Will Bunch has a truly heartbreaking, infuriating post up on the murder of nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father in Arizona in 2009. Brisenia’s mother survived by playing dead.
The killers were newly minted Tea Partiers and fledgling Minutemen, and I think it’s safe to say they were influenced by at least one Tea Party rally in Arizona before carrying out their murders. Shawna Forde, the mastermind of the operation, had apparently cooked up an idea to murder and rob drug dealers to fund her anti-immigrant activities. She and her accomplice, Jason Bush, broke into the Flores home on May 30, 2009.
[A warning (better late than never) this next bit is graphic and disturbing]
You would think that by now, what with the “Happy Holidays” promos and its own “Holiday Party,” Fox would just forget the whole “War on Christmas” war. For years now, Fox has heavily promoted this idea that “secular progressives” are engaged in a so-called “war” on Christmas, declaring over and over that the holiday is “under attack.” In its efforts to continue this overhyped, manufactured non-controversy, the network has taken to misleading viewers and even has accused the Democrats of “waging their own War on Christmas.”
When all that failed, Fox tried to rebrand the “War on Christmas”—the “War on Christianity”—except that facts, predictably, got in the way of that campaign. Today, Fox has a new culprit to go after for supposedly waging a War on Christmas. It’s attacking the NBA for scheduling five games on Christmas Day.
If you do anything but what the Christo-fascists want on Christmas, they freak out. Do they even understand that not everyone in the country celebrates the holiday?
And all of you folks who attacked Kos for the “American Taliban” can kindly please be quiet.
I’m usually reluctant to link to Sully’s stunt stand-ins, but since this is the birthplace of the (flawed) idea of Peak Wingnut, we’re pretty much obligated to link to a post that proposes the idea of Peak Palin. Dave Weigel has the details:
Let’s also ask what it means that Sarah Palin’s America by Heart is not anywhere close to the hit Going Rogue was. The new book debuted at number 2 on the NYT bestseller list, then fell to 3rd, 5th, and now 8th, which means it’s unlikely it will ever get the “#1 New York Times bestseller” badge given to recent hits by David Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, and Glenn Beck.
[.....]
Her show’s not doing too bad. Ratings for “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” which tumbled after 5 million people watched the premiere, have remained stable at around 3 million. That’s about as good as “Mad Men.” No one’s proposing a John Hamm candidacy, though.
(If it kept him from doing so many voice-overs, I’d get behind it, btw.)
I have a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that Palin won’t make much of a showing in the 2012 Republican primary, that we’ll be stuck with six months of Bobo masturbating to John Thune’s sun-chapped good looks and sound Burkean temperament.
Right-wing media figures have seized on a Wired article about the classified Iraq war documents recently released by WikiLeaks.com to desperately claim ‘Bush was right’ that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). In fact, the Wired article reported the documents did not ‘reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime,’ but rather remnants of the stockpiles largely destroyed during the Gulf War.
There are those who think that this will only go on for another few years, but the truth is, thirty years from now, Luke Brooks-Roberts will be solemnly telling tv viewers that there were in fact WMD in Iraq.
I would not normally link to the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog (aka “where they’ve stashed Jon Meacham and Sally Quinn, since it would be too embarrassing to fire them outright”) but Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite has an intriguing post explaining “Why Anita Hill Deserves an Apology“:
Women like Anita Hill who try to tell the truth about being sexually harassed all too often are disbelieved and even demonized. Hill testified, during the Senate confirmation hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas, that Thomas had engaged in a consistent pattern of sexual harassment of her in the workplace…
Anita Hill deserves an apology for having her life once again disrupted and being used by a right-wing activist in what seems yet another attempt by the Tea Party to drive their extremist agenda and move American history backwards.
I think, therefore, this is not just about “publicity” but perhaps an early sign of another front opening on Supreme Court decisions, and other legal precedents, this time about laws that have secured equal rights for women in the workplace…
So many women over the years have come to me in a pastoral context and told me about these patterns that constitute sexual harassment at work. They know it’s wrong, they even know it’s illegal, and they know they are being discriminated against on the basis of their sex. But even today many just want to keep silent because they are more afraid of what will happen if they speak up. The lesson of Anita Hill is not lost on them. Look at what happens to women who try to tell the truth? A few women dare to speak up and claim their rights to a workplace free of such discrimination, but many even today do not.
How much harder will it be for them if the Tea Party sets its sights on trying to overturn these important precedents that establish the legal arguments that made sexual harassment illegal?
