It’s been a bit of a long day here …

Posted: December 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic terrorism, Foreign Affairs, fundamentalist Christians, Gun Control, just because, open thread, religion, religious extremists, Republican politics, right wing hate grouups, Second Amendment, Syria, The Media SUCKS | Tags: , , , , | 12 Comments

yawn2It seems JJ’s having some issues with word press so I thought I’d just provide a few links to discuss since I really have a good case of blurry brain today.  Something intense and wonky is beyond me this evening.

I don’t know if any of you watch Richard Engle on NBC.  He’s one of the better foreign correspondents around.  He’s missing in Syria right now.  He hasn’t been in touch with NBC since Thursday. Syria’s a serious war zone right now with a mad dictator in charge of some fairly scary weapons so this is concerning.

NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel has gone missing in Syria, according to Turkish news reports. The reports also say that Aziz Akyavaş, a Turkish journalist working with Engel, is unaccounted for. NBC News has been successfully keeping Engel’s status subject to a news blackout—one to which Gawker agreed until now—for at least the past 24 hours.

Turkish newspaper Hurriyet is reporting that Engel and Akyavaş were last known to be in Syria and haven’t been in contact with NBC News since Thursday morning. The news has been reported widely in the Turkish press over the past 24 hours, including by Turkish news channel NTV, which presents itself as an international partner of MSNBC. It’s also been widely distributed on Twitter.

A lot of the worst nuts are keeping their mouths shut about the Sandy Hook massacre.  However, there’s alway Dr. Dobson to bring on the theocratic fascism.

James Dobson dedicated his radio program this morning to discussing Friday’s tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Connecticut, which he attributed to the fact that God has “allowed judgment to fall upon us” because the nation has turned its back on him by accepting things like abortion and gay marriage:

Our country really does seem in complete disarray. I’m not talking politically, I’m not talking about the result of the November sixth election;  I am saying that something has gone wrong in America and that we have turned our back on God.

I mean millions of people have decided that God doesn’t exist, or he’s irrelevant to me and we have killed fifty-four million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition.  Believe me, that is going to have consequences too. 

And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us.  I think that’s what’s going on.

I’ve really thought a lot of the gun nuts represent an insurrectionist attitude and that many of them are still what I would chararterize as neoconfederates or confederacy hold outs.  Larry Pratt proved that royally on HardBall today.  Frankly, I hope the FBI keeps a really good eye or twenty on him.

Pratt believes gun ownership is necessary to scare office holders and to remind them that we can take them out.  I have no idea what to say to a man that is so obsessed with stolen elections that he suggests assassination as a way to correct things.

During the interview on Hardball, Pratt argued that guns are necessary to “control the government.” When Matthews asked for an example, Pratt pointed to 1946, in Athens, Tenn., when townsmen took up arms against corrupt government officials.

David Chipman, a former special agent at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who now works with Mayors Against Illegal Guns, told Matthews that Pratt’s argument was bogus.

“Law enforcement is here as a force of good and we’re the good guys, and that’s what we saw in Newtown. When we get rhetoric like I’m hearing right now, I think this is extremely fringe, I believe most Americans believe otherwise.”

Pratt scoffed at Chipman as a tool of the government.  I really think that people like Pratt–read Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachmann, Allen West, etc.–need to be outed for the insane extremists they are.

Even worse is the suggestion by Megan McCardle which has got to be the dumbest idea on the planet.  This is written by Jonathan Chait at The Nation.

In what can only be seen as a malicious plot by Newsweek’s editors [Update: this is a long blog post, not a magazine piece] to ensure Megan McArdle’s reputation does not outlive Newsweek, the Daily Beast has published a 4,000 word essay by its new hire on how to stop massacres like last Friday’s. McArdle begins her essay with a prescient harbinger (“There just aren’t good words to talk about Newtown.”) but recovers to churn out a fairly standard libertarian argument about why various government remedies won’t work. And it’s true, to some extent, that various regulatory solutions all have complications.

The problem comes at the end when, having dismissed the standard liberal regulatory measures as unworkable, she has to propose her own solution. This is what McArdle comes up with:

I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once. 

Are you kidding me? You think gun control is impractical, so your plan is to turn the entire national population, including young children, into a standby suicide squad? Through private initiative, of course. It’s way more feasible than gun control!

Yes, if only those first graders had learned to tackle a shooter with 2 semiautomatic weapons in hand and a chicken-fried brain.  What a morooonnnnnn!!!!

T. ‏@TPPratt

@AngryBlackLady The larger children can throw smaller children at shooter. #MeganMcArdleDefenseTips

There is one major headline today worth mentioning.  That is the death of Hawaiian former Senator and World War 2 Hero Daniel Inouye.

Democrat Daniel Inouye, the U.S. Senate’s most senior member and a Medal of Honor recipient for his bravery during World War II, has died. He was 88.

He died of respiratory complications and had been at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center since earlier this month. His office said his last word was “Aloha,” the traditional Hawaiian word for “hello” and “goodbye.”

President Obama praised Inouye, saying the nation has “lost a true American hero.”

