Pill-Popping Child Molester Listened to Yet Again
"As far as the media's concerned, Mrs. Obama deserves this. Look at the sordid past. Look at our slave past, look at the discriminatory past. It's only fair that people of color get their taste of the wealth of America too." - Unofficial Viagra pitchman Rush Limbaugh on Friday, sneering as he said it.

Can we please, once and for all, laugh Rush Limbaugh out of the public discourse for being the embarrassing racist fuck that he is? Because he thinks any perceived advantage that African Americans, even the First Lady, get from the media or anywhere else is a result of the Affirmative Action that Limbaugh loathes for its "discrimination" toward his downtrodden Aryan brothers and sisters.

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Ten Medical Aid Workers Murdered by Taliban in Afghanistan
It's creepy when life imitates art. It's even creepier when it's the Sylvester Stallone movie, John Rambo, the fourth installment of the First Blood series. In that movie, humanitarian aid workers and doctors were slaughtered and held hostage by thugs in Myanmar.

This time around, ten aid workers were killed by Taliban militants who have already taken responsibility, claiming they killed the aid workers for spying for us and preaching Christianity, charges even the Taliban can't be stupid enough to believe.

It'll be interesting to see how Time treats this in their next issue, perhaps wondering aloud if this will happen if we leave Afghanistan. (Editor's note to Time's editors: Hey, assholes. We've been there for the last 9 years and the Taliban is doing this at will. Why do you think Karzai is negotiating with the Taliban and inviting them to run for public office? Because he's long since given up on any American solution.)

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Republican Named After Lizard Leaves Comments Open After Hypocritical Post About Marriage
According to adulterer Newt Gingrich, marriage ought to be between a man and a woman. One man, one woman... at a time.

Suck my dick, Newt, and make it sloppy this time. Easy on the backstroke, too.

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US Loses 131,000 Jobs Last Month
...because the federal government laid off all those census workers (maybe we can put them back to work counting all of Rush Limbaugh's, Newt Gingrich's and Rudy Giuliani's ex wives). But the Obama administration will, instead crow about the 71,000 jobs added to the private sector... which is exactly half what the government's "experts" predicted.

Meanwhile, chocolate rations will be increased by 40 20 10 grams next month. Doubleplusgood!

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Republican Whackjob Mr. Rogers Advocates Executing, Soldier, Wikileaks Founder
Well, the article specifies only Julian Assange, not the Army private arrested for leaking the documents to Assange. Congressman Rogers says that Pvt. Manning aided the enemy by leaking those documents to Julian Assange.

But considering the stunning comeback of the Taliban these past few years, I don't think they needed any help from a previously obscure private. I think we ought to execute every Congressman for appropriating tens of billions more for Obama's inherited little war considering that God knows how much of it will wind up in the pockets of the Taliban and tribal warlords we're bribing for not killing us.

But that's just me...

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Reservoir Dogs at BP to Tempt Fate, to Drill in Same Spot
"But... but... there's oil and gas down there! The money. Dear God, the money to be made!" BP says.

Well, yeah, we allowed them to drill without taking the proper safety protocols and without presenting an oil spill plan that didn't sound like something out of Saturday Night Live and they completely Katrina'd the Gulf coast for the next generation. So what makes them think it'll happen again?

Sometimes it seems that America's national pastime is mocking show tunes. Everyone loves to mock the idea of people on a stage bursting into song for no reason at all. Of course what we think of as "show tunes" today are, at their best, the successors of Tin Pan Alley songs with names like "The Little Good for Nothing's Good for Something After All", and the mythical song that the New Lost City Ramblers once threatened to sing, "I'm So Miserable Without You (It's Almost Like Having You Here". But scratch the surface of any of the pop songs that lodge in your head for days, and you'll find the influence of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. No more unlikely a candidate for such influence is Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, who freely admits to hearing, and singing, a lot of show tunes as a kid. Armstrong isn't exactly possessed of the greatest voice in the world, and wasn't even at 15, when he sang in a Christmas show:

But how many people would ever dream that someone who rose to fame singing about getting high and masturbation would have even been caught dead doing such a thing? When "American Idiot" came to Broadway, it seemed shocking, unless you knew about who Armstrong's influences were.