Ruth Marcus, WaPo columnist, lets her commitment to truth temporarily override her commitment to Right-Wing Conventional Wisdom, sandwiching the following paragraphs between an extended defense of “wifely” grudge-holding and a quick both-sides-must-be-equally-at-fault finish:
... Ginni Thomas is wrong about who should apologize to whom…
Does anyone besides the two of them know the full truth about what happened between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill when he was a Reagan administration official and she was a young lawyer on his staff? Perhaps not. But as I wrote when Clarence Thomas released his angry autobiography, the overwhelming weight of the evidence is on Hill’s side.
She complained to friends at the time about his behavior, telling one, Susan Hoerchner, that Thomas, then the chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, had “repeatedly asked her out . . . but wouldn’t seem to take ‘no’ for an answer.” Another former EEOC employee, Angela Wright, described how Thomas pressured her to date him, showed up uninvited at her apartment and asked her breast size.
Some of the strangest behavior that Hill cited—Thomas asking about a pubic hair on his Coke can, and his taste for extreme pornography—resonated with episodes from Thomas’s past. A college classmate, James Millet, recalled “an almost identical episode,” Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher report in their biography, “Supreme Discomfort.” Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson found two others who recalled a pubic hair-Coke can comment at the EEOC.
What’s a wife to do with this uncomfortable information? Clarence Thomas has taken the road of angry denial and, unless she’s about to let her marriage unravel over it, the path of least resistance may be for Ginni to join him there.
Why seek satisfaction from Hill now? One explanation might be that Ginni Thomas has recently found herself in the media cross-hairs over her role as head of a group dedicated to exposing the leftist “tyranny” of President Obama. Perhaps that has rekindled her unresolved feelings about Hill. Was it a coincidence that she made the call on the morning the New York Times ran a front-page story headlined, “Activism by Thomas’ Wife Could Raise Judicial Issues”?
... It’s also not clear why Ginni Thomas believes that re-arguing Thomas v. Hill 19 years later could possibly benefit Clarence Thomas. Yes, the Internet is buzzing today with claims that Prof. Hill, who never wanted to testify against Thomas in the first place and hasn’t sought out any of these Desperate Housewives-style battles, is a liar and always was one. But the Washington Post has already found a former girlfriend of Justice Thomas’ who claims that Hill’s account of Thomas’ behavior in the early 1980s is consistent with the Clarence Thomas she once dated. A new generation of Americans is being reminded of the fact that Hill took a polygraph test at the time of the hearings while Clarence Thomas did not. Anyone who ever read Strange Justice, by Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer, is recalling the exhaustive research they put into establishing that Anita Hill had been smeared…
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WILMINGTON, Del. — Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell of Delaware on Tuesday questioned whether the U.S. Constitution calls for a separation of church and state, appearing to disagree or not know that the First Amendment bars the government from establishing religion.
The exchange came in a debate before an audience of legal scholars and law students at Widener University Law School, as O’Donnell criticized Democratic nominee Chris Coons’ position that teaching creationism in public school would violate the First Amendment by promoting religious doctrine.
Coons said private and parochial schools are free to teach creationism but that “religious doctrine doesn’t belong in our public schools.”
“Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” O’Donnell asked him.
When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O’Donnell asked: “You’re telling me that’s in the First Amendment?”
Her comments, in a debate aired on radio station WDEL, generated a buzz in the audience.
“You actually audibly heard the crowd gasp,” Widener University political scientist Wesley Leckrone said after the debate, adding that it raised questions about O’Donnell’s grasp of the Constitution.
On a related note, I’ve been watching PBS’s wonderful “God in America” series. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a more in-depth understanding of just how important religion has been to the evolution of this society. For instance, the very notion of separating Church and State wasn’t brought about by radical secularists. It was sparked by the Baptists who were being arrested for preaching in Virginia. At the time Virginia had an institutional church, the Anglican Church, and the elites and heads of the Church were very threatened by these radical preachers. Separation of Church and State was the work of both early Christian evangelicals and radical secularists like Thomas Jefferson who saw the good in keeping the two institutions separate, all of which eventually led to the inclusion of the First Amendment in the Constitution.
Ironically, in Delaware there was a great deal more tolerance for pluralism at the time, and the two institutions were already pretty much separate. It’s really a shame O’Donnell doesn’t know this and yet hopes to make herself part of that State’s legacy.
Of course Dana Milbank quite literally has a book to sell, but I’m wondering how much of a hopeful sign it may be that the Premiere Village Insider is edging away from full-frontal embrace of the Twenty-Seven-Percenters:
Conspiracy theorists find validation from Glenn Beck
“I would’ve never started watching Fox News if it wasn’t for the fact that Beck was on there,” says this friend, Byron Williams. “And it was the things he did, it was the things he exposed, that blew my mind.”
