Salt City Sinner

Jon Stewart's take on Beck is pretty spot on in my opinion: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Rage Within the Machine - Progressivism www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Vancouverage 2010 One other thing - it's worth noting that one of CPAC's sponsors this year was the John Birch Society , a pre-paleoconservative organization that St. Buckley drove from the island of conservatism in the 1950s (arguably, that's the only reason that conservatives in the U.S. managed to mainstream their platform). David Weigel, in a great interview on Terry Gross' Fresh Air, described a brief exchange with David Frum in which Frum said that "the best you can say about Beck is that he has taken hard-money crankery away from the anti-Semites." Yikes.

What a week (and only Tuesday so far)! Wonkette sums it up best: So, this week the wingtards are furious about a) Scott Brown voting for some tax breaks for companies that hire American workers, b) Glenn Beck being too liberal *, and c) a wingnut blog not calling for a homosexual holocaust. Carry on, freedom fighters! 2010 is going to be a weird one. * - It's worth noting that this isn't the first time Beck has been called out by WND for not being enough of a wingnut. He has been more or less on WND's black list since he refused to jump on board the birther wagon - apparently the one thing that Andrew Breitbart and Glenn Beck have learned that Joseph Farah hasn't is that all this birth certificate stuff is very damaging to the conservative cause, because it makes you look freaking crazy .

Well, this ought to be interesting. FreedomWorks (AKA " Team Astrotuf ") has endorsed one of Bob Bennett's challengers in the Republican primary, one Mike Lee . Via Marc Armbinder : The effort to oust Republican Sen. Bob Bennett (UT) in 2010 is gelling, a bit: the Dick Armey-led activist group FreedomWorks endorsed conservative candidate Mike Lee today at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC. This comes after the Club for Growth announced Jan.8 that it would oppose Bennett, while declining to endorse any of his potential challengers specifically... The semblance of unity here between FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth is significant: the Club for Growth injects millions into campaigns every cycle to back pro-business conservative candidates, while FreedomWorks tries to rouse grassroots activist support. They're ideologically similar: fiscal conservative, pro-business, small-government, and Ayn Randish. FreedomWorks has cultivated a close re...

Jesus god, can we get a pass on the tri-corner hats and "B-B-BUT OUR FOUNDING FATHERS!!!" nonsense already? It's hard to have a serious conversation about political theory or policy with people who seem hell-bent on merging remedial revisionist history and renaissance faire every time they go out in public : The ceremony was moved into a small building set apart from the main house. Inside, a George Washington impersonator, James Manship, made the rounds as conservative activists shook hands and caught up with one another...Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America led the audience in a prayer, asking God to “equip us and guide us as we strive to advance constitutional principles.” And the ceremony kept that high level of pomp... Heritage Foundation president Ed Fuelner was given the task of reading out the statement, word for word. As he did so, Manship — the George Washington impersonator — nodded at key phrases like “tyrants and despots everywhere.” Via the invaluabl...

Okay - the furor over Sarah Palin's use of crudely scribbled notes on her palm : ...would be silly if she hadn't followed the right-wing script of leaping down Obama's throat for his use of a TelePrompTer every time she was given the shadow of an opportunity. I think Joan Walsh pretty much hit the nail on the head when it comes to summarizing the tone of Palin's Tea Party speech (and, frankly, her whole Nuremberg Junior approach to politics in general): I know journalists aren't supposed to use words like mean and dumb, but I can't help it. Palin is one of the meanest people on the public stage today. She wallows in it. She loves it! Also? Possibly one of the dumbest. But mean works, and so does dumb. And so do lies, and there were many mean, dumb lies in her speech. Dave Weigel* also noted Palin's tone: “How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?” said Palin, paraphrasing a slogan made popular on Tea Party t-shirts.” She mocked the stimulus packag...

David Neiwart introduces/hosts a four-part takedown of one of the worst political books of the last five years, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism : It has now been just a little over two years since the release of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Despite its provocative title and thesis – and particularly its open challenge to the established historical assessment of the nature of fascism among academics – it was greeted largely with silence among those academic historians and political scientists. Few spoke out, as Roger Griffin suggests, because they recognized that Goldberg’s book was more of an exercise in polemics than a historical work, and as such not really appropriate for academic consideration. Its use of history was so shoddy and propagandistic, and its claims so frankly absurd, that very few of them considered it worth taking seriously... One of the more striking aspects of Goldberg’s...

Good lord. The Tea Party convention in Nashville has been getting a lot of press regarding a series of intra-movement spats, but now that the whole rickety structure is off the ground and lurching awkwardly onward in search of glory, it has become apparent how bat-shit crazy these people are. Via the LA Times : If the National Tea Party Convention hoped to keep its focus on political organizing and its message on limited government, it has had little success so far. Capping the first full day of the meeting, right-wing instigator Joseph Farah spent much of his dinner speech questioning whether President Obama was born in Hawaii and casting doubt on whether the president was legitimately elected. “The media, the politicians … all say, no, it’s all been settled. I say, if it’s been settled show us the birth certificate. Simple,” Farah’s said, as his remarks were cheered by the roughly 600 activists gathered in Nashville for the event. Farah runs WorldNetDaily.com, a conservative tabloid,...

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