An even less likely aficionado of show tunes is snarky Seth MacFarlane, the creator of the most twisted animated show in the history of television, Family Guy. It hardly seems likely that the same mind that created the initially homicidal but now only cynical baby Stewie, the idiotic, repulsive, id-driven Peter Griffin, a dog that's the only intelligent creature in the house, and the date-rapist Glenn Quagmire, apparently saw all that as a stepping stone to his real love -- the American songbook:

Seth MacFarlane, below, the pop-cultural polymath who created and provides many of the voices on the Fox animated comedy “Family Guy,” will be lending his pipes to an album of 1940s and ’50s-era show tunes for Universal Republic Records, the label said on Friday. The album, which will be produced and arranged by Joel McNeely (whose credits include Mr. MacFarlane’s series “American Dad”) will include standards by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Lerner and Loewe, as well as a song called “She’s Wonderful, Too” that Mr. McNeely wrote for the television show “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.” Universal Republic said in a news release that Mr. MacFarlane would sing to the accompaniment of a live orchestra and a big band, using vintage equipment and analog tape to replicate the sound of classic records by artists like Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Rosemary Clooney.

It seems ridiculous, sort of like an album of Pee Wee Herman singing selected numbers from Der Rosenkavalier -- unless you've ever heard MacFarlane actually sing.

Here's MacFarlane as both Brian the dog and Stewie at the 2007 Emmy Awards. The song is an adaptation of the hilarious "The Freakin' FCC", by the incomparable Walter Murphy:

...and MacFarlane as "Peter Griffin" with "Lois" voice actor Alex Borstein on Jimmy Kimmel in another Murphy masterpiece:

So these are all songs in the Family Guy vein. But if you are still thinking that this is just a vanity project by someone with enough money to buy himself a record contract, take a gander at MacFarlane singing "I Like Myself" from MGM's It's Always Fair Weather" (music by André Previn, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green):

...or "You're Sensational" from High Society:

If you, like me, watch Family Guy for the music (and I'm sure there are one or two of you out there who do), you know that this project was out there waiting for someone to do it. Because some guys, like the reluctant bridegroom in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, would rather....just....sing!

Labels: music, pop culture, Seth McFarlane, You can't make this shit up

"The court now determines that Blankenhorn's testimony constitutes inadmissible opinion testimony that should be given essentially no weight. Blankenhorn lacks the qualifications to offer opinion testimony and, in any event, failed to provide cogent testimony in support of proponents' factual assertions." - Judge Vaughn Walker

In the wake of Prop 8's dismissal and gay marriage being legal in California again, one has to ask two questions: What was the big fuss all about and what took so long?

Proposition 8 was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution. The California State government did not defend Proposition 8 and its proponents, after having spent millions of dollars to ram Prop 8 into law, produced only two witnesses, one of them being David Blankenhorn, a lying, factually-crippled, fundamentalist baboon who was so spectacularly awful on the stand that Judge Vaughn Walker singled him out time and again in his ruling for special condemnation.

The defendants were so comically inept in proving their case that one is amazed and outraged that the trial ate up over a year and who knows how many millions of dollars that California couldn't afford to spend.


This is Blankenhorn advancing his personal values that, for over a year and a half, overturned state law and denied countless tens of thousands of gay people from getting married in California.

So, yes, a rational person must conclude it's a very good thing that gay marriage is now legal in California again and Prop H8's supporters have been sent packing and gotten their uptight asses kicked up and down Electric Avenue. But how could a faction so bereft of facts and expert testimony expunge from the books and keep off the books a law that essentially grants same sex couples the same marriage rights as heterosexuals?

Meanwhile, at the other table, the other guys produced psychologists, sociologists, historians, economists and other expert witnesses that conclusively proved to the court that, not only does gay marriage not endanger so-called traditional marriage but it can even benefit California's troubled economy. They proved that biological and adopted children can thrive in a family with same-sex parents.

Things any married gay couple with kids innately knows through experience and could've told us in far fewer words and for free.

Yet this took over a year to prove against a tidal wave of ignorant prejudice and ossified religious dogma. Where were the Mormons? Where were the money men? Where were all the fundies and Republicans who used to think this was the moral equivalent of Armageddon? And why aren't they raising a bigger fuss over their greatest victory being snatched and shoved back down the throat of defeat?

I read the entire 136 page ruling last night (not as imposing as it seems, once you close the gaps and remove the useless annotations in the document it's actually closer to 60 pages). And it struck me that, with a little bit of imagination, one can picture Judge Walker privately pinching the bridge of his nose and shaking his head at the lunacy he had to listen to for well over a year.

It brought to my mind the legendary battle between Drummond and Brady in Inherit the Wind, the film version of Jerome Lawrence's and Robert E. Lee's masterpiece. Inherit the Wind was actually a commentary on the McCarthy witch hunts of the early 50's but used as its backdrop the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 and the battle between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, the preeminent fundie windbag of his day.