“I do enjoy Glenn Beck,” Williams also says, “and the reason why I enjoy that is because… no other channel will speak about the same things that he’s talking about, and if you go and investigate those things you’ll find out that they’re true.”
Unfortunately for Beck, this satisfied viewer currently resides at the Santa Rita Jail near Oakland and stands accused of a freeway shootout with police. Williams pleaded not guilty to four counts of attempted murder of a police officer. But according to court documents, he said he had been on a mission to kill people at the liberal Tides Foundation, which happens to be a favorite Beck target.
In August, I wrote that while it’s not fair to blame Beck for violence committted by his fans, he would do well to stop encouraging extremists. Now, Williams has granted a pair of jailhouse interviews, one with the conservative Examiner.com and one to be published soon by the liberal group Media Matters. These recorded exchanges, which I have reviewed, show precisely why Beck is dangerous: because his is the one voice in the mass media that validates conspiracy theories held by the unstable…
Dave Weigel at Slate is reporting from Virginia Tea Party Patriots Convention, where the veterans of the Wingnut Wurlitzers’ Clenis offensive are oozing out to infect a new generation:
In the 1996, former FBI agent Gary Aldrich published Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House. It was an account of his days running background checks for the Clinton White House, and like every pre-2001 book accusing the Clintons of strange things, it was a hit. Aldrich faded into the background after that, but he’s emerged at the Tea Party Patriots Convention, under the banner of his Patrick Henry Center, as a punchy political veteran who can teach activists how to avoid being screwed by the media.
“This is a typical liberal,” said Aldrich at his morning session, pointing to a slide of Hannibal Lecter. “They’re some of the nastiest people you could possibly imagine.” He switched up the Lecter photo with photos of enemy reporters, like Chris Matthews, “perky”Katie Couric, and Rachel Maddow, pausing briefly to make fun of Maddow’s haircut. And on the way into the room, he said, he browbeat a reporter for filming an interview with a goofy-looking tea party activist who was carrying a gun. “That’s what’s going to show up on the nightly news,” he said. His audience nodded their heads knowingly.
And so Aldrich’s advice to activists fit cleanly under the heading of “ways to seem paranoid.” Don’t travel alone, he said: He himself had advised a prominent Tea Party leader to stop traveling solo around the country. Choose friends wisely, because allies can betray you and leak to reporters. Demand conditions from the media before agreeing to interviews. Also, learn to use a gun, especially if you live in an open carry state. (The friction between this and his previous statement was not noted.)...
What was that quote about “first as tragedy, then as farce”?
Mark Williams, a controversial tea party political movement supporter, said the center would be used for “terrorists to worship their monkey god.”
Williams was publicly ousted by the National Tea Party Federation last month after posting a satirical letter supposedly from “the Colored People.” He resigned as spokesman of the Tea Party Express in July and told reporters he would focus on fighting the mosque plan, the New York Daily News reported at the time.
Via commentor El Cid, the latest incarnation of our great Real American™ tradition of insisting that what we want to be true must be true… and death to anyone who disagrees. “Sovereign citizens spin history, reject government”:
As many as 300,000 people identify as sovereign citizens, the Southern Poverty Law Center found in a study to be published Thursday that was obtained by The Associated Press. Hate group monitors say their numbers have increased thanks to the recession, the foreclosure crisis, the growth of the Internet and the election of Barack Obama in 2008…
At the heart of their belief system: The government creates a secret identity for each citizen at birth, a “straw man,” that controls an account at the U.S. Treasury used as collateral for foreign debt. File enough documents at the right offices and the money in those accounts can be used to pay off debt or make purchases worth thousands of dollars.
The movement is based on a form of “legal fundamentalism,” said Michael Barkun, a retired Syracuse University political science professor who researches anti-government and hate groups.
“These people really seem to feel that filing certain kinds of legal papers that are connected to their theories will somehow also magically have the power to alter relationships and grant things that otherwise would be unobtainable,” he said.
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Permits should not be granted to build even one more mosque in the United States of America, let alone the monstrosity planned for Ground Zero. This is for one simple reason: each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government. Each one is a potential jihadist recruitment and training center, and determined to implement the ‘Grand Jihad’ of which Andy McCarthy has written.
