Monthly Archives: April 2010

Wednesday roundup

Posted on April 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

Pat Buchanan is ebullient at the thought of the coming White Uprising:

Why are the Tea Partiers not intimidated the way Republicans often are? Why is the charge of racism not working?

First, they do not feel the guilt of country-club Republicans.

Second, they know it to be untrue. While Tea Partiers are anti-Obama, they are also anti-Pelosi, anti-Martha Coakley and anti-Charlie Christ. The coming conflict is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal.

Black America seems united. White America is the house divided, for it is in the womb of white America that this new people is gestating and fighting to be born.

And Pat’s standing ready with the forceps.

In addition to not understanding the Constitution – a profound political document that they have cheapened by fetishizing – Sarah Palin and her Tea People also have a poor grasp on the colonial history that they idolize. Far from embodying the spirit of the original Tea Party, they resemble nothing more than King George himself.

House Democrats are tired of waiting for President Obama to slow-walk the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell until after the November elections. Looks like they’re going to try it without him.

Not content with codifying racial profiling as its police officers’ solemn duty, the Arizona legislature has now officially demanded to see Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

Reason for cautious optimism regarding Obama’s SCOTUS pick – maybe:

President Obama thinks Republicans will engage in a full battle over his Supreme Court nominee regardless of the person’s ideological leanings, and in some ways “that realization is liberating for the president” to choose whomever he pleases, an administration official told TPMDC.
…
“It doesn’t matter who he chooses, there is going to be a big ‘ol fight over it. So he doesn’t have to get sidetracked by those sorts of concerns,” the official told me. The GOP has attempted to obstruct “anything of consequence” put forth by the Obama administration since he took office, the official said. “The president is making this decision with a pretty clear view that whoever he chooses is going to provoke a strong reaction on the right,” the official added.

It’s one thing to be a total pussy. It’s another thing to be a big, fat, lying pussy.

More evidence that the Tea People don’t really believe their own propaganda:

Congress will not consider legislation to give the District of Columbia voting rights this year because the bill was clogged with “issues” such as gun ownership, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced this morning.

The “gun rights” issue Hoyer is referring to is a “poison pill” amendment that Republicans attached to the D.C. voting rights bill, requiring D.C. to scrap its gun restrictions before its citizens are allowed to have the vote. I guess taxation without representation is okay with conservatives, as long as it’s in a Democratic district.

Holy shit! The gummint wants to put a microchip in your “vaginal-rectum area“!

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Posted in birthers, financial reform, Tea Party

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A libertarian Utopia

Posted on April 21, 2010 | 1 Comment

Reason magazine recently featured an article by Jacob Hornberger in which he made short work of one of my key complaints about libertarianism – namely, that it is less a political philosophy than a religion because it argues the merits of an imaginary society while criticizing a real one. My view has been that arguments in favor of libertarianism are largely nonfalsifiable because libertarians are unable to point to a working example of the government-free Utopia they espouse.

Not so, says Hornberger:

Let’s consider, say, the year 1880. Here was a society in which people were free to keep everything they earned, because there was no income tax. They were also free to decide what to do with their own money—spend it, save it, invest it, donate it, or whatever. People were generally free to engage in occupations and professions without a license or permit. There were few federal economic regulations and regulatory agencies. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, bailouts, or so-called stimulus plans. No IRS. No Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. No EPA and OSHA. No Federal Reserve. No drug laws. Few systems of public schooling. No immigration controls. No federal minimum-wage laws or price controls. A monetary system based on gold and silver coins rather than paper money. No slavery. No CIA. No FBI. No torture or cruel or unusual punishments. No renditions. No overseas military empire. No military-industrial complex.

As a libertarian, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a society that is pretty darned golden.

So there you have it: the United States in 1880 was a “golden” example of a libertarian society.

Taking Hornberger’s lead, Mark Sumner, a Daily Kos contributor, weighs in on the virtues of this “golden” example of libertarianism in an excellent diary:

Ah, the 1880s. I can hear people getting wistful from here.
…
It was a golden age without labor laws in which only 5% of people faced the awful restriction of an 8 hour work day while 3 times that many were blessed with a workday that was 12 hours or longer. Many industries, breweries for example, had a standard workday of 15 hours. And with all the extra freedom of that age, many children were able to experience the blessings of back-breaking labor starting every day by the time they reached the age of 10, with more than a third generating freedom dollars before they turned 15.

Of course, that wasn’t hard since this was a golden age of few public schools. Except it wasn’t. Public education was common across the country, even in remote communities. Even the tiniest frontier village rarely went long without a school, many states had organized school districts, and in a good number of areas the ratio of teachers to students was actually higher than in our own socialistic era. Perhaps what Hornberger meant to say was that there were few schools available to minorities. In many areas minorities lived with “compulsory ignorance,” as they were not only excluded from public schools, but discouraged (often violently) from seeking education. That accounts for a literacy rate of less than 40% among African-Americans in 1880. As laws changed and more schools became available for all, that rate grew by more than 30% over the next three decades. However, white literacy remained about the same — not surprising since whites were already suffering from those socialistic public schools well before 1880.