“In Washington, he worked to strengthen our military, forge bipartisan consensus, and hold those of us in government accountable to the people we were elected to serve,” Obama said in a statement. “But it was his incredible bravery during World War II — including one heroic effort that cost him his arm but earned him the Medal of Honor — that made Danny not just a colleague and a mentor, but someone revered by all of us lucky enough to know him.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced the news of Inouye’s death on the Senate floor, sparking a round of tributes for the man Reid called “a giant of the Senate.” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., hailed Inouye’s service and his reserve as a mark of “men who lead by example and expect nothing in return.”

Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes appear to part way on gun fetishes.

While Ailes’s network said it wasn’t the right time to talk about legislation, Murdoch had no hesitation. Within hours of the attack, he took to Twitter to call for an automatic-weapons ban. “Terrible news today. When will politicians find courage to ban automatic weapons? As in Oz after similar tragedy,” he wrote, referring to Australia’s move to ban assault weapons in 1996 after a man used two semiautomatic rifles to kill 35 people and wound 21. That massacre came six weeks after the horrific mass school shooting in Dunblane, Scotland, in which sixteen children and one adult were murdered. (Despite Murdoch’s plea, automatic weapons are already illegal in the United States; Adam Lanza used semiautomatics.)

As a global media mogul, Murdoch’s newspapers and television networks have the power to shape public opinion. Already there are signs that parts of Murdoch’s empire are adopting the boss’s position. Today’s New York Post cover, fronting a photo of Obama, declared, “ENOUGH!” In London, where gun culture is decidedly outre, the cover of the Sun screamed, “END THE LUNACY.” Murdoch “is obviously very affected by what’s gone on,” News Corp. executive vice-president Joel Klein told me. “I think most rational people would think there’s no place for assault weapons. I don’t think it’s complicated.” He said that Murdoch will continue to advocate for gun-control policies.

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Thursday Reads: Republican Wars on Women, Children, and the Poor . . . Plus Mormon White Supremacy and Michelle Cottle’s War on Sarcasm

Posted: October 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, abortion rights, Barack Obama, morning reads, racism, religion, religious extremists, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, Republican politics, U.S. Politics, Violence against women, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , | 67 Comments

Good Morning!!

Today I’m leaving the Boston area and driving to Indiana to stay with my mother for a few weeks. I should be able to keep up my blogging schedule most of the time. I’m going to miss Sky Dancing today, but I’ll check in when I stop for the night. I should get to Indiana on Friday evening. But before I leave, I have some interesting reads to share with you.

I’ll begin with war on women updates.

Via Kaili Joy Gray at dailykos, CNN posted a piece yesterday in which they claim to have found a “study” that shows that women’s voting behavior is dictated by their menstrual cycles. There must have been quite a backlash, because CNN later took the post down and replaced it with a statement saying that the content didn’t meet CNN’s “editorial standards.” Fortunately Kaili Joy Gray found the the article elsewhere and posted the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:

The researchers [Kristina Durante of the University of Texas, San Antonio and colleagues] found that during the fertile time of the month, when levels of the hormone estrogen are high, single women appeared more likely to vote for Obama and committed women appeared more likely to vote for Romney, by a margin of at least 20%, Durante said. This seems to be the driver behind the researchers’ overall observation that single women were inclined toward Obama and committed women leaned toward Romney.

Here’s how Durante explains this: When women are ovulating, they “feel sexier,” and therefore lean more toward liberal attitudes on abortion and marriage equality. Married women have the same hormones firing, but tend to take the opposite viewpoint on these issues, if you also take into consideration other hormonal issues, everything intensifies. for example if you look at what are the symptoms of low dhea you´d be surprised at how many of them you already have .she says.

“I think they’re overcompensating for the increase of the hormones motivating them to have sex with other men,” she said. It’s a way of convincing themselves that they’re not the type to give in to such sexual urges, she said.

Durante’s previous research found that women’s ovulation cycles also influence their shopping habits, buying sexier clothes during their most fertile phase.

Um…. Kristina? I have a question. What about us women of a certain age who no longer ovulate? How do we make our voting decisions? Go read the whole thing. You’ll never believe it otherwise.

[UPDATE: I just noticed that JJ posted about the CNN story last night–sorry for any repetition]

As of late last night Mitt Romney was still standing by Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who is now internationally famous for saying the following in a candidates’ debate on Tuesday night.

“You know, this is that issue that every candidate for federal or even state office faces. And I have to certainly stand for life. I know that there are some who disagree, and I respect their point of view. But I believe that life begins at conception. The only exception I have to have on abortion is in that case—of the life of the mother. I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God. And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

Of course Paul Ryan will support Mourdock because Ryan even more extreme views on abortion–he believes it should be abolished in every case, even if her life is in danger from her pregnancy. Mourdock later claimed that he didn’t mean to say that god wills women to be raped, just that god insists that if a raped women gets pregnant, she must carry and give birth to her rapist’s offspring.

As of last night Mourdock was not backing down.

Mourdock, meanwhile, dove into damage control Wednesday, explaining that he abhors violence of any kind and regrets that some may have misconstrued and “twisted” his comments. But he stood behind the original remark in Tuesday night’s debate.

“I spoke from my heart. And speaking from my heart, speaking from the deepest level of my faith, I would not apologize. I would be less than faithful if I said anything other than life is precious, I believe it’s a gift from God,” Mourdock said at a news conference Wednesday.

