225 comments, plus ‘ADDED’ and ‘AND’.

Help me! Here in Real America, I can’t help having the same, fruitless dicussions. Too often it’s with a Glenn Beck groupie and starts off cordially enough. Efforts to calmly explain that ‘No, it was not ACORN, but Wall Street bankers and their predatory buddies in the mortgage lending biz that did the real damage to our 401Ks’ normally just end up with suspicious glares and familiar screeds about the evils of redistributionism and hippies.

Taking pains to help them understand that losing your wallet and a bridge collapsing under a passenger train are both bad things, but one is very much worse than the other, just seems to lead to bitter acrimony and hard feelings.

This reminds me of a very old bad joke ..

Walking along a downtown street late at night a man encountered a drunk crawling around on the ground on his hands and knees, obviously searching for something.

“Lose something, buddy?” he asked.

“Yeah, I dropped a quarter up the block there, and I’m trying to find it.”

“Well, if you lost it a block away .. why aren’t you searching there?”

“Light’s better here.”

Dumb as it sounds, I think that’s a pretty apt metaphor for why the Fox News cocoon crowd insist on blaming the most helpless of the poor for screwing the country into the ground. It’s less bothersome to search under Beck’s lamppost, nodding along with simple-minded rants at minorities they already fear, than it is to grope through the dark,  complicated stories like this one by McClatchy:

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers that it also was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting. A five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose those secret bets may have violated securities laws.

I suppose it’s fair to question just how many Beck or Hannity fans could be drunk all the time. Probably not many, but seeing they can be cold sober and that idiotic at the same time isn’t helping my cheerful outlook.

So, this caught my eye:

California Science Center is sued for canceling a film promoting intelligent design
The American Freedom Alliance says the center bowed to pressure from the Smithsonian. The science center says a news release hadn’t been submitted to the museum, violating the contract.

L.A.’s California Science Center will start the new year defending itself in court for canceling a documentary film attacking Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

A lawsuit alleges that the state-owned center improperly bowed to pressure from the Smithsonian Institution, as well as e-mailed complaints from USC professors and others. It contends that the center violated both the 1st Amendment and a contract to rent the museum’s Imax Theater when it canceled the screening of “Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record.”

The suit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by the American Freedom Alliance, an L.A.-based group described by senior fellow Avi Davis as a nonprofit, nonpartisan “think tank and activist network promoting Western values and ideals.”

This is a familiar wingnut gambit: get a respectable institution with ‘Science’ in its name to somehow screen a Creationist crap movie, and then trumpet the fact that it’s being screened, as if scientists take it seriously. It happened to The Smithsonian. It happened to the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History in Oklahoma. And now the anti-science folks tried it with our California Science Center, but failed.

When the best they can do to pretend Creationism could ever be taken seriously is this sort of p.r. sleight-of-hand, I’d say they’ve proven they’re intellectually bankrupt. And when the uber-hacks at Creationism Central, the Discovery Institute, release chintz like this, making the California Science Center look like a Non-Science Center, you can bet someone should and will be pissed:

AMERICAN FREEDOM ALLIANCE EVENT SERIES HIGHLIGHTS
THE DEBATE AT FILM DEBUT SCREENING OCTOBER 25

LOS ANGELES, CA — Highlighting the continuing controversy over the origins of life on earth, the American Freedom Alliance will premiere “Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Explosion” at the California Science Center in Los Angeles on Sunday October 25 at 7:00 pm. The event will feature a panel discussion with filmmakers and leading proponents of the movement to examine the scientific inconsistencies of the famous British naturalist’s theories proposed in his work, On the Origin of Species, first published exactly 150 years ago . . .

There are plenty of mysteries surrounding the details of Evolution, but there’s no ‘continuing controversy’ about the essential theory itself. This makes the Science Center look like fools, and it’s exactly why they demand that hype about their scheduled events go through them.

The AFA and the Discovery Institute are certainly entitled to their opinions, but duping science institutions into their circus acts and then suing when they predictably back out, demanding they declare their own actions ‘Unconstitutional!’, is nothing less than pathetic. It’s a childish game.