It truly was a golden age. One in which, thanks to that lack of nasty safety requirements and the troublesome health organizations, the average lifespan was all the way up to 40! An age in which, unfettered by the shackles of regulations on clean water and Hitler-like restrictions on sewage, 50,000 Americans died of cholera. An age in which parents could experience the ultimate freedom endowed by watching 1 child in 5 die in infancy, and 1 out of 3 fail to reach adulthood. Those numbers are for white Americans. Minorities experienced even more of the freedom that comes from burying your children.
…
An age without communist limits on commerce or immoral government tests, where thousands of Americans each year died from tainted food. Where you didn’t need no stinkin’ license to hand out medicines. An age free from the horrors of the FDA where parents could feel good about using a childrens’ cough remedy laced with opium, cocaine, formaldehyde, and wood alcohol. An age when nobody told us how much lead we could have in our water, or how much soot we could have in our air. An age where the injured and elderly had the God-given right to starve.

It was a golden age of rights for women in which… oh, wait. Sorry. I forgot for a moment that women don’t count when measuring freedom. Good thing, since in 1880 they couldn’t vote, were excluded from many occupations, faced restrictions on their ownership rights, and were often treated as the property of their husbands. Naturally, their reproductive rights consisted of the right to reproduce — or die trying.
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[A]ctual Libertarians realize that for individual rights to have any meaning, they require the presence of a body that can ensure those rights. They know that freedom can’t be maintained in an absence of information, and that there must be agencies that create the transparency needed for effective individual action and ensure there are consequences to dishonesty. Real advocates of the free market realize that term has no meaning unless the market is free from coercion and the law is not defined by “might makes right.” They know that individual freedoms are incompatible with a system where corporations are treated as super-citizens and that Libertarianism requires that workers be more valued that abstract entities that live only on paper.

The difference between actual Libertarians and Republicans hiding from their tarnished name is quite easy. Actual Libertarians are concerned about the freedom of individuals. Conservatives use Libertarian as a code word meaning “I want to continue to enjoy all the privileges I do now, but I don’t want to share them with you and most of all I don’t want to pay any taxes.” Push come to shove, they’re happy to abbreviate that to “Screw freedom. I just don’t want to pay taxes.”

Pulling snippets doesn’t do the article justice. It’s worth reading in its entirety.

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Tuesday roundup

Posted on April 20, 2010 | 2 Comments

Poor Mitt Romney. He’s going to be reading ledes like this one every day between now and the day that he concedes the 2012 Republican primary race:

Mitt Romney on RomneyCare: The former Massachusetts governor talks about the subtle differences between his state’s health care reform and that signed by President Obama.

And Poor John McCain.

Yes, it’s still true: Republicans are despicable. Even to their own people.

Did you know that promiscuous women cause earthquakes?

I can’t think of a better argument for drug legalization than this one.

Lucy gets her football ready – again:

“I’m optimistic that maybe the Democrats won’t go forward with the [Financial Reform] bill as it is,” [Sen. Olympia] Snowe [R-Maine] told reporters outside her office. “Over the next few days, hopefully, something will change to make that possible. I don’t see why it would be impossible because frankly I think that there isn’t that much of a gap.”

Would such an agreement be possible within the week, to keep within the Democrats’ preferred timeframe?

“I think it certainly could be, absolutely,” Snowe said. “I’m always willing to be the only Republican if it’s the right thing, and it’s important to do the right thing on this.“

As she’s said before, when history calls, history calls.

Governor Rick Perry (R-Texastan) thinks W was the Best. President. Evah.

At the end of the day, when the history books are written, I think George W. Bush will go down as a very, very good President. Approaching great? I don’t know yet because I don’t know if we’ve seen the –

A year and a half since he’s been out of office, this may be a little bit early to write George’s history. But here’s why he was an incredibly good President: because this man kept America safe. […]

Anyone who is not a rank political hack, who has an agenda, and looks at this President’s efforts — I mean, there are two things that I think people judge Presidents on: their safety and the economy.

No doubt. One of the most epic terrorist attacks in world history, a soaring deficit, and a near-economic collapse later, George’s posterity is sitting pretty.

Speaking of keeping America safe:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and US officials say two leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq have been killed in a joint Iraqi-US operation.

Mr Maliki said on national TV that the Iraqi al-Qaeda leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who led an affiliate group, were dead.

US Vice-President Joe Biden said their deaths were “potentially devastating blows” to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

You know – the “al-Qaeda in Iraq” that didn’t even exist until Rick Perry’s BFF invaded the country.