I have to say that I think forcing a woman to carry her rapist’s baby is pretty violent and will certainly cause her to endlessly reexperience the violence of the rape.

Yesterday, Ayn Rand fanboy and VP candidate Paul Ryan gave a speech about how he wants to help the poor by taking away the social safety net. Here’s Jonathan Chait’s take on the speech: Paul Ryan: No, I Want to Help the Poor! Really!

Paul Ryan, the celebrated Republican idea man, delivered a speech today entitled “Restoring the Promise of Upward Mobility in America’s Economy.” Upward mobility is a vital concept for Ryan. He is the author of a plan that would, as budget expert Robert Greenstein put it, “produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history.” Upward mobility is Ryan’s constant answer to this objection. In his telling, his plans would make the economy more open and free, making it easier for the poor to rise and the rich to fall. As Ryan says, “We believe that Americans are better off in a dynamic, free-enterprise-based economy that fosters economic growth, opportunity and upward mobility instead of a stagnant, government-directed economy that stifles job creation and fosters government dependency.”

Of course, as Chait points out, Ryan’s plan to “help the poor” is complete bullsh*t.

So, what does Ryan have to offer in defense of his promise to “restore upward mobility?” He offers a riff about the importance of education reform, without either explaining what such a policy would entail or how it would differ from the very aggressive education reforms the Obama administration has implemented. He praises the role of private charity, suggesting that rolling back government assistance for the poor will encourage the private sector to step in, a decidedly shaky proposition.

Mostly, he talks about welfare reform. There is a consensus that welfare as we knew it did create serious cultural pathologies. Ryan cites the case of welfare reform frequently. To him, it proves that large cuts to programs that help poor people of any kind at all are not only harmless but will help the poor. “The welfare-reform mindset hasn’t been applied with equal vigor across the spectrum of anti-poverty programs,” he says. Thus he proposes enormous cuts — to children’s health-insurance grants, Head Start, food stamps, and, especially, Medicaid, which would have to throw about half its current beneficiaries off their coverage under his proposal.

What a guy! And he even has “scientific” support for his policies:

Ryan noted that Americans born into poor families are more likely to stay poor as adults than Americans born into wealthy families.

No kidding! And Ryan knows whereof he speaks, since he was born into a wealthy family. It’s so generous of him to want to help the irresponsible 47 percent.

I’ve been kind of sarcastic in this post, haven’t I? Does that bother you? According to Michelle Cottle of The Daily Beast, women don’t like sarcasm. In fact she wrote a story based largely on anonymous sources claiming that the women of “Hillaryland” were annoyed and offended by the sarcasm that President Barack Obama used on Mitt Romney in the third presidential debate Monday night. I never heard of “Hillaryland” before so I read about it in Wikipedia.

Hillaryland was the self-designated name of a group of core advisors to Hillary Rodham Clinton, when she was First Lady of the United States and again when, as United States Senator, she was one of the Democratic Party candidates for President in the 2008 election.

The group included Huma Abedin, Patti Solis Doyle (credited with coining the name “Hillaryland”), Mandy Grunwald, Neel Lattimore, Ann Lewis, Evelyn Lieberman, Tamera Luzzatto, Capricia Marshall, Cheryl Mills, Minyon Moore, Lissa Muscatine, Neera Tanden, Melanne Verveer, and Maggie Williams.

Now I have no idea if Michelle Cottle actually talked to any of the women listed above, because she doesn’t name names. She just claims that Hillary supporters hated Obama’s debate performance. Cottle writes:

How snarky was President Obama in his final debate with Mitt Romney?
He was scornful enough that, during the midst of the matchup, Hillaryland insiders were circulating amongst themselves a twit pic featuring that kick-ass photo of Hillary in her shades, captioned by Obama’s infamous put-down from one of their ’08 debates: “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”

Message: the arch, condescending Obama that so chafed Hillary backers was back with a vengeance.

That was the extent of Cottle’s references to “Hillaryland.” After the first two paragraphs of her piece, Cottle mostly quotes Republicans.

Many Dems cheered the sharp-quipped president, especially those demoralized by his sorry showing two debates ago in Denver. (As @JohnKerry tweeted, “I think POTUS just sank Romney’s battleship.”)

By contrast, Republicans were quick to proclaim shock and disgust at the president’s behavior. “We don’t have as many horses and bayonets as we used to, Mitt!” mimics Republican pollster Whit Ayres, his voice growing higher, shriller, and louder with each word. “I guess you didn’t learn much going to Harvard, did you, Mitt? How stupid are you, Mitt?!”

His voice coming back down to earth, Ayres huffs, “This is the president of the U.S. acting like a schoolyard bully.”

Oooooooh! A schoolyard bully? That sounds more like the Republican candidate to me.

As I noted above, Cottle even refers to “research” (which she doesn’t cite) that shows that women don’t like sarcasm. You couldn’t prove it by me. I think Cottle’s research is about as reliable as the “study” in the CNN piece I described above.

While you’re at The Daily Beast, I recommend reading Andrew Sullivan’s two posts on racism in the Mormon church and Mitt Romney’s failure to challenge it. Here’s the first post and the second post. Sullivan has also published some reader reactions in subsequent posts.