Grow up. And show your movies at your churches if you like, those are the people who created Creationism. None of us are demanding you screen our atheist pics there.

More on the AFA later.

. . . because the blog is one year old, as of today. w00t!

. . . who knew he could bake? Thanks, Charlie.

About a thousand posts and 80,000 clicks later, let’s say we do it again. Okay, settled.

The male counterpart to Sarah Palin has spoken up, but he’s still a moron. Thus, the air is sweet and the fish swim in the sea and the sun rises in one part of the sky and then it settles in Utah and could use some company, it’s pretty empty out there.

Very, very few people are dumb like Newt Gingrich is dumb. And nobody but Newt so strangely gets called ‘smart’ like he does, being the stone cold chunk of stupid that he is. Not that he’s yet been comically exposed for his vapidity, for what reasons I’ll probably never know–maybe he looks like everybody’s junior high school English teacher? And, hey, he wasn’t such a bad guy, right?

But what can you say about a guy with a million Twitter followers, a pillar of political thought, whose internet pamphlet is bannered like this?

Mind you, he put that in quotes. Maybe somebody else said it before him, and he’s just being honest. Good for us.

In all cases, this post that seeks to re-make the United States of America will be predictably en-dark-ening, particularly to those of you who thought that Republicans aren’t the intellectual Herefords we liberals mock them for being. Especially when it’s the sort of thing that TRUMPETS TALKING POINTS inside its own text IN GIANT LETTERS as if they were BREAKING NEWS or HEADLINES ALL ON THEIR OWN. Because he can’t really MAKE HIS CASE, so he relies on FONT SIZE to MAKE IT FOR HIM. Funny.

Here we go. And remember: this is the intellectual giant of the Republican party . . .

On Terrorism it’s Time to Know, to Profile, and to Discriminate
by Newt Gingrich
12/30/2009

After the Christmas Day near disaster in Detroit, it is time for Americans to demand effective anti-terrorist actions.

TA-DAAAH! The opening salvo. Why didn’t we think of that before?

Over eight years after 9/11 and 30 years after the Iranian illegal seizure of the United States embassy and the 444 day Iranian hostage crisis, Washington is still avoiding being intellectually honest about the war we are in.

Our Politically Correct Government is Making Life More Miserable For the Innocent

. . . instead of targeting the source of the threats, our politically correct government decides to make life more miserable for the travelling public by imposing hopelessly meaningless rules such as not allowing passengers to leave their seats in the last hour of the flight. Bound by cultural sensitivities, the default reaction of the bureaucracy is to review the procedures and wring its hands ineffectively.

Today, because our elites fear politically incorrect honesty, they believe that it is better to harass the innocent, delay the harmless, and risk the lives of every American than to do the obvious, the effective, and the necessary.

Newt is talking about George W. Bush’s TSA flight rules. Obama hasn’t touched them.

It’s Time to Be Honest About What We Know

Before a lot more Americans are killed we must acquire the courage to tell the truth and to act on that truth. It is time to be honest about what we know.

We know our opponents are radical extremists of the irreconcilable wing of Islam (Islamists, some would call them)…

Protecting the Rights of Terrorists Has Been More Important than Protecting the Lives of Americans

In the Obama Administration, protecting the rights of terrorists has been more important than protecting the lives of Americans.

That must now change decisively.

It is time to know more about would-be terrorists, to profile for terrorists and to actively discriminate based on suspicious terrorist information.

It’s a parody, isn’t it? We should try to know more about terrorists. And “discriminate based on suspicious terrorist information.” Like if they appear to be members of Al Qaeda, or carrying bombs in their luggage.

Continue Reading »

The latest trends in tiny pets…

Monkeys? Eww.

..h/t Booster Shots..

No wonder it’s taking over the Republican Party, it’s populated with the same narcissists. Glory seekers, political opportunists, greed merchants and the like. Welcome to ‘reform’, right-wing style:

Majority Of Tea Party Group’s Spending Went To GOP Firm That Created It
Zachary Roth | December 28, 2009, 6:15PM

The political action committee behind the Tea Party Express (TPE) — which already has been slammed as inauthentic and corporate-controlled by rival factions in the Tea Party movement — directed almost two thirds of its spending during a recent reporting period back to the Republican consulting firm that created the PAC in the first place.