Ah, chastity:

When Pat Bond told her lover Henry Willenborg, a Franciscan priest, that she was pregnant, he urged her to have an abortion.

Bond, who was 28, had a miscarriage and then became pregnant again. This time Willenborg’s superiors urged her to give up the child for adoption.

Bond, from Missouri, kept the child but agreed to a vow of silence. In a signed contract with the Catholic Church, she undertook to keep the priest’s identity secret in exchange for financial support for her son, Nathan.

In America, Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy and Austria,women made pregnant by priests have signed such pledges in exchange for hush money from the church.

Deus vult, and all that.

Looks like Jews for Sarah Palin may have launched their web site a little too soon:

“Hearing any leader declare that America isn’t a Christian nation and poking at allies like Israel in the eye — it is mind-boggling to see some of our nation’s actions recently, but politics truly is a topic for another day,” Palin said.

In some ways the really noteworthy thing here is that Palin specifically combined her denunciation of religious minority groups with an attack on Barack Obama’s insufficient fealty to Israeli government policies. The two themes were in the very same sentence.

Jim Crow is alive and well in Arizona. Thanks to the Arizona legislature, having brown skin is the only probable cause police now need to pull you over and ask for your papers. Jawohl!

This is pretty much all you need to know about the Republicans’ loyalties when it comes to passing meaningful financial reform.

The Douchebag Council at Pat Robertson’s Liberty University argue that unless employers are allowed to discriminate on the basis of sexual preference, deviant sex offenders are going to rape the bloody stumps of paraplegic veterans.

For Mitch McConnell, telling lies is like breathing:

CANDY CROWLEY (CNN, Sunday): The president says you are being deceptive in describing this bill.

MCCONNELL: Well, Candy … there is a bailout fund in the bill that was reported out of the Banking Committee, the partisan bill that came out of committee on a party-line vote.

CROWLEY: But that still does not–

MCCONNELL: I don’t think that’s in dispute.

CROWLEY: But that bailout is funded by the banks themselves, is it not? It is not a taxpayer bailout?

MCCONNELL: Well, Robert Reich, who was Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, says it is a bailout fund.

***

When Mitch McConnell has to misquote me to find evidence he’s telling the truth, he is desperate. No, Senator, I never said Dodd’s finance reform bill contains a bailout fund. The fund in the Dodd bill is a $50 billion liquidation fund designed to keep the creditors of distressed banks from jumping ship so fast they’d cause widespread financial panic before the bank’s operations could be wound down. And the cost of that liquidation fund would be paid entirely by Wall Street’s biggest banks. So it’s not, I repeat not, a bailout fund.

As always, Eugene Robinson nails it:

The overhyped Tea Party phenomenon is more about symbolism and screaming than anything else. A “movement” that encompasses gun nuts, tax protesters, devotees of the gold standard, Sarah Palin, insurance company lobbyists, “constitutionalists” who have not read the Constitution, Medicare recipients who oppose government-run health care, crazy “birthers” who claim President Obama was born in another country, a contingent of outright racists (come on, people, let’s be real) and a bunch of fat-cat professional politicians pretending to be “outsiders” is not a coherent intellectual or political force.

Speaking of the incoherence of the Tea People:

Tea party activists are divided roughly into two camps, according to a new POLITICO/TargetPoint poll: one that’s libertarian-minded and largely indifferent to hot-button values issues and another that’s culturally conservative and equally concerned about social and fiscal issues.
…
The results, however, suggest a distinct fault line that runs through the tea party activist base, characterized by two wings led by the politicians who ranked highest when respondents were asked who “best exemplifies the goals of the tea party movement” — former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), a former GOP presidential candidate.

Call it the Dingbat/Wingnut split.

Finally, there is much to criticize about the Obama administration. Thinking that America’s success is measured by how much the rest of the world hates us is not one of them.

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Posted in al-Qaeda, Bush administration, Catholic church, drugs, financial reform, health care, Iran, Iraq war, Obama administration, Tea Party, Uncategorized

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Monday morning roundup

Posted on April 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

Happy Monday! The crazy continues, even when we’re busy. Here’s a taste of what I’ve missed over the past few days:

The big news, of course, is Goldman Sachs getting caught selling its customers securities they knew would fail, and then betting against them. But you already knew that. And is this really surprising to anyone at this point?

Here’s some stuff you might have missed:

Notorious bigot and former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo wants to “send Obama back to Kenya.”

Celebrated bigot and erstwhile Sheriff Joe Arpaio kills an epileptic man:

A man died from a brain hemorrhage after Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s officers refused to give him his anti-seizure medication and put him in a cell with a concrete floor and walls, his daughters say.

The family says the Sheriff’s Department knew of Joseph Phillippi’s medical history because he had suffered multiple seizures when he was denied his medication during a previous incarceration.