On many occasions, Judge Walker had to point out that not only was the defense unprepared, they even contradicted themselves numerous times (such as admitting that gays and lesbians are subject to discrimination that is determined by political power).

The day after Prop H8 was ceremoniously tossed out, the Mexican Supreme Court upheld gay marriage in Mexico City. This in itself comes just three weeks after Argentina became the first Latin American country to legalize same-sex marriage.

It would be easy to pronounce the fundies down on one knee and to predict they will not be on their feet again by the end of the ten count.

But reconsider how long it took the LGBT community to get gay marriage in even one state and how easily the fundies were able to battle the California courts for well over a year armed with nothing but dogma, ignorance and bigotry. John Scopes and Clarence Darrow lost against a tide of religious fundamentalism and Scopes was later exonerated but on a technicality.

Today as then, we still have to battle against religious fundamentalists who insist that the so-called word of God trumps all human knowledge and hard, peer-reviewed science. We need to disinherit these windbags from the continuing evolution of the human race, to be able to completely disregard them as long as they insist on subtracting from the store of human knowledge and even to discriminate against their fellow humans in their quest for moral "purity."

But I don't see that happening any time soon.

(By American Zen’s Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

“We’re killing children, we’re killing women, we’re killing innocent people.… Do we have the right here in the United States to say we are going to kill tens of thousands of people, make millions of people, as we have, refugees, kill women and children as we have?… We must feel it when we use Napalm or a village is destroyed and civilians are killed.” – Senator Robert F. Kennedy on US involvement in Vietnam, 1968

“A poem is a pheasant,” was how Wallace Stevens once defined poetry. Anyone who’s ever made note of or (like Dick Cheney, when he wasn’t shooting senior citizens in the face) hunted the pheasant know that the quail is an easily-startled bird. Wallace’s point was that if you abruptly come charging at a poem instead of sneaking up behind it, the poem’s meaning will flee.

The same can be said of the American people.

Now, we don’t like to think of ourselves as either physical or moral cowards. After all, our grandfathers and great grandfathers willingly jumped into the meat grinder known as Normandy on D Day and, before that, battled to keep the nation together at Gettysburg, Antietam and both bloody Battles of Bull Run. We dropped our plows and pens and fought almost 100 years before that to establish our independence from the tyrannical and seemingly invincible British.

But we’re also the same people, Reeboked and moussed palimpsests of our heroic forebears, who ran to the supermarket in our SUV’s and, inexplicably, gorged ourselves on duct tape and jugged spring water right before Y2K because very serious and trusted people told us to without explaining how duct tape or jugged water would counteract the effects of our computers’ time stamps going back to 1900.

A year or two later, when the Bush/Cheney administration cynically used 9/11 to take away our constitutional protections by way of rewarding us with unconditional and full-throated support, those same protections fought for and died for by those same heroic ancestors, we allowed these bastard sons of Adams and Jefferson to contort our thinking and even our belief and value systems so that indefinitely taking away those civil liberties was a good tradeoff for a little bit of safety.

Who cared if national security was never actually increased, and even weakened, as a result?

So, yes, we are a nation not of laws or even of men but pheasants: Easily-startled animals insufficiently removed from the animal kingdom as to be immune from the herd mentality seen every day on the midwestern plains and in the stockyards.

Those who do not fit the definition of pheasant can usually be classified as peasants too depressed and despairing to be frightened. This is what the right wing has reduced us to, true, but much of the blame can be laid like a dead wreath at the mausoleum door of what used to be liberalism. And what had survived of liberalism’s very likely final decline is sounding more and more like the right wing, the last chapter of Orwell’s Animal Farm coming true before our very eyes, in real time and beamed into our living rooms, sponsored by BP (“We’ll Make it Right!” they promise us in banner ads at the top of so-called liberal blogs whose proprietors apparently can afford to abandon their own moral belief system in their pursuit of bandwidth revenue).

A cursory look through some bylines just from the last few days tells or asks us what’s going on: How things have either remained static or gotten worse under Obama than under Bush II. But, in the case of the author of a grimly fascinating article entitled, “The American Left and the WikiLeaks Documents”, David Walsh asks how we can be so competently and calmly led astray by some of our most trusted liberal voices, particularly The Nation magazine.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is today living the life of David Kimble because he and his site refuse to accept the lies and heavily redacted documents dribbled to us by our government from time to time through a gutted FOIA and making these truths, as our forebears once wrote, self-evident.