Our Country Deserves Better (OCDB) spent around $1.33 million from July through November, according to FEC filings examined by TPMmuckraker. Of that sum, a total of $857,122 went to Sacramento-based GOP political consulting firm Russo, Marsh, and Associates, or people associated with it…

…one expert on political action committees told TPMmuckraker it was unusual for a PAC to direct so much spending back to the entity that created it. And the spending details raised hackles among members of the Tea Party Patriots, a rival faction of conservative activists who have denounced TPE as a creature of Republican political professionals that lacks grassroots authenticity. In an email to a Patriots group that was obtained by TPMmuckaker, one TPPer who had examined the filings asked, “What would the true grassroots people think if they knew their money is being spent in this manner?”

..earlier…

Party Foul! Tea Partiers Eat Their Own In Bitter Internal Feud
Zachary Roth | November 12, 2009, 5:08PM

…”How much money does TPP have? How much did we make in DC? Where are the financial statements? Do board members get paid and if so who? Who signs the checks? Where does our money go?”

Merits echoed that theme. “Why are the financial records not public knowledge?” he asked. “Show me the money!”

Eventually a Tea Party Patriots loyalist couldn’t take it anymore. “Why are you intentionally trying to destroy this movement??” he demanded.

Charges of lax book-keeping — and worse — appear to be breaking out across the Tea Party movement. In a separate email written Wednesday and obtained by TPMmuckraker, Matt Perdue, the president of a San Antonio Tea Party group, ripped into the group’s treasurer, her husband, and their supporters for conducting a “mass redirection campaign,” apparently to line their own pockets using Tea Party donations.

“Where has all this money gone?” asks Perdue. “If there is nothing wrong going on, why has there not been one single piece of paper produced to back up why people got checks, some for $3,000, $7,400+, $4,000, $10,400+??? Where is the documentation? Why isn’t the cash deposited like it should be? Why did it take more than two weeks to deposit cash from the meetings?”…

Some TPPers expressed concern that the acrimony could damage the movement if exposed. “Daily Kos and other left wing interest groups are going to love running with this story,” wrote one.

Merits appeared to share that concern. “This will go public if we let it drag on long enough and if you don’t think this will have a chilling effect on all Tea Party movements raising funds you are living in a world of fairy dust and gingerbread houses,” he wrote. “Read my previous emails. If this goes on long enough, we all go down – NOT just TPP and TPE – ALL OF US.”

Thanks to Zachary Roth and TPMMuckraker.

Fury as China executes British drug smuggler
Fierce condemnation as last-ditch attempt to prevent death of Akmal Shaikh, 53, fails

China was this morning condemned for its human rights record after a British man who, his supporters say, had mental health problems, was executed for smuggling drugs.

Paul Newberry, a British national who lives in Poland, described how Shaikh while there had lived in a fantasy world: “He had no money but was never desperate for it. He was clearly not desperate enough to smuggle heroin to China.”

Andy Martin Ad Calls Mark Kirk a Homosexual
By ANDREW GREINER

“Republican U.S. Senate candidate Andy Martin plans to unveil political ad aimed at front-runner and primary rival Mark Kirk’s sexual orientation Monday.

“Martin, a fringe candidate who pushes the idea that President Obama is a Muslim and even sued the state of Hawaii to produce a ribbon copy of Obama’s birth certificate, has a history of salacious allegations and frivolous lawsuits.

“His advertisement asserts that there’s ‘solid rumor that Mark Kirk is a homosexual’ and that he’s part of the ‘Republican Party homosexual club.’

“The ad’s full transcript is available here.”

I’m Andy Martin, Republican candidate for United States Senator. I approved this message because Illinois Republicans deserve the truth about their candidates.

I have over forty years of experience and integrity fighting corruption, and fighting for the truth in politics.

I helped expose many of Barack Obama’s lies in 2008.