The Oklahoma legislature wants to create a State Militia – using taxpayer money of course – to protect itself against Federal tyranny:

[State Sen. Randy Brogdon, R-Owasso], who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor, said in an AP story Monday that a citizen militia is authorized by state law and the U.S. Constitution and that the Second Amendment “deals directly with the right of an individual to keep and bear arms to protect themselves from an overreaching federal government.”

At the time, Brogdon and some local tea party leaders indicated a militia could be used to stop federal encroachment into state’s rights. Brogdon has since said he spoke only of a new National Guard-type unit to aid the state during civil emergencies. In a number of media appearances this week he said he never used the term “militia” in his AP interview.

Brogdon used it five times.

“Is a state militia a good idea? It probably is. Because it, again, it would just reinforce the, the attitude and the belief that you and I have the right to keep and bear arms and to provide and protect our families from an overreaching federal government. I think it’s a great idea,” Brogdon said in the interview conducted last week.

Don’t like the Federal government? Think it’s “tyranny” any time your party is out of power? Why not declare yourself a sovereign citizen:

Sovereign citizens are anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or “sovereign” from the United States. As a result, they believe they don’t have to answer to any government authority, including courts, taxing entities, motor vehicle departments, or law enforcement.

This causes all kinds of problems—and crimes. For example, many sovereign citizens don’t pay their taxes. They hold illegal courts that issue warrants for judges and police officers. They clog up the court system with frivolous lawsuits and liens against public officials to harass them. And they use fake money orders, personal checks, and the like at government agencies, banks, and businesses.

Sounds like fun!

Shocker: Americans hate Sarah Palin and her teabagger army:

In a new CNN/Opinion Research poll, the ephemeral nature of the Tea Party movement is once again revealed. When asked for their opinion of Tea Parties, respondents were decidedly unenthusiastic.

While the total numbers for support and opposition are tied at 27%, the support numbers have declined since January and those strongly opposed have doubled.
…
A mere 4% reported having attended a Tea Party rally or meeting.
…
These numbers confirm previous polling that shows the Tea Party to be a much smaller phenomenon than the impression given to it by the media. It incorporates a tiny percentage of the population and is widely disliked.
…
The Tea Bag sag coincides with the plummeting popularity of the Tea Bag Hag, Sarah Palin. The CNN poll showed Palin’s favorability rating at 39% (55% unfavorable). 69% of respondents said that she is not qualified to be president.

Maybe when she finally manages to reunite church and state, her followers’ “prayer shields” will be able to protect her from those kind of numbers.

Speaking of the Tea Bag Hag, this story is priceless:

A couple of weeks before the Alaska legislature began this year’s session, a bipartisan group of state senators on a retreat a few hours from here invited Gov. Sarah Palin to join them. Accompanied by a retinue of advisers, she took a seat at one end of a conference table and listened passively as Gary Stevens, the president of the Alaska Senate, a former college history professor and a low-key Republican with a reputation for congeniality, expressed delight at her presence.

Would the governor, a smiling Stevens asked, like to share some of her plans and proposals for the coming legislative session?

Palin looked around the room and paused, according to several senators present. “I feel like you guys are always trying to put me on the spot,” she said finally, as the room became silent.

And speaking of being put on the spot:

With partisan charges over financial regulation legislation sharpening and intensifying, Senator Scott Brown said yesterday that he would follow GOP leaders and vote against the current version of the bill.
…
Brown, whose vote could be critical as Democrats seek to find a GOP member to avoid a filibuster, assiduously avoided talking about specifics.

When asked what areas he thought should be fixed, he replied: “Well, what areas do you think should be fixed? I mean, you know, tell me. And then I’ll get a team and go fix it.’’

When you want the American public to believe you’re fighting the big banks instead of fellating them, who you gonna call? Why, Frank Luntz, of course:

The crux of [Mitch McConnell's] criticism is that the bill “institutionalizes… taxpayer-funded bailouts of Wall Street banks.” He knocked the expansion of power at the Fed and Treasury, while sounding the alarm on Wall Street accountability. If the outline of his speech sounds familiar, it’s because it is the exact argument pollster Frank Luntz urged Republicans to make earlier this year in a widely publicized memo. Compare the excerpts below (emphasis mine):

Luntz: “The single best way to kill any legislation is to link it to the Big Bank Bailout.”

McConnell: “We cannot allow endless taxpayer-funded bailouts for big Wall Street banks. And that’s why we must not pass the financial reform bill that’s about to hit the floor.”

Luntz: “Taxpayers should not be held responsible for the failure of big business any longer. If a business is going to fail, not matter how big, let it fail.”

McConnell: “[The Dodd bill] gives the government a new backdoor mechanism for propping up failing or failed institutions…. We won’t solve this problem until the biggest banks are allowed to fail.”