Finally, at Mother Jones, Tim Murphy asks if Romney supports corporal punishment of children. Romney has stated unequivocally that he opposes the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I have the answer to Murphy’s question. Yes, Mitt believes in “whacking” children’s “bums,” according to his wife Ann

Ugh! But back to the MJ article. Murphy writes:

In July, the GOP presidential nominee wrote a letter to Virginia conservative activist Michael Farris, an evangelical power broker in the critical swing state, outlining his opposition to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which commits ratifying nations to protect children from discrimination. “My position on that convention is unequivocal: I would oppose Senate approval of the convention, and would not sign the convention for final ratification,” Romney wrote. “I believe that the best safeguard for the well-being and protection of children is the family, and that the primary safeguards for the legal rights of children in America is the U.S. Constitution and the laws of the states.”

The UN CRC hasn’t received much mainstream attention, but it’s becoming a rallying cry on the far right, mostly because social conservatives fear that its passage would imperil the rights of parents to, among other things, use corporal punishment on their kids. The first bullet point in Farris’ 2009 fact sheet explaining his beef with the treaty warned that “[p]arents would no longer be able to administer reasonable spankings to their children.” (The second was that juveniles could no longer be sentenced to life in prison.) Thanks to the efforts of Farris and others, at least 37 GOP senators have announced their opposition to the treaty.

The fear of a national spanking ban extends beyond the realm of international law. When the Supreme Court upheld most portions of the Affordable Care Act, Farris fretted that “Congress can regulate every aspect of our lives so long as there is a tax involved. Congress can ban spanking by enacting a $1,000 tax on those who do. Congress can ban homeschooling in a similar fashion.”

These are the same people who want to regulate every aspect of the lives of American women!

OK, those are my recommendations for today. What are you reading and blogging about? I’ll read your comments later tonight.

Know your Right Wing Christofascists!

Posted: October 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, religious extremists, right wing hate grouups, VAGINA Ralph Reed, VAGINA Rick Santorum, War on Women | Tags: , , , , , , | 64 Comments

Here’s a list of the 10 Most Dangerous Religious Right Organizations in the country.  These folks are determined to undermine the US constitution that prevents mixing of specific religious doctrines with US law.  These people don’t want freedom for their religious practices.  They want the US government to enshrine their petty theocratic agendas into law and to persecute the unbelievers.

1. Jerry Falwell Ministries/ Liberty University/Liberty Counsel

Revenue: $522,784,095

2. Pat Robertson Empire

Revenue: $434,971,231

3. Focus on the Family (includes its 501(c)(4) political affiliate CitizenLink)

Revenue: $104,463,950

4. Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund)

Revenue: $35,145,644 

5. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

Lobbying Expenditures: $26,662,111 

6. American Family

Association

Revenue: $17,955,438

7. Family Research Council

Revenue: $14,840,036  (includes 501­(c)(4) affiliate FRC Action)

8. Concerned Women for

America

Revenue: $10,352,628  (includes 501­(c)­(4) affiliate CWA Legislative Action Committee)

9. Faith & Freedom Coalition

Revenue: $5,494,640

10. Council for National Policy

Revenue: $1,976,747

The Christian Right has basically infiltrated the Republican Party and is most evident as “Teavanagelicals”.

ON AN INSTITUTIONAL LEVEL, the merger of Christian Right and Tea Party interests is remarkably advanced. The alliance has served as the very foundation stone of theFaith and Freedom Coalition, the latest venture of that intrepid politico-religious entrepreneur, Ralph Reed, which has sprouted chapters in many states, most prominently Iowa, where it sponsored the first candidate forum of the 2012 cycle. There is even a term to describe this new strain of conservatism: the “Teavangelicals,” a subject of a recent broadcast by Christian Right journalist David Brody, which, among other things, examined the conservative evangelical roots of major Tea Party leaders. Most recently, a host of organizations closely connected with the Christian Right and “social issues” causes have signed onto the “Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge,” the Tea Party-inspired oath that demands a position on the debt limit vote that is incompatible with any bipartisan negotiations.

But this convergence between the two groups goes well beyond coalition politics and reflects a radicalization of conservative evangelical elites that is just as striking as the rise of the Tea Party itself. Indeed, the worldview of many Christian Right leaders has evolved into an understanding of government (at least under secularist management) as a satanic presence that seeks to displace God and the churches through social programs, to practice infanticide and euthanasia, to destroy parental control of children, to reward vice and punish virtue, and to thwart America’s divinely appointed destiny as a redeemer nation fighting for Christ against the world’s many infidels.

As an illustration of this phenomenon, it’s worth unpacking a few lines from a recent missive by televangelist James Robison, the convener of two recent meetings of Christian Right leaders in Texas to ponder their role in 2012, and also of a similar session back in 1979 that helped pave the way for Reagan’s conquest of conservative evangelicals. Says Robison:

There are moral absolutes . No person’s failure reduces or redefines the standards carved in stone by the finger of God and revealed in His Word. We must find a way to stop judges and courts from misinterpreting the Constitution and writing their own laws.