Assange has been turned into the real-life fugitive for committing the unforgivable act of ripping off the humanitarian mask the last two administrations have put on our two wars and showing us the true face of our attitude toward the people we’re told we’re liberating. Thanks to Assange, we were given indelible, incontrovertible proof of how much contempt we feel for the Iraqi people and in our own voices speaking our own words. Thanks to Assange and his latest, 92,000 page scoop, we now know the true limitations of COIN in Afghanistan that, one would think, was already made self-evident by Rolling Stone’s landmark article on Gen. Stanley McCrystal and his team. But it isn’t just the Republicans who want to hunt him down like a rabid dog but the Democrats, too. The truth is, literally, samizdat.

I’m a Stranger Here, Myself
We the pheasants of the Disunited States of America, a massive herd of upholstered buffalo living in constant fear of the nonexistent bow, arrow and spear, are also a people who have to be beaten over the head with the cudgel of truths that alert us to the true danger. While we cowered from anyone who even looked Middle Eastern and smelled of falafel, no one told us about the dangers the PNAC neocons represented. While we reviled the working poor and medically uninsured, we let self-dealing HMOs essentially write their own health care bill just as we let the banks and other lenders write their own self-dealing bankruptcy bill five years ago while we reviled the bankrupt.

While we spat at ACORN we completely forgot about the Andrew Breitbarts and James O’Keefes of the world and the Republican money men behind them. While we publicly pilloried the dispossessed as they were being evicted from their own homes, we conveniently forgot about the lenders and their pie-in-the-sky promises of low-risk loans until we found out we had to bail them out.

While we sneered not at Andrew Breitbart but at Dan Rather, we forgot about the Republican douchebags who funded the Swiftboat Veterans and suddenly George W. Bush’s spotty military record was more commendable than John Kerry’s well-documented one.

While we’re conditioned to snarl on cue at Hamas or the nuclear warhead-coveting Mamoud Ahmedinejad, we keep giving one free pass after another to the terrorist state of Israel and don’t seem to care that we’re paying them $3 billion every year to kill innocent Arabs, as if Israel is the only nation in the Middle East entitled to defend itself.

And while the entire government dumped on Shirley Sherrod without stopping to consider the source of the easily-debunkable rumors of her racism, we let the Winston Smiths of Fox “News” and, once again, Andrew Breitbart and his band of not-so-merry pranksters alter the face of our government (which is to say made it a bit whiter). While we hurl invectives at illegal immigrants who only wanted to work for meager wages, we tend to forget about the reason why they come here: Unscrupulous produce companies who’ve come to depend on that cheap, sub-minimum wage labor to harvest their crops for even larger corporations. We all too easily forget that these immigrants who will now be rounded up en masse under a nakedly fascist, extra-legal law known as SB 1070 will be making Arizona courts and CCA, the private prison corporation that’s enjoying bigger profits under Obama than they ever did under Bush, very wealthy.

We are a stupid, stupid, easily misdirected people who start at mice while remaining blissfully unaware of the elephant charging us from behind. And a viable liberal movement could’ve worked wonders in preventing this from happening. Martin Luther King would’ve set us straight on Van Jones, ACORN and Shirley Sherrod. Bobby Kennedy would’ve set us straight on Iraq and Afghanistan. But they’re long dead and the liberal movement, like Hamlet at Ophelia’s funeral, jumped in the grave with them.

Now, right wing mouth-breathers like David Horowitz and other conservatives in a perpetual state of mental spasm are no longer the bad guys: It’s university professors who are likened, not by Horowitz but so-called liberals, to the welfare queens we were taught to revile by our genially mean-spirited Dutch Uncle Ronald Reagan.

Now that Iraq is literally a Seven Year Itch, we’re smoothly informed by Obama that things are going along right on the schedule that had been denied both us and Iraq for nearly six years under Bush. And hardly anyone, not even those passing themselves off as liberals, are stopping to ask aloud, “But why did we invade Iraq, in the first place?” If Iraq and Afghanistan have produced some tangible results, it will be all worthwhile. And if I threw a hand grenade into a china shop, I’m sure the owner would be overjoyed that I hung up a couple pieces of dry wall and slapped some wallpaper over it.

But evil is still evil no matter its IQ. We couldn’t quite bring ourselves to fully embrace the reality that Bush was evil because he was a bumbling, inarticulate intellectual anorexic. We can believe even less that Obama’s policies are evil because, darn it, he’s so glib, intelligent and good-looking. In fact, the only true face of evil we’ve known these past ten years was Dick Cheney’s snarling puss but, officially speaking, Cheney wasn’t the President.