Luntz: “Government policies caused the bubble and its ultimate crash. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Reserve, and the Community Reinvestment Act all had a role in the catastrophe. The government inflated economic bubbles with easy credit policies.”

McConnell: “It also directs the Fed to oversee 35 to 50 of the biggest firms, replicating on an even larger scale the same distortions that plagued the housing market and helped trigger a massive bubble we’ll be suffering from for years. If you thought Fannie and Freddie were dangerous, how about 35 to 50 of them?”

Have you heard the new one that Republicans are pushing? Outrage that 47% of American households don’t even pay taxes. It’s bullshit, of course. 47% of Americans receive enough tax credits to wipe out their federal income tax burden. But they still pay payroll taxes and state income taxes, which disproportionately impact lower-income taxpayers (when was the last time you heard a rich guy bitching about his payroll tax?). Of course the hilarious element of all of this is watching Republicans complain about people not paying enough taxes. Take it away, John Stewart.

On that note, if you’re bummed out that rich people didn’t get a tax break this year like the other 98% of us, why not make a donation to help them out?

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Posted in financial reform, militia movement, Tea Party

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It’s time to honor their service

Posted on April 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

GetEQUAL is an equal rights advocacy group founded by Robin McGehee and Kip Williams, the co-directors of last Fall’s National Equality March on Washington. As part of their larger goal of demanding equal rights for the LGBT community, they have partnered with Lt. Dan Choi to carry out direct actions aimed at lighting a fire under the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.”

GetEQUAL’s first action took place on March 18th, when Dan Choi and fellow serviceman Capt. Jim Pietrangelo were arrested for handcuffing themselves to the White House gates and calling for President Obama to make good on his promise to repeal DADT. The display was coordinated with a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office in San Francisco, where four GetEQUAL members were arrested while protesting Congress’ failure to pass the Employee Non-Discrimination Act.

In Robin and Kip’s own words:

Our mission at GetEQUAL is simple: to create a movement of everyday people—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and straight—who are dedicated to bringing about full legal and social equality. We believe there are millions of Americans who are tired of waiting and are ready to act. Our goal is to serve and grow this constituency by helping them take strategic, coordinated, bold action to demand equality, and to hold accountable those who stand in the way.

We know it will take all of us working together to reach our goals, so we seek to create a broad and inclusive community. GetEQUAL will bring together people of every sex, gender, race, class, age, ability, look, religion, family status, or citizenship; those who can contribute in small ways, and those who are able to put themselves on the line. United, we can build a more powerful movement to demand change. We invite you to join us, and ask your friends and family to do the same.

Join with us.

Take bold action to demand equality for LGBTQ people. Don’t accept excuses, delays, compromises, or empty promises. Hold accountable any person or organization who stands in the way. Push back, rise up, and speak out against all forms of discrimination that plague our community.

Take the pledge.

Join the fight.

Help us make this one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

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Posted in equal rights, LGBT, Obama administration, Uncategorized

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The racist Right – part 2

Posted on April 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

Carl Paladino is the Tea Party candidate for Governor of New York. WNY Media today posted a piece on Paladino that is getting some attention.

Last week, we received a deluge of emails that Carl Paladino had sent to a veritable who’s who of Buffalo-area politicians, media types, hangers-on, hacks, and appointees. Mostly, these are chain emails with a long provenance, including hundreds of email addresses of current and past recipients.

The piece then goes on to give a sampler of the emails, many of which are sexually explicit, and some of which are downright weird (one video he forwarded was of a woman having sex with a horse). But the most telling are emails like these:

1. In December 2008, Paladino forwarded a message entitled “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal” including a video clip showing African tribesmen dancing in a village. This video is very popular in the white supremacist community and has been posted at the Neo-Nazi Stormfront website.
…
4. Here’s a cute email from October 4, 2009, which portrays President Obama and the First Lady dressed in 70s pimp/prostitute/blaxploitation garb.
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7. One email entitled “demotivated” included several phony “motivational” posters, along with this one: [an image with the title "run niggers, run!"]

Predictably, Paladino’s campaign is trying its best to ignore the emails. But they did issue this little gem of a statement:

Carl Paladino has forwarded close friends hundreds of email messages he received [sic]. Many of these emails he received were off color [sic], some were politically incorrect, few represented his own opinion, and almost none of them were worth remembering.

We’re not surprised the political establishment feels threatened by Carl’s drive the [sic] take Albany back for taxpayers. Our campaign won’t be wading through the details of what is just another liberal Democrat [sic] blog smear. It figures that members of the Party [sic] who brought us record taxes, record spending and record debt would want to change the topic from reform to having sex with horses and S&M parlors.

Yeah, right? Because liberals are always thinking about things like bestiality.

Oh, wait…

I’d rather not post the images here – they just give me the creeps. But you can see them here if you’re so inclined.