“Activist judges” who have developed and applied protections for abortion rights, non-discrimination, and church-state separation have long been a bugaboo for the Christian Right. But Robison appears to be extending this traditional list of evangelical grievances, adding his blessing to the Tea Party’s objection to the string of Supreme Court decisions that enabled the federal government to enact New Deal programs like Social Security that protect people afflicted by personal “failure” from the consequences of their actions.

They have more impact than just trying to deny the civil rights of GLBT, the reproductive rights of women, and the suppression of religious minorities in the US.  They have a global agenda  that is as much of a terrorist movement as any religious extremist movement abroad.  They support governments that believe in not only persecuting but killing GLBT citizens with money and other resources.  They actively support militia’s that kill and maim GLBT citizens and non-believers and work to keep women’s status as property and breeding chattel.

In recent weeks, police have descended on the Harare offices of Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ), seizing the group’s publications and computers as evidence, they claimed, in an ongoing investigation. The police sought to also arrest staff, but the organization’s lawyer has kept them free for now.

The gay rights activist organization is — absurdly — accused of seeking to overthrow President Robert Mugabe’s government and teaching people to commit acts of sodomy.

This police activity underscores the effort of the Mugabe-led ZANU-PF ruling political party to incite anti-LGBT hatred in mobilizing its base for elections next year. Mugabe faces a challenge from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirayi, who recently adopted a pro-LGBT rights position.

In one raid, police forcibly entered GALZ premises and began arresting advocates gathered to discuss the draft constitution under debate. The draft includes anti-gay provisions shaped with help from the US-based Christian right group American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) through its Zimbabwe office. The proposed provisions explicitly prohibit homosexuality and, mimicking American efforts, define marriage as between a man and woman.

Some activists were injured trying to escape over a security fence armed with an electric razor wire. Those caught — 31 men and 13 women — were arrested, bundled into police vehicles, and kept in filthy cells for what GALZ staffer Miles Rutendo remembers as “a night in hell.” Police beat and stomped on the backs of gay rights advocates forced to lie on the wet floor. One victim passed out and was rushed to the hospital.

The physical and mental abuse did not end with their release. In a country where LGBT people suffer brutal harassment, these activists’ sexual preference was exposed to neighbors, families, and workplaces. Their families forced some from their homes. Whether any lose their jobs remains to be seen.

Additional, rallies have been held through out the US that are well within in the boundaries of first amendment free speech rights but definitely fall into the hate speech realm.

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins topped a full day of speakers at “The America for Jesus 2012” prayer rally.

Robertson, a former Republican candidate for president, called the election important, but didn’t mention either major political party or candidate by name.

“I don’t care what the ACLU says or any atheists say. This nation belongs to Jesus, and we’re here today to reclaim his sovereignty,” said Robertson, 82, who founded the Christian Coalition and Christian Broadcasting Network, and ran for president in 1988.

Organizers plan another prayer rally Oct. 20 in Washington, D.C., two weeks before President Barack Obama faces Republican Mitt Romney in the presidential election.

Perkins asked the crowd to pray for elected officials including Obama.

“We pray that his eyes will be open to the truth,” Perkins said.

A number of event organizers, though, have been vocal critics of the Democratic president.

Steve Strang, the influential Pentecostal publisher of Charisma magazine, which was distributed at the rally, recently wrote in a blog post that America is under threat from a “radical homosexual agenda.” He also said Obama “seems to be moving toward some form of European socialism. Speaker Cindy Jacobs has blamed a mysterious Arkansas bird-kill last year on Obama’s repeal of the policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which allows gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military.

Speakers throughout the day condemned abortion, gay marriage and population control as practiced by Planned Parenthood. Christian rock music filled the historic mall as speakers challenged the crowd to overcome the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and slothfulness.

Yup, these are the same folks we’ve been fighting since the 1980s.  It’s going to be a continual fight to keep theocracy out of our state, local, and federal government and to stop the hate-filled agendas of  these religious extremists.

A Fresh Hell: Hyping an Angry Base with Lies

Posted: September 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, religious extremists, right wing hate grouups | Tags: , , | 71 Comments

We’ve seen an incredible amount of lies, distortion, and bigoted memes aimed at the most frustrated and ugly part of the Republican base.  These racist dog whistles (see the am post by BB) have been so bad that I can’t believe that any dog in america has been sleeping.  Ralph Reed’s group has been trotting out its usual set of  over-the-top rhetoric too. The Romney camp is desperate, and desperate angry people do desperate angry things.

A mailer blasted out by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a nonprofit group spending millions of dollars to mobilize evangelical voters this November to help Mitt Romney’s campaign, compares President Barack Obama’s policies to the threat posed by Nazi Germany and Japan during World War II. It also says that Obama has “Communist beliefs.” A copy of this so-called “Voter Registration Confirmation Survey” was obtained by Mother Jones after it was sent to the home of a registered Republican voter.

The Faith and Freedom Coalition is the brainchild of Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition who was once hailed as “the right hand of God” and who is now tasked with getting out the evangelical vote for Romney. In the mid-2000s, Reed was ensnared in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Reed was a longtime friend of Abramoff’s, and he took payments from Abramoff to lobby against certain American Indian casinos. Reed once ran a religious-themed anti-gambling campaign at the behest of an Abramoff-connected Native American tribe to try to prevent another tribe from opening a competitor casino. His current efforts for Romney are something of a political rehabilitation for Reed.

We’ve seen the President of the United States called “foreign”, “not really American”, and deemed an apologist for radical Islamists and communists.  We’ve now got conspiracy theories about his birth, his education, and the mainstream public polls. What positive outcomes can come from hyping up a base that tends to be filled with militia groups, dooms day-oriented religious followers, and old school, KKK-like racists?  What possible outcomes might happen if these groups decide they should save their country from the outrageous stereotypes built around a democratically elected leader? This is a questions explored by Josh Holland at Alternet.

It’s an exceptionally dangerous game that the right-wing media are playing. If Obama wins – and according to polling guru Nate Silver, he’d have a 95 percent chance of doing so if the vote were held today – there’s a very real danger that this spin — combined with other campaign narratives that are popular among the far-right — could create a post-election environment so toxic that it yields an outburst of politically motivated violence.

A strategy that began with a series of rather silly columns comparing 2012 with 1980, and assuring jittery conservatives that a huge mass of independents was sure to break for Romney late and deliver Obama the crushing defeat he so richly deserves, entered new territory with the bizarre belief that all the polls are wrong. And not only wrong, butintentionally rigged by “biased pollsters” – including those at Fox News – in the tank for Obama. (See Alex Pareene’s piece for more on the right’s new theory that the polls are being systematically “skewed.”)

Consider how a loosely-hinged member of the right-wing fringe – an unstable individual among the third of conservative Republicans who believe Obama’s a Muslim or the almost two-thirds who think he was born in another country – expecting a landslide victory for the Republican might process an Obama victory. This is a group that has also been told, again and again, that Democrats engage in widespread voter fraud – that there are legions of undocumented immigrants, dead people and  ineligible felons voting in this election ( with the help of zombie ACORN ). They’ve been told that Democrats are buying the election with promises of “free stuff” offered to the slothful and unproductive half of the population that pays no federal income taxes and refuses to “take responsibility for their lives” – Romney’s 47 percent.

They’ve also been told – by everyone from NRA president Wayne LaPierre to Mitt Romney himself – that Obama plans to ban gun ownership in his second term. (Two elaborate conspiracy theories have blossomed around this point. One holds that Fast and Furious – which, in reality, is much ado about very little – was designed to elevate gun violence to a point where seizing Americans’ firearms would become politically popular. The second holds that a United Nations treaty on small arms transfers (from which the United States has withdrawn) is in fact a stealthy workaround for the Second Amendment.)

And they’ve been warned in grim, often apocalyptic terms of what’s to come in a second term. The film, “2016: Obama’s America,” offers a dystopian vision of a third-world America gutted by Obama’s supposed obsession with global wealth redistribution. His re-election would bring something far worse than mere socialism – it would be marked by Kenyan anti-colonialism, in which America’s wealth is bled off as a form of reparations for centuries of inequities between the global North and South.

We’ve seen undercurrents of this already in the Tea Party Movement.  We’ve also seen actual acts of terrorism–like the bomb found along a parade route in Washington State–that indicate that many elements of the right are taking these things seriously.  We also see that legitimately elected politicians  repeat and spin these same paranoid memes.  Republican Reps Steve King (R-Iowa), Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Allen West (R-Florida), and others have been repeating complete nonsense and legitimizing it by asking for congressional investigations.  The media also gives these folks air time to spew what amounts to tin foil hat hypotheses.  Remember the judge in Texas that was preparing for all out civil war based on an Obama re-election? Read the rest of this entry »

Fundamentalist Religions create a Pit of Suffering for the Rest of Us

Posted: September 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, religious extremists | Tags: , | 54 Comments

At some point in time, man invented the club and GAWD.  The two have been inseparable since then. Women, children and gay and “others’ have been the recipient of the combined force of blunt object and stupidity ever since.

All you have to do is spend a few minutes reading up on the “Values Voter” summit and watching the newscasts of protests at US and Western embassies around the world to realize it really is us against them. It’s those of us that live with two feet solidly in modernity, science, and reason and the people that just can’t seem to give up their extreme religious views. All of them are orgasmic over their pet version of some rabid end time scenario where they get proven right and every one else falls into a big old pit of suffering. They seem hell-bent–excuse the term–to end life as we know it. Frankly, I look at all of them and believe they have made a pit of suffering in this world, they wallow in it, and they intend to bring the rest of us into it.

We have to overcome.

This week the Popes of the Roman Catholic and the Coptic Orthodox Churches, Hillary Clinton, and other world leaders have been on TV trying to get people to calm down. That’s not what religious fundamentalists of all stripes actually want and it’s not going to stop until we separate religious expression that deserves protection from hate speech that provokes violence coming from people who use religion like Rush Limbaugh uses Oxycontin. It’s a display of mental illness and an addiction. Religion is the drug, the psychosis and the root of their angry, ignorant, deviant, and downright mean behavior. It makes me want to use the blinky-flashy thing on people and say there is no such thing as your GAWD to each and every one of them.

So, we’ve covered the embassy attacks this week.  We know it’s a complete mess over there.  Most of the folks over in the MENA region can’t even get a job, food on the  table, and any kind of education.  What’s the excuse of the Values Voters and folks like Paul Ryan and Rick Santorum?

Paul Ryan supposedly has an education and classes in economics.  You really wouldn’t know it from this: “Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan called the Federal Reserve’s latest effort to stimulate the economy “insidious” during a speech to Floridians on Saturday.”  Let me just say this.  Paul Ryan is insidious, insipid, immoral, and inspiring to only the craziest and most stupid of the crazy and stupid. He wants the rest of us to suffer for his ideology and political ambition.  Here’s his speech to the Summit of those who Value Hate and Ignorance.  These are the folks that should be airlifted to Tahrir Square to explain things to their Muslim stupid and crazy counterparts. These are the people that piss off Muslim fundamentalists.  It’s not the rest of us.  These are the people–and the man–who want to take away rights from living breathing women and give them to possibly viable fertilized eggs and even unfertilized eggs. These are the people that deny the humanity of our GLBT brothers and sisters. These are the people that say women ask for rape, call rape just another form of conception, and consider children victimized by incest to be less important than the fathering rights (e.g. property rights) of their attackers.

… nothing undermines the essential and honorable work of government more than the abuse of government power.

In the President’s telling, government is a big, benevolent presence – gently guiding our steps at every turn. In reality, when government enters the picture, private institutions are so often brushed aside with suspicion or even contempt.

This is what happened to the Catholic Church and Catholic Charities this past January, when the new mandates of Obamacare started coming. Never mind your own conscience, they were basically told, from now on you’re going to do things the government’s way.

Ladies and gentlemen, you would be hard pressed to find another group in America that does more to serve the health of women and their babies than the Catholic Church and Catholic Charities. And now, suddenly, we have Obamacare bureaucrats presuming to dictate how they will do it.

As Governor Romney has said, this mandate is not a threat and insult to one religious group – it is a threat and insult to every religious group. He and I are honored to stand with you – people of faith and concerned citizens – in defense of religious liberty.

Yes, nothing says liberty like forced pregnancy, forced & unnecessary vaginal probes, forced compliance with other people’s superstitions about birth control, forced propaganda sessions filled with lies about abortion, and forced death from laws enacted using other people’s religious tripe.   Nothing says liberty like withholding civil rights from people; like civil marriages.  Nothing says liberty like defining porn for every one else and defining the modicum of dress that is dowdy enough to hold back grown men from raping women and children. 

The Values Voters Summit, presented by the Family Research Council, has been bashing President Obama, birth control and homosexuals all week, but here is something they are for: women dressing modestly.

ThinkProgress.org reports that an organization called Modesty Matters, which has a table at the Values Voters Summit in D.C., is passing out flyers admonishing women to cover up, especially in church.

Some of the advice for the ladies includes: “Since men are particularly visual, immodesty in church can trigger lustful thoughts” and “All women, whether married of single, are to model femininity in their various relationships, by exhibiting a distinctive modesty, responsiveness, and gentleness of spirit.”

Another piece of literature says “My men’s bible study group talks frequently about controlling our lust, thoughts, and eyes. Yes the problem and responsibility are ours, but is it really reasonable for the women of the church to make it this difficult for us?”

Modesty Matters was founded by a retired pharmacist from Roanoke, Virginia named J.H. Woolwine.

GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan was one of the speakers at the Values Voters Summit this year, as was Rep. Michele Bachmann and actor Kirk Cameron.

Exactly what is the christian version of a burkha?

When do we begin to run sex segregated buses in our urban areas so as not to offend orthodox jewish men that also appear unable to control their rapacious tendencies?  Notice that the majority of Israelis don’t agree or want this particular little extremist service either.  But, we have to surrender in the war on christmas and they have to acknowledge the prurient urges of guys stuck in the dark ages in the name of ‘religion’. Denying other people rights in the name of religion is not the same as protecting first amendment expression of religion.  It simply cannot be. Otherwise, I could yell Jayzeus says there’s “Fire” in this auditorium and laws wouldn’t apply to me.  It’s not like Simon sez.  Jayzeus said is not a get out of crime free card. Neither is Muhammed said or the Torah said or the Tree over there that tells me to paint myself blue and run amok.

A group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish millionaires is considering funding a private bus line in Israel that would enforce strict segregation between male and female passengers, an Israeli newspaper has reported.

The initiative follows public outrage at an incident where a secular Israeli woman refused to take a seat at the back of a public bus travelling to an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood in Jerusalem at the request of a religious male passenger.

The backers of the proposed project are looking at providing bus transportation in Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) neighbourhoods in Jerusalem, Ashdod and Beit Shemesh as an alternative to Israel’s Egged bus service, which insists that any gender segregation on its buses must be voluntary, Israel’s daily Yediot Aharonot reported yesterday.

“The Haredi public doesn’t own the entire state,” Israel’s Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger was quoted as saying. “I support segregation, but only when it is done willingly. On private lines in which all the passengers are eager for separation, and the dignity of women is maintained, then that is a welcome initiative.”

Israel’s Transport Ministry has yet to respond to the request, and it remains unclear if the initiative will be approved, as Israel’s laws against discrimination demand that any provider of a public service must treat everybody equally, irrespective of gender, religion or ethnicity.