And the really bad news is, not only has liberalism been shifted to the right as only Joe Overton’s window can do it, we’re already so disgusted by this Bowdlerization of liberalism that we’re poised to give conservatism another chance. Liberalism, true liberalism and not its anemic cousin Progressivism, has become a forgotten utility player deep in the shadows of the dugout. We’re giving up on it before many of us in our lifetimes have had a chance to see it fully extend itself in the batter’s box.

And Obama is proving to be almost as much of a boon to the morally and intellectually overdrawn GOP as Bush was to the equally bankrupt Democrats. Too many of us still let Obama represent the so-called progressives and (pardon me while I snicker) liberals on the Hill rather than see him for what he is: A wet-legged centrist more prone to fire a competent official than incur right wing wrath. Liberalism had not failed us: Obama had.

But then there’s the sophomore jinx, the almost invariable rule that a first term president’s party will lose their majority in the House in the first midterm after his election. And I’m all for voting literally 99% of these Democrats out, provided we can find true liberals and progressives with which to replace them. But we’ve yet to learn that, since the 60’s, the Republican Party never has the answers nor the solutions for what ails this nation, especially the latter day GOP.

The Republican Party has made pheasants and peasants out of all of us and all we do is hold out our empty bowls and timidly ask, “Please, sir, may I have another?” And when the response comes, the liberals will be right behind the conservatives in the cruel chorus of laughter.

And he understands what the founding documents mean a lot better than any teabagger:

We have come here to Governors Island to stand where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted. We've come here to see the inspiring symbol of liberty that, more than 250 years later, would greet millions of immigrants in the harbor, and we come here to state as strongly as ever - this is the freest City in the world. That's what makes New York special and different and strong.

Our doors are open to everyone - everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants, and it is sustained by immigrants - by people from more than a hundred different countries speaking more than two hundred different languages and professing every faith. And whether your parents were born here, or you came yesterday, you are a New Yorker.

We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That's life and it's part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.

On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn't want us to enjoy the freedom to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams and to live our own lives.

[snip]

This morning, the City's Landmark Preservation Commission unanimously voted not to extend landmark status to the building on Park Place where the mosque and community center are planned. The decision was based solely on the fact that there was little architectural significance to the building. But with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building. The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship.

The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right - and if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question - should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions, or favor one over another.

The World Trade Center Site will forever hold a special place in our City, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves - and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans - if we said 'no' to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.

Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values - and play into our enemies' hands - if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists - and we should not stand for that.

For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime - as important a test - and it is critically important that we get it right.

On September 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked 'What God do you pray to?' 'What beliefs do you hold?'

The attack was an act of war - and our first responders defended not only our City but also our country and our Constitution. We do not honor their lives by denying the very Constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights - and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.

Of course, it is fair to ask the organizers of the mosque to show some special sensitivity to the situation - and in fact, their plan envisions reaching beyond their walls and building an interfaith community. By doing so, it is my hope that the mosque will help to bring our City even closer together and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any way consistent with Islam. Muslims are as much a part of our City and our country as the people of any faith and they are as welcome to worship in Lower Manhattan as any other group. In fact, they have been worshiping at the site for the better part of a year, as is their right.

The local community board in Lower Manhattan voted overwhelming to support the proposal and if it moves forward, I expect the community center and mosque will add to the life and vitality of the neighborhood and the entire City.

Bloomberg is exactly right, and as a Jewish man and New Yorker, he is also qualified to let his reptilian brain speak for both himself and his policies. He chooses not to, because he, like many of us, including many New Yorkers, chooses to NOT allow the reptilian part of his brain control his reactions, and more importantly, to control policy.

Right after the 9/11 attacks, there were very few American who didn't support the invasion of Afghanistan. I did. When someone attacks your country, just as when someone attacks YOU, you fight back. (Democrats in Washington seem not to have learned this.) Where George Bush started to lose Americans was when he for some reason allowed Osama Bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora, largely abandoned Afghanistan, and instead chose to focus on a relatively secular Middle Eastern nation that had nothing to do with the attacks and did nothing to us. Had Bush succeeded with the stated mission in Afghanistan, EVERYONE would have rallied around him -- even me. However, the definition of "success" over the years has become ever more muddied. What is "winning"? Is it an equal civilian body count? We've long since passed that.

Today the majority lacks enthusiasm for the Afghanistan effort. No doubt there are those who would continue to support it if the president were a white male with an Anglo-Saxon-sounding name, and those for whom the idea of "success" would be turning the entire Islamic Middle East into a sheet of glass. But for the most part, it's because it's no longer clear what we are trying to do. The hatred and the immediacy of the need for revenge has, as it should, ameliorated with the passage of time -- except when it can still be used as a cudgel for cheap political gain.