Because of this subversive ideology, Muslims cannot claim religious freedom protections under the First Amendment. They are currently using First Amendment freedoms to make plans to destroy the First Amendment altogether. There is no such thing as freedom of religion in Islam, and it is sheer and utter folly for Americans to delude themselves into thinking otherwise.
Not to worry! He has a simple plan that all potential mosque-builders and American Muslims can follow in order to get their building permits:
If a mosque was willing to publicly renounce the Koran and its 109 verses that call for the death of infidels, renounce Allah and his messenger Mohammed, publicly condemn Osama bin Laden, Hamas, and Abdelbaset al Megrahi (the Lockerbie bomber), maybe then they could be allowed to build their buildings. But then they wouldn’t be Muslims at that point, now would they?
Leaving aside how a mosque could publicly renounce anything, this is really one of the most staggeringly stupid things I’ve ever read. This makes Andy McCarthy’s anti-Muslim screeds look like poems about kittens. Good grief.
Steve Benen had an interesting post a few days ago about Republicans’ desire to repeal the 14th, 16th, and 17th amendments. He pointed out something that I had forgotten, that under Bush, Republicans also wanted to add several new amendments:
Indeed, by the mid-point of his presidency, George W. Bush was on record supporting at least six different proposed amendments to the Constitution: (1) prohibiting flag burning; (2) victims’ rights; (3) banning abortion; (4) requiring a balanced budget; (5) prohibiting same-sex marriage; and (6) allowing state-endorsed prayer in public schools. As a wise blogger noted at the time, Bush “really seems to think the Constitution is just a rough draft.”
At the same time, of course, Republicans like to paint themselves as the ultimate defenders of the constitution. I can’t help but be reminded, once again, of how much constitutional fetishists resemble hard-core Christianists. In the Catholic Church, anyone who favors reproductive rights is derided as a “cafeteria Catholic”, while those who oppose reproductive rights but favor the death penalty, wars, and the destruction of social welfare programs are the keepers of the One Truth Faith.
It’s a neat trick, now conservatives of various stripes accomplish this. I’m not sure how effective it is as a long-term strategy: the Catholic Church and Republican party are in terrible shape in this country right now and, like other aspects of wingnut mythology, it ultimately becomes too complicated for lay people to follow. Which amendments to keep? Which teachings to take seriously? There’s no apparent logic to any of it, so keeping abreast of the correct patriotic/religious positions requires more effort than most people want to expend.
But as a short-term rhetorical strategy, it’s remarkable.
Since the Very Serious People are all obsessed with the Very Serious Question of Elena Kagan’s softball skillz, thank gods for the potty-mouthed humor blog Wonkette, who will tell us about Maine’s Insane Klown TP Party...
Earlier this week we learned that the Maine GOP, during its state convention, replaced its standard platform with a hilarious four-page teabagger e-mail that one local reporter could only describe as “a mix of right-wing fringe policies, libertarian buzzwords and outright conspiracy theories.” It turns out, though, that this was only the second most comical thing that the teabaggers did during the convention. Some folks, while caucusing in a rented classroom at the nearby middle school, got it in their heads that the classroom’s teacher was a commie liberal indoctrinating the children with commie liberalism, and so they just dug through all of his stuff and trashed the place.
“The Republican State Convention was held at the Portland Exposition Building, which is on Park Avenue, near the middle school. Party members from Knox County caucused in a classroom used by eighth-grade social studies teacher Paul Clifford.
When Clifford returned to school on Monday, he found that a favorite poster about the U.S. labor movement had been taken and replaced with a bumper sticker that read, “Working People Vote Republican.”
Later, Clifford learned that his classroom had been searched. Republicans who had attended the convention called Principal Mike McCarthy to complain about “anti-American” things they saw there, including a closed box containing copies of the U.S. Constitution that were published by the American Civil Liberties Union…”
Yes, a bunch of Republicans called a guy named McCarthy to complain that the Constitution was “anti-American”.
*****
Also, only Wonkette seems to properly appreciate the lulz involved when the Republican National Committee rejected both wrinkly old John McCain (Phoenix) and glossy humanoid pretender Mitt Romney (Salt Lake City) by choosing Tampa, “the nation’s lap-dance capital”, as the site of the 2012 Republican Convention. Hey, I believe the last RNC national convention in Florida was Richard Nixon’s 1972 coronation!
HASTTIGTAMSAMCO (Hrmm, after some thought I guess that acronym makes sense and might catch on). Well, you know what they say- SWARSOTTAJSASICFOWTHTAD (Sometimes wingnuts are stupid, other times they are just silly, and sometimes I can’t figure out what the hell they are doing).