When does the religious bigotry and violent actions of these folks cease being a constitutional expression of religion?  At one point, Southerners were arguing that slavery was just a constitutionally protected expression of their christianity.  They said the same thing about not giving women the right to vote and repealing laws that made married women the property of their husband. They said the same thing about legalizing racially mixed marriages. Mormons argued the same thing whey the refused to give up polygamy. When do the rest of us get to rid ourselves of these backward, barbaric views that hide behind iron age religious practices? When can we take them all, give them iron age weapons, and drop the lot of them in some desert to find the end times on our  terms instead of theirs?

Here’s a Values of Hate Voter speech to think about. Rick Santorum actually confesses that “Smart People Will Never Be On Our Side”.  Hell, yeah!

Former presidential candidate Rick Santorum attacked the media and “smart people” for not being on the side of conservatives in a speech to the Values Voter Summit on Saturday.

“We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country,” Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, told the audience at the Omni Shoreham hotel. “We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”

So true Rick.  Economists that don’t want to be guilty of malpractice will not be on the side of Romney or Ryan.  Doctors that don’t want to be guilty of malpractice will not be on your side either.  Neither will scientists who know that a creation myth is just a creation myth.  This brings me to another fantastic story about how dumb people can be when under the influence of fundamentalist religions. “Creationists Boycott Dr. Pepper over “Evolution of Flavor” Facebook Ad”

Several commenters, however, expressed disapproval of Dr. Pepper — believing, apparently, that the ad showed support for the scientific theory of evolution — and vowing to boycott the product. “I ain’t no freaking chimp. No more Dr Pepper for my household. God Bless y’all,” one user wrote. Another chimed in with, “I have lost all respect for Dr Pepper and if Dr Pepper wants business from thousands of people they will need to apologize.”

As the debate roiled on, pro-evolution commenters expressed their support of the company, vowing to stand by Dr Pepper no matter what. One person, for example, promised he’d continue drinking the soda even “if they announced they pissed in the formula.”

No matter what you believe regarding evolution, creationism, Christianity, Dr. Pepper, unicorns, cyborgs, narwhals or anything else, the campaign was a huge if inadvertent win for the soft drink company. As one Facebook commenter points out, “DR Pepper scored with this one. It’s all over the internet now. The Creationists just made this ad famous. Sweet, sweet irony.”

Yes.  Evolution means that people “evolved from chimps”.  A fertilized egg always implants and becomes a normal human baby.  Women don’t become pregnant in real rapes because of hormones their killer vaginas emit. I guess once you literally believe in Adam and Eve and a Garden of Eden–no matter what the flavor of Abrahamic religion you bought–your mind is susceptible to any old story.  Maybe that’s why Romney and Ryan think they can get away with so much lying. Values voters are gullible ignoramuses.

Here’s Bachmann’s brand of crazy.

“This was an intentional act that was done by radical Islamists who seek to impose their set of beliefs on the rest of the world and we will not stand for it,” Bachmann continued. “No one here is suggesting that all Muslims are radical but we should not be ignorant of the objective reality that there’s a very radical wing of Islam that’s dedicated to the destruction of America, of Israel, and Israel’s allies, and what we’re watching developing before our eyes today are the direct consequences of this administration’s policy of apology and appeasement across the globe.”

“I’m no master war strategist,” she said, but “appeasement doesn’t work.”

Bachmann also accused Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of pushing “enforced Islamic speech codes” in U.S. counterterrorism training materials, and sounded alarms about Egypt’s ruling party, the Muslim Brotherhood, before urging the president to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to stand in solidarity with Israel.

Bachmann, of course, feels its just hunky dory to force her brand of what-ever-it is on us through laws and coercion.  I noticed she didn’t rail on about GLBTs this time.  Perhaps Marcus sashayed away with that page of her speech.

So, Bachmann isn’t aware she’s the American equivalent of bat shit crazy fundamentalist. Here’s some of the company she keeps.

Last night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow called out Paul Ryan for speaking at the Values Voter Summit and lending credibility to the bigotry and pure crazy on display at the conference. Her report provided crucial context on the extremists who are appearing at the conference – something that has been sorely lacking in most media coverage so far.

Maddow paid particular attention to three anti-Muslim activists that we regularly cover – Jerry Boykin, Kamal Saleem and Frank Gaffney. As I said yesterday, the Values Voter Summit is making a mockery of diplomacy and the threat of terrorism by featuring Saleem, who has made a career for himself as a fake former terrorist, and Boykin and Gaffney, who are leading forces behind the Huma Abedin smear and helped spark anti-American protests in Egypt.

It’s time we start treating some of this as something other than ‘religion’.  Here’s some up-and-comers and their agenda of hate from Salon. I’ve just put number one here.

Mat Staver is the  fiercely anti-gay chairman of the Liberty Counsel and dean of the Liberty University Law School, which are both connected to the late Jerry Falwell. Staver has accused the Obama administration of running an “affirmative action” program to get Muslims into top national security positions, thus helping the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrate the top levels of the U.S. government. He’s also argued that the Obama administration has been pushing “in-your-face forced abortion funding, in-your-face forced homosexuality,” and that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which protects gays and lesbians in the workplace, “will put individuals at risk and ultimately result in significant damage and even death of some individuals.”

You just have to wonder what rock these people crawled out from and how human evolution left them so far behind.

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