Especially in an election year, to have a controversy like this brewing that largely succeeds in once again appealing to the reptilian, emotional brain is something that we really don't need. I wish that for that reason alone, the Cordoba Initiative had chosen another site. But at the same time, I would also argue that scoring cheap political points off of the corpses of the thousands of souls who died nearly nine years ago spits on their graves and shows a far greater lack of respect for this country's principles than any building that contains a mosque can possibly do.

The mission of the Cordoba Initiative is to promote understanding, to build a bridge between the Muslim community and the larger population of those who are not Muslim. That kind of bridge is designed to ameliorate the "us vs. them" mentality that drives young men to kill thousands of others in the name of a deity. This is not a bad thing. Who among us hasn't had a pang of fear when sitting in an airport and seeing a family in Islamic dress? Who among us hasn't thought, "I hope they aren't on my flight." I know I have. I don't like that I have, but I have.

An argument could be made that the moderate Islamic community hasn't "done enough" to denounce the actions of the extremists who claim to practice the Muslim religion. To that I would say that I don't think there is any amount of denouncing that would ever be enough for those who regard that pang of fear as a mark of their patriotism, rather than as the visceral response that it is. Funny, too, that no one has ever claimed that Christians aren't doing enough to denounce the actions of Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolph. People seem able to recognize that the actions of an American Christian extremist with an American name do not represent all Christians. And yet, we seem unable to accept that not every practitioner of Islam regards mass murder as a virtue. To those who would say that Islam is a religion of converting the nonbeliever by the sword, I would tell them to take a look at the history of Christianity.

I still wish that this controversy didn't exist. I'd like to believe that if this community center were being built north of Chambers Street, there wouldn't be a problem. But this is an election year, and there is a huge American population that is terrified about its future. And just in case undocumented immigrants aren't providing a big enough target for Americans' displaced rage, in order to fully keep that rage away from the corporations that plan to continue stuffing their pockets until we are all on the street and begging for jobs for a nickel an hour, this controversy has unfortunately provided the wingnuts with an even bigger target.

Labels: Islam, Religious Intolerance

Newt Gingrich's statement on the decision today declaring California's anti-gay marriage statute unconstitutional (emphases mine):

"Judge Walker's ruling overturning Prop 8 is an outrageous disrespect for our Constitution and for the majority of people of the United States who believe marriage is the union of husband and wife. In every state of the union from California to Maine to Georgia, where the people have had a chance to vote they've affirmed that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Congress now has the responsibility to act immediately to reaffirm marriage as a union of one man and one woman as our national policy. Today’s notorious decision also underscores the importance of the Senate vote tomorrow on the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court because judges who oppose the American people are a growing threat to our society.”

Newt Gingrich's glass house:

1962: Newt married Jackie Battley on June 19, 1962.
1963: Newt's daughter Kathy was born.
1966: Newt's daughter Jackie Sue was born.
1980: Newt met Marianne Ginther in January 1980.
1980: Jackie and Newt separated in April 1980.
1981: Jackie Battley and Newt Gingrich's divorce was finalized in February 1981.
1981: Six months later Newt married Marianne Ginther on August 8, 1981.
1987: Marianne and Newt separated in June 1987.
1993: Newt and Callista Bisek began their affair in November 1993.
1993: Marianne and Newt reconciled in late 1993/early 1994.
1999: Newt and Marianne separated in May 1999 and filed for divorce in July.
1999: Marianne and Newt reached a settlement in their divorce case.
2000: Marianne and Newt's divorce was finalized in April 2000.
2000: Callista Bisek and Newt announced their engagement.
2000: Newt married Callista Bisek on August 18, 2000.

Now I'd like to tell you about the shop where I get my hair done. It's a funky shop, in a struggling downtown in suburban New Jersey. It's owned and operated by two gay men, who have run this shop as business AND life partners for probably about 40 years. They live in an apartment over the shop. One is now seventy, the other is fifty-nine. They live AND work together. And they still take care of each other, as well as the many octe- and nonegenarians who comprise much of their clientele (with a few middle-agers like me thrown in). Their relationship is healthier and more affectionate than most marriages I know.

So tell me again why ANYONE should listen to Newt Gingrich on the subject of marriage?