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The racist Right – part 1

Posted on April 12, 2010 | 2 Comments

The National Review has been the standard bearer for the putative “intellectual Right” since its formation in 1955 by William F. Buckley, Jr. Whether it remains so is a subject open to debate. This weekend has added another little morsel to that discussion.

John Derbyshire, a contributing editor at National Review, was invited to address the Black Law Students’ Association of the University of Pennsylvania Law School last week as part of a panel discussion. The subject: Revisiting Race and Remedies: Should the Government Play A Role in Eliminating Racial Disparities in Education and Employment? He has since published the text of his remarks at his web site.

Here are a few of the things this conservative intellectual had to say to the audience of black intellectuals who had invited him into their home:

[R]acial disparities in education and employment have their origin in biological differences between the human races. Those differences are facts in the natural world, like the orbits of the planets. They can’t be legislated out of existence; nor can they be “eliminated” by social or political action.
…
Our species separated into two parts 50, 60, or 70 thousand years ago, depending on which paleoanthropologist you ask. One part remained in Africa, the ancestral homeland. The other crossed into Southwest Asia, then split, and re-split, and re-split, until there were human populations living in near-total reproductive isolation from each other in all parts of the world. This went on for hundreds of generations, causing the divergences we see today. Different physical types, as well as differences in behavior, intelligence, and personality, are exactly what one would expect to observe when scrutinizing these divergent populations.
…
We all notice the different physical specialties of the different races in the Olympic Games. There was a run of, I think, seven Olympics in which every one of the finalists in the men’s 100 meters sprint was of West African ancestry — 56 out of 56 finalists. You get less pronounced but similar patterns in other sports — East African distance runners, Northeast Asian divers, and so on. These differences even show up within sports, where a team sport calls for highly differentiated abilities in team members — football being the obvious example.

We see the same differences in traits that we don’t think of as directly physical, what evolutionary psychologists sometimes refer to as the “BIP” traits — behavior, intelligence, and personality. Two of the hardest-to-ignore manifestations here are the extraordinary differentials in criminality between white Americans and African Americans….

This is what passes for intellectual conservatism in 2010.

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A family with no mother

Posted on April 11, 2010 | 5 Comments

Whatever your feelings about Maureen Dowd, there’s no denying that she’s now number one with a bullet when it comes to commentary on the Catholic church, its despicable Pope, and its love affair with pedophilia.

From today’s New York Times:

To circumscribe women, Saudi Arabia took Islam’s moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Muhammad; the Catholic Church took its moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Jesus. In the New Testament, Jesus is surrounded by strong women and never advocates that any woman — whether she’s his mother or a prostitute — be treated as a second-class citizen.

Negating women is at the heart of the church’s hideous — and criminal — indifference to the welfare of boys and girls in its priests’ care. Lisa Miller writes in Newsweek’s cover story about the danger of continuing to marginalize women in a disgraced church that has Mary at the center of its founding story:

“In the Roman Catholic corporation, the senior executives live and work, as they have for a thousand years, eschewing not just marriage, but intimacy with women … not to mention any chance to familiarize themselves with the earthy, primal messiness of families and children.” No wonder that, having closed themselves off from women and everything maternal, they treated children as collateral damage, a necessary sacrifice to save face for Mother Church.
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As the A.P. reported [on Friday], the Oakland diocese recommended defrocking Father Stephen Kiesle in 1981. The priest had pleaded no contest and was sentenced to three years’ probation in 1978 in a case in which he was accused of tying up and molesting two boys in a church rectory.

In 1982, the Oakland diocese got what it termed a “rather curt” response from the Vatican. It wasn’t until 1985 that “God’s Rottweiler” finally got around to addressing the California bishop’s concern. He sent his letter urging the diocese to give the 38-year-old pedophile “as much paternal care as possible” and to consider “his young age.” Ratzinger should have been more alarmed by the young age of the priest’s victims; that’s what maternal care would have entailed.
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While the Vatican sat on the case — asking the diocese to resubmit the files, saying they might have been lost — Kiesle volunteered as a youth minister at a church north of Oakland. The A.P. also reported that even after the priest was finally defrocked in 1987, he continued to volunteer with children in the Oakland diocese; repeated warnings to church officials were ignored.

The Vatican must realize that the church’s belligerent, resentful and paranoid response to the global scandal is not working because it now says it will cooperate with secular justice systems and that the pope will have more meetings with victims. It is too little, too late.

The church that through the ages taught me and other children right from wrong did not know right from wrong when it came to children. Crimes were swept under the rectory rug, and molesters were protected to molest again for the “good of the universal church.” And that is bad, very bad — a mortal sin.