Today, I am fighting for the facts about Mark Kirk. Illinois Republican leader Jack Roeser says there is a, ‘solid rumor that Kirk is a homosexual.’ Roeser suggests that Kirk is part of a Republican Party homosexual club. Lake County Illinois Republican leader Ray True says Kirk has surrounded himself with homosexuals.

Mark Kirk should tell Republican voters the truth.

I’m Andy Martin a Republican you can trust for U.S. Senator.

Please vote for Andy Martin.

Paid for by Illinois Republicans for Andy Martin.

I thought maybe Dr. Perry Stone had a scoop on the liberal media:

A report on December 21 said that a plane loaded with weapons from North Korea was seized by Thai authorities in Bangkok. The plane was bound for Iran, according to documents obtained by arms trafficking experts.

You know you can always trust arms trafficking experts, and, especially, those without names, but my amateur attempts to fact-check this made my head spin. All the earlier reports (the plane had already been detained for a week) say the plane’s destination was unknown with the only clue being the flight plan that targeted Columbo, Sri Lanka.

The only references to Iran I could find, besides the  doctor’s, were a Wall Street Journal article subtly titled Arms Seized by Thailand Were Iran-Bound and an Israeli tabloid that uses the Wall Street Journal as its source.  This was the lede:

A plane loaded with weapons from North Korea that was recently impounded in Bangkok was bound for Iran, according to documents obtained by arms-trafficking experts.

If you bother to click through to the PDF, you find that the experts do have names, and that the blaring conclusion is drawn from a  joint draft report by analysts at TransArms, and that the International Peace Information Service, or IPIS, never bothers to explain why the flight plan suddenly includes Tehran. But it does say things like this:

For general cargo the flight plan is a fairly normal one, but for smuggling guns the flight plan is a recipe for disaster. The best option – for an illicit arms transfer – would have been an overflight over China towards the former Soviet republics and then to Tehran, but this was allegedly discarded by the representative of UTM due to commercial reasons.  Based on the authors’ analysis of the flight plans this could almost seem like a deliberate attempt to let an arms flight out of Pyongyang be impounded, coincidentally in the same country holding Victor Bout, which is subject to competing pressure for extradition from the United States and Russia.

But, last week, everyone else seems to have overlooked that part about Tehran:

Today, government spokesman Panitan Wattanayagorn said … “We believe after Colombo there may have been another destination,” he said, adding that, according to the crew, the plane had planned to refuel in the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan before flying to its “final destination” in the Ukraine.

Still, who are you going to believe? After all, Iran and the U.A.E. are practically allies, and we also can’t discount Dr. Stone’s prophetic supernatural insider knowledge:

Are we on the verge of witnessing the war of Ezekiel 38 and 39? One thing we know for certain is that sooner or later, the Persians, along with other nations in that part of the world, will be involved in a war against Israel.

The cynical skeptics may try to laugh this off, but Dr. Stone documents the evidence by the barrel.

Un-fucking-believable…

For 8 years, they’ve been getting away with meekly saying “…er, it’s, uh, nobody’s fault. Nobody could’ve predicted it.” Now there is somebody to blame for the thousands of deaths–Bill Clinton. What a surprise.

Fine, then: What the hell should Bill Clinton have done on September the 10th to prevent his catastrophic failure on the following day? When you can answer that one, Mary, I’ll refrain from calling you the rank pile of festering political garbage that you obviously are.

When a guy reportedly gets on board a Detroit-bound plane with 80 grams of PETN, which is pretty much TNT, the system failed. That’s the truth, that’s what people need to hear–this was a terrifying failure. Whose system failed and how, those are now literally the burning questions. Coulda been Amsterdam’s with the Americans’ sharing the blame in not making clear enough their security demands. But this is a failure, and sensible people want to know who and what is to blame.

The system worked, after the fact? This is classic Bush-era smiley-face government administration. Your Homeland Security person is supposed to be the type who couches everything in sober worry and caution, not mindless happy-speak. If she’s gotta go, she’s gotta go.

Here are some idiots with 10 grams of PETN: