Salt City Sinner

posted 8/17/2012 by the Salt City Sinner For the first time in the history of this blog I would like to reproduce, in its (almost) entirety, an essay. Thomas Frank, "Compromising Positions:" Let us review. Barack Obama, who was lifted to the presidency four years ago on a great wave of progressive fantasy, likes to say that hte national budget is like a family budget: that when times are tough, government has to tighten its belt. This is a Republican simile of very long standing, and the president is a Democrat. He is in fact the leader of the party that is supposed to believe in deficit spending during hard times. Yet Obama has enthusiastically adopted the belt-tightening trope, and all the terrible ideas that go with it.  Another thing the president likes to say - or liked to say, back in the days when his administration was new and "hope" hadn't started to stink yet was that "we should be looking forward and not backwards." More recently, h...

The "reproductive rights" debate, which is a sort of catch-all phrase for smaller, more complex and awful debates surrounding issues of public health, contraception, religious belief, and abortion, is one that I honestly hoped had been, to some extent, shelved. Much like the Democrats wisely abandoned the gun control debate in the 00's, it seemed - for a little while, recently - that Republicans had come to the same conclusion: public opinion had more or less gelled around a fairly non-controversial compromise on the issue, and they should just shut up. Not so! From a bombastic radio host who stuck his fat foot in a big bucket of shit on the issue recently to the resurgence of a Republican primary contender who almost justifies Markos Moulitsas' unforgivable "American Taliban" book - the culture war is alive again! One of the most instructive, horrible, and anti-woman laws imaginable passed in (where else) Texas recently (from a debate over the issue by t...

Joseph Farah's World Net Daily , a clearinghouse of unhinged wingnut lunacy and a website that's about as far to the right as you can go before you hit Stormfront country, posted a re-hash of a recent CNN poll today, and got kind of...creative...with what them liberal elites call the "mathemagics." In a post titled CNN's bad news for Obama: 6 of 10 doubt U.S. birth story , the brain trust at WND dusted off Glenn Beck's chalkboard, started scribbling away, and came up with the following : [CNN's poll] question was: "Do you think Barack Obama was definitely born in the United States, probably born in the United States, probably born in another country, or definitely born in another country?" Definitely in the United States got the vote from 42 percent of the respondents, and probably in the United States another 29 percent. But that leaves almost 6 of 10 Americans uncertain about the president's birth – and therefore his eligibility under the...

OK - first off, I *hate* the militia movement : On Monday, nine members of a Christian terrorist militant group were arraigned and charged by a grand jury with conspiring to attack and kill police officers including those attending a funeral in an attempt to expand their war against the group’s enemy, namely the United States... The group, Hutaree, consists of several members in several states, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. The members were planning to kill a police officer, and then when other officers attended the funeral, they planned to detonate IED devices to kill police officers in attendance of the service. FBI officials stated that the attacks were being planned by the group to occur some time in April. Hey, assholes! My cousin just got back from Afghanistan where he led a counter-IED team. Way to give him a warm welcome home by trying to encourage a second "War of Yankee Aggression," you illiterate, rancid bastards. You can join Fred Phelps and enjoy a special place i...

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 .

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,...

It turns out that James O'Keefe, the goon who was arrested yesterday for allegedly attempting to wiretap Senator Mary Landrieu's phones, was scheduled to speak at a Salt Lake County Republican fundraiser. From the Trib : Salt Lake County Republicans are scrambling to line up a new keynote fundraising speaker after the arrest Tuesday of their scheduled first choice, filmmaker James O'Keefe, on charges of attempting to tamper with the phone system of a U.S. senator. "The allegations and arrest today certainly change our plans," county GOP Chairman Thomas Wright said in a telephone interview with The Tribune. "We'll be announcing a new speaker shortly." As of Tuesday night, the party's Web site, slcogop.com, still advertised O'Keefe as the guest speaker for the Feb. 4 Lincoln Day Dinner. His topic was to be "his national exposé of ACORN's unethical behavior, his changes in Congress and [how he will] inspire our Party's passion for ...

From NOLA.com : Alleging a plot to tamper with phones in Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in downtown New Orleans, the FBI arrested four people Monday, including James O'Keefe, 25, a conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos at ACORN field offices severely damaged the advocacy group's credibility. Also arrested were Joseph Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan, all 24. Flanagan is the son of William Flanagan, who is the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, the office confirmed. All four were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony. O'Keefe's previous hijinks were quite a hit in the conservative community, and managed to bring down a storm of opprobrium upon ACORN. Here's hoping that Mr. O'Keefe has now learned that there is a boundary between hilarious right-wing pranks and felonies. Then again, what's a felony or two between ...

...but then again they owned slaves. Following up on my last post ; today the NY Times expands on the type of vile, unspeakably evil bullshit that Jason "Jackboot" Mitchell apparently supports: Human rights advocates in Uganda say the visit by the three Americans helped set in motion what could be a very dangerous cycle. Gay Ugandans already describe a world of beatings, blackmail, death threats like “Die Sodomite!” scrawled on their homes, constant harassment and even so-called correctional rape . “Now we really have to go undercover,” said Stosh Mugisha, a gay rights activist who said she was pinned down in a guava orchard and raped by a farmhand who wanted to cure her of her attraction to girls. She said that she was impregnated and infected with H.I.V. , but that her grandmother’s reaction was simply, “ ‘You are too stubborn.’ ” "Correctional rape," ladies and gentlemen. This is the cause that Jackboot Mitchell and his ilk have decided to throw their lot in wi...

There's very little I find more fascinating than the good people at WorldNetDaily . WND is a website so right-wing that it makes Glenn Beck sound like Terry Gross . To get any further right or any more nationalistic, you have to pretty much start looking through the remainders bin for white supremacist or overtly Nazi sites, and I prefer not to go there. WND is worth giving a perusal every so often, however: when they aren't promulgating ridiculous conspiracy theories that have even fellow travellers in the wingnut community calling them out , they feature a colorful refugee camp of pundits that can be highly entertaining. If you're such a nut that Fox usually won't touch you with a ten foot pole (let alone, god forbid, the liberal media), WND has a place for you. A place right next to Chuck Norris ! One such refugee is Jason "Molotov" Mitchell, a loathesome little moron who produces a series of low-tech video rants for WND (where have I seen that font befor...

"Liberal Media" update: CSPAN's Book TV gave Jerome "Lying Piece of Shit" Corsi a whole segment to lie about his lying book in late October. These WND nuts are the scum of the earth . If you need to know how repulsive Corsi is, well, here's a link . The HuffPo has more on how Corsi is a shameless liar and his article is total trash (par for the course with Jerome "Swift Boat" Corsi).

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Anne "14:58/15:00 of Fame" Coulter, describing the infamous Willie Horton ad from 1988 as "...The most devastatingly relevant campaign commercial in all of American history" makes the remarkable claim that "...The Bush campaign commercial about Dukakis' furlough program never showed a picture of Horton ." (Emphasis hers) That's strange, because if I remember correctly:

The lunatic fringe at WorldNetDaily (the site that, more than almost any other, has been carrying the Birther torch for quite some time now) put up a pretty sad little attempt at justifying right-wing consternation over President Obama's pretty bland, middle-of-the-road speech to America's youngsters today about the virtues of working hard and staying in school. This is a topic that is so "Golly, Mr. President!" that previous Republican presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan both felt moved to flog it in national addresses as well. Full disclosure; the Democrats at the time, moved by a similar sense of high moral dudgeon stretched to idiotic lenghts, acted like asses. Note: most of this hysteria was generated before the full text of Obama's speech was even posted, so it can be viewed as a case of shooting first and then asking questions - if questions were going to be asked by the right at all. In the case of WND's article, they've pretty much avo...

Insipid wingnut Matthew Vadum managed to excrete a particularly vile little piece at the American Spectator today, entitled " Obama's Plan to Desecrate 9/11 " (no, really, go ahead and have a look - I'll wait). In part, it reads: On the Aug. 11 call, Yearwood and other leaders kept saying repeatedly that they wanted 9/11 to be used for something "positive," "forward-leaning," and "productive," said a source with knowledge of the teleconference. The plan is to turn a "day of fear" that helps Republicans into a day of activism called the National Day of Service that helps the left. In other words, nihilistic liberals are planning to drain 9/11 of all meaning. And how are nihilistic liberals planning to drain 9/11 of all meaning? [Author's note: even in the midst of the lunacy coming out of the right these days, it stone cold blows my freaking mind that I typed that sentence quoting, in full and in context, a conservative who...

(I decided this deserved it's own entry)