Labels: assholes, faux moral outrage, gay rights, hypocrisy, Newt Gingrich, You can't make this shit up

There are no jobs. American corporations are sending what jobs they create overseas. There is no tax cut deep enough to make them have any sense of responsibility towards American citizens other than those wealthy enough to be stockholders. And that -- the profit motive NOT above all else, but EXCLUSIVE OF all else, is where capitalism falls apart.

So what happens to the American worker in a society in which we're told to work hard but there are no jobs?

Ms. Jarrin is part of a hard-luck group of jobless Americans whose members have taken to calling themselves “99ers,” because they have exhausted the maximum 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits that they can claim.

For them, the resolution recently of the lengthy Senate impasse over extending jobless benefits was no balm. The measure renewed two federal programs that extended jobless benefits in this recession beyond the traditional 26 weeks to anywhere from 60 to 99 weeks, depending on the state’s unemployment rate. But many jobless have now exceeded those limits. They are adjusting to a new, harsh reality with no income.

In June, with long-term unemployment at record levels, about 1.4 million people were out of work for 99 weeks or more, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Not all of them received unemployment benefits, but for many of those who did, the modest payments were a lifeline that enabled them to maintain at least a veneer of normalcy, keeping a roof over their heads, putting gas in their cars, paying electric and phone bills.

Without the checks, many like Ms. Jarrin, who lost her job as director of client services at a small technology company in March 2008, are beginning to tumble over the economic cliff. The last vestiges of their former working-class or middle-class lives are gone; it is inescapable now that they are indigent.

Ms. Jarrin said she wept as she drove away from her old life last month, wondering if she would ever be able to reclaim it.

“At one point, I thought, you know, what if I turned the wheel in my car and wrecked my car?” she said.

If that is what the corporations want, if that is what Republicans want -- mass suicide of everyone not in the Rich Guys Club, then let them at least have the decency to come out and say it. Because it certainly seems that this is their goal. Most of the comments to this article are from people who get what's going on. But still, even at the "liberal" New York times, the haters come out, trying to find SOME way to blame this woman for her own predicament, to avoid realizing that what is happening to Alexandra Jarrin could just as easily happen to them:

1) The "Let her get rid of everything that costs her money and let's attack her for getting an education" people:

Some decisions by this person clearly were her own fault - a $90K debt for an undergraduate education is ridiculous in any economy; clearly she keeps feeding a cat (in the photo but not mentioned in the story) that has to cost her money she can ill afford.

1) The "let her take a minimum wage job" people, conveniently forgetting that those who have ever worked at anything OTHER than a minimum wage job are undesirable for those jobs because "they'll quit when something better comes along:"

When you are unemployed you have an obligation to yourself and your family to take ANY work you can find, rather than whining that the rest of us limit you to only 2 years on the dole. So you used to be a white collar worker and cant find a similar job?? Get real and do what you can. That is the type of work ethic that built this country

I wonder what this commenter does for a living and if she has ever tried to get a minimum-wage job with a background of white-collar employment. To his credit, the author replied to the many comments like this:

As Ms. Jarrin tells it, she has applied for plenty of minimum wage jobs, including McDonalds, Burger King and other fast food restaurants, in addition to positions that better fit her background. I've actually heard this a lot from many unemployed with college-degrees. They can't even get those jobs at Starbucks and the like because they're overqualified or perceived that they will leave as soon as the economy improves.

3) The "It's a liberal conspiracy" people:

Can this be what the Democrats in Congress have been hoping for, millions of people who are now dependent on government benefits for their existence? Can it be that the Democrats would like to see people dependent on extensions of unemployment benefits, welfare, Medicaid, etc. so that they remember the Democrats' largesse when it comes time to vote?

4) And then there are the just plain idiots:

Many of these high paying do-nothing cubical jobs are disappearing forever. She needs to fix here resume so she doesn't appear over-qualified and trade down for a lesser job.

Funny how the writer of this one doesn't have any problem with the executives who are making 500 times more than the "cubical" (sic) workers they're jettisoning.

Aside from the severe structural unemployment that seems to be the future of this country, the biggest problem we have is that American simply refuse to wake up to the reality that's staring them in the face, and that is that every single one of us could be in this position tomorrow. If we have some money set aside, or retirement savings, that's only a cushion. But if you have 20-30 years of life expectancy ahead of you, who has THAT kind of money set aside?

As long as people insist that there are pat answers for the long-term unemployed -- go live with family (without knowing what any individual's family situation is), dumb down your resume (how do you do that with 30 years of ever-increasing knowledge level jobs?), work at McDonald's (as if every fast food restaurant has a "come on in, the money's fine" sign out front...