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Posted in Catholic church, religion

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Let the games begin

Posted on April 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

Justice John Paul Stevens’ retirement announcement is less than a day old, and already the Party of No is lining up its objections to the imaginary nominee for his replacement, who has not yet even been announced.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL):

The product of [Sonya Sotomayor's] confirmation hearing was a near-universal rejection of President Obama’s empathy standard, the flawed notion that judges should allow personal feelings, political opinions, and social views to guide judicial decision-making.
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I hope I will be able to support the individual selected by the president, as I have a majority of his judicial nominees. But, as I have said before, I cannot and will not vote for a nominee with a record that fails to demonstrate a commitment to the Constitution, the rule of law, and the oath of a judge.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX):

Our nation deserves a Supreme Court nominee who is committed to deciding cases impartially based on the law, not on personal politics, preferences, or what’s in the nominee’s ‘heart.’

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY):

As we await the President’s nominee to replace Justice Stevens at the end of his term, Americans can expect Senate Republicans to make a sustained and vigorous case for judicial restraint and the fundamental importance of an even-handed reading of the law.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT):

As I have said for many years, someone who would be an activist judge, who would substitute their own views for what the law requires, is not qualified to serve on the federal bench.

Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) – before Stevens even announced his retirement:

[Whether Republicans filibuster] will all depend on what kind of a person it is. I think the president should nominate a qualified person. I hope, however, he does not nominate an overly ideological person. That will be the test.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA):

The Judiciary Committee will take the time needed to ensure that the President’s nominee will be true to the Constitution and apply the law, not personal politics, feelings or preferences.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-C Street):

I hope President Obama’s pick will unite rather than divide the country (translation: I hope he picks a slavering wingnut).

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Posted in Obama administration, Republican Party, Supreme Court

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Criminals

Posted on April 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

A shocker from The Times today: Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff, goes on the record to say that George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were aware that hundreds of innocent men were being detained at Guantanamo and that they covered it up for fear of discrediting the Guantanamo detention program:

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.
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Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country”.

He signed the declaration in support of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese man who was held at Guantánamo Bay from March 2003 until December 2007. Mr Hamad claims that he was tortured by US agents while in custody and yesterday filed a damages action against a list of American officials.

When do the Bush administration criminal trials start?

Oh, right…

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Posted in Afghanistan, Bush administration, Guantanamo, Iraq war, torture

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The End Times network

Posted on April 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

Oy.

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Posted in FOX News, nuclear weapons, Obama administration

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Dingbat smackdown

Posted on April 9, 2010 | 2 Comments

President Obama responds to Sarah Palin’s comments on the nuclear treaty he just signed with Russia:

Palin, the former vice presidential candidate, has not been shy about criticizing Obama’s policies and this week weighed in on his revamped nuclear strategy, saying it was like a child in a playground who says ‘punch me in the face, I’m not going to retaliate.’

“I really have no response to that. The last I checked, Sarah Palin is not much of an expert on nuclear issues,” Obama said in an interview with ABC News.

Pressed further on Republican criticism that his strategy restricts the use of nuclear weapons too much, Obama added:

“What I would say to them is, is that if the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff are comfortable with it, I’m probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin.”

Booyah.

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Posted in nuclear weapons, Obama administration

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A boy can dream

Posted on April 8, 2010 | 2 Comments

Please, please, please…

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Posted in Palin Bachmann 2012, Republican Party, Tea Party, the conservative psychosis

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Sarah and Michele decide to experiment

Posted on April 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

Sarah Palin recalls her first meeting with Michele Bachmann:

I knew that we’d be buddies when I met her when she said, Drill here, drill now. And then I replied, Drill, baby, drill and then we both said, You betcha!

Bachmann was equally taken with Palin’s charms:

[A]s absolutely drop dead gorgeous this woman is (sic) on the outside, I’m here to testify that she is 20 times more beautiful on the inside.

Palin/Bachmann 2012: Don’t ask, baby, don’t tell

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Posted in campaign, Palin Bachmann 2012, Republican Party, Tea Party

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Der Spiegel ist zerbrochen

Posted on April 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

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Posted in funny, prank

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The diaper responds

Posted on April 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

Upon hearing porn star Stormy Daniels announce that she’d consider running for David Vitter’s Senate seat as a Republican, the NRSC responded, calling Daniels a “Republican sideshow.”

Stormy was quick with the comeback:

We are disappointed that Senator Vitter has shamelessly allowed the Washington and Baton Rouge Republican elite to violate Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment and attack a fellow Republican who is not as of now even a declared candidate in this race.
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[F]ellow Louisiana tea partiers and true conservatives will reject the Republican elite’s attempt to ram down our throats closet liberals like David Vitter.

Ouch!

But the Louisiana Democratic party gets the last word:

If the Louisiana Republican Party is uncomfortable with a Republican challenger who has a history of selling sex, I would suggest they reconsider standing by an incumbent with a history of paying for it.

Booyah!

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Posted in Republican Party

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Michael Steele opens a laundromat

Posted on April 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

It’s like a bad dream that the RNC just can’t wake up from.

The Republican National Committee at the end of last year struck a deal with the Michigan Republican Party that if the state party could raise what turned out to be a half a million dollars for the RNC from its donors, the committee would immediately give the money back, in a scheme apparently devised to increase the RNC’s 2009 fundraising numbers.

“It was a known secret that a deal had been struck on the topic,” a former RNC official confirmed to The Daily Caller.

RNC spokesman Doug Heye, contacted by a reporter Tuesday afternoon, did not comment.

The allegations appear to be backed up by FEC reports: Fifteen donors from Michigan maxed out their donations to the committee on a single day —Dec. 31 — the last day of 2009 — giving $456,000 to the committee. Over the next two months, $500,000 was disbursed back from the RNC’s coffers to those of the Michigan Republican Party, with $250,000 given in January and another $250,000 disbursed in February.

For the record: that’s illegal. In fact, it’s almost exactly why Tom DeLay was indicted in 2005.

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Posted in Republican Party

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Murder: take three

Posted on April 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

In case you missed it during the coverage of the Baghdad helicopter slaughter this week, another gruesome example of civilian deaths was reported on Sunday. This time, it was in Gardez, Afghanistan. Two men – both local officials – and three women – two of whom were pregnant – were shot and killed by U.S. troops.

More horrifying: it looks likely that the troops, after realizing their mistake, anesthetized the crime scene to make it look like they stumbled upon an honor killing.

By digging the bullets out of the women’s bodies with knives.

Afghan officials investigating the deaths of five Afghan civilians gunned down in February during a bungled raid by American Special Operations forces believe that troops tampered with evidence at the scene, the lead investigator said Monday.

The joint American and Afghan assault team shot five Afghans — all family members — from the roofs of buildings in a large residential compound near Gardez, in southeastern Afghanistan, where members of an extended family lived in different homes, survivors said. The Americans did the killing, they said.

As in the case of the Baghdad helicopter killings, the circumstances surrounding the shooting were at first grossly misrepresented by the military to make the deaths seem justified:

At first, the American-led military command in Kabul said that the two men who died were “insurgents” who had “engaged” — in other words, shot at — the forces at the scene. The initial account also said that the troops then stumbled onto the bodies of three women “tied up, gagged and killed” and hidden in a room.

Military officials later suggested that the women — who among them had 16 children — had all been stabbed to death or had died by other means before the raid, implying that their own relatives may have killed them.

The implication behind the lie is insidious – that the two men killed their own wives before the troops arrived on the scene.

Evidently, the troops cut their own bullets out of the women’s bodies with knives, to make it look as if they’d been killed by their husbands in some sort of honor killing:

Mohammed Tahir, whose 18-year-old daughter was killed, said he had watched from the compound through an open door as an American knelt over one corpse with a knife and tried to extract bullets. “I saw them working on the bodies,” Mr. Tahir said. “I saw a knife in one of the American’s hands.”

Another family member, Abdul Ghafar, said the bullet entry wounds on the bodies had been widened or scraped out in an effort to remove bullets. “The holes were bigger than they were supposed to be,” he said.

The military has thus far denied tampering with the bodies.

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Posted in Afghanistan

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Stormy Daniels: Republican

Posted on April 7, 2010 | 1 Comment

Porn star and would-be Senate candidate from Louisiana Stormy Daniels FTW:

I am ready today to declare that should I seek the office of US Senator from the great state of Louisiana that I will do so as a Republican.

While this decision has not been an easy one, recent events regarding Republican National Committee fundraising at Voyeur, an LA based lesbian bondage themed nightclub finally tipped the scales.
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As someone who has worked extensively in both the club and film side of the Adult Entertainment Industry, I know from experience that a mere $1900 outlay at a club with the reputation of Voyeur is a clear indication of a frugal investment with a keen eye toward maximum return.
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As is the case with so many of my fellow Louisianans, I have been a registered Democrat throughout my life. But now I cannot help but recognize that over time my libertarian values regarding both money and sex and the legal use of one for the other is now best espoused by the Republican Party.

I am so proud of my home state right now.

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Posted in Republican Party

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A batshit confederacy

Posted on April 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

Poor Minneapolis:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) will be welcoming a very special guest to Minnesota today: Sarah Palin, for a rally together in Minneapolis.

The much-anticipated rally will begin at 3 p.m. ET, and will be streamed online by Bachmann’s campaign. Other guests will include Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a potential presidential candidate, as well as right-wing talk show host and Bachmann ally Sean Hannity.

And poor Tim Pawlenty. Talk about holding your manhood cheap.

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Posted in Republican Party, Tea Party, the conservative psychosis

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