As long as Americans are content with the idea that if it weren't for those darned illegal immigrants, good red-blooed Amurricans could have those 40 to 50 cents per 32-lb bucket tomato picker jobs where you would have to pick 456 pounds (14 buckets) an hour to make even minimum wage, we are going to continue to be like the proverbial frog immersed in the water on the hot burner -- swimming around blithely until it is too late.

Labels: economic death watch, heartlessness, unemployment

SOmehow I think we'll be hearing about more guys like this before the election season is over:

A prison guard accused of shooting a lawyer to death at a gun range told police he found the man dead and stole his rifle so it could be used by an extremist group bent on overthrowing the U.S. government, court records show.

Camp Hill State Prison guard Raymond Franklin Peake III wouldn't name the group but said a fellow guard accused of helping him steal attorney Todd Getgen's AR-15 also was a member, according to the affidavit of probable cause.

"Peake told (investigators) that he would kill to defend his country and he was stealing weapons to defend his country," wrote North Middleton Township police Detective Timothy Lively.

Lively said Monday that Peake, in speaking with detectives, denied killing Getgen, who was 42. Lively said he didn't know the identity of the anti-government group involved but he believed the gun theft was the motive for the killing.

Funny how these guys were dead silent when the Secret Service was visiting college kids for having posters, nuns were put on the no-fly list, and the Pentagon was keeping Quakers under surveillance. The Constitution mattered to them not one whit when a white male Republican was president.

Labels: racism, right-wing hatemongers, wingnuttia

Today's honoree: Blue Girl, who has had quite enough of the media drawing false equivalency between the merely opinionated left and the batshit crazy violent right.

Money quote (it's a long one, but go read the whole thing and show BG some love in the comments...or even better, donate over there:

So I have some questions for Howard.  

I wonder if he would care to share some information with us that he seems to have in his possession that the rest of us have missed. How many fringe lefties who hang on every word of Maddow or Olberman have walked into Holy Roller churches and opened up on the parishoners with a shotgun because they "hate conservatives"? Where is our Jim D. Adkisson, who was a die-hard O'Reilley and Hannity devotee? I missed that story, somehow.

And remind me how many lefties have gotten into shootouts with cops? Where is our Richard Poplawski? He's the man in Pittsburgh who armed himself to the teeth, donned body armor and laid in wait.  He met the two officers who responded to his mother's domestic violence call at the door, and he murdered them in cold blood, shooting both of them in the head, then he shot dead the policeman who tried to get to his colleagues and help them.   Two more police officers were wounded.

During the four-hour standoff, hundreds of shots were fired and neighbors hid in their basements until the suspect, 23-year-old Richard Poplawski, was taken into custody.  

His best friend was interviewed and said that Poplawski feared "the Obama gun ban that's on the way" and "didn't like our rights being infringed upon."

Or how about Jerry and Joe Kane, the so-called sovereign citizens who died in a shootout with the police in Arkansas after killing two law enforcement officers? Yep...right wing, anti-government zealots.

Where is the left's James Cummings? He was the Maine man who was shot dead by his abused wife before he could make and detonate a dirty bomb. That was in January 2009 - he went over the edge as soon as Obama was elected, and set his plot in motion before he was even sworn in.  After his death, four 1-gallon containers of 35 percent hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon were removed from the residence, as well as the instructions to assemble a dirty bomb.

Or how about Byron Williams? Last month the paroled bank robber from northern California loaded up his mom's Toyota Tundra with guns he stole from her safe, donned body armour and headed for San Francisco where he intended to kill staffers at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU to "start a revolution" because he was sick of Congress shoving their "left wing agenda" down America's collective throat.  Where is our Byron Williams, Howard?

Or how about Timothy McVeigh? He murdered 168 people in cold blood because he hated the government as soon as a Democrat was elected. He said he was set off by Waco, but if that hadn't happened it would have been something else.

Where is the lefty who has done any of those things, Howard?

Don't bother looking, you fucking asshole. There isn't one. Not a one of them has a left-leaning counterpart. And so long as that remains the case, Kurtz and the rest of the Village Idiots will not merely remain part of the problem, they will be the arsonists pouring accellerant on an already raging fire.

Labels: bloggers, double standards, mainstream media, wingnuttia

Almost one in every five Americans of working age is out of a job. Retirement savings, such as they are, have been decimated. Millions who ARE still working are barely getting by. Thirty years of conservative policy, and gutless Democrats who refuse to stop it, have brought the middle class to the brink of extinction.

So what do have have to look forward to if the Republicans take Congress in the fall?

A new economic plan that works? Hardly.

A strategy for ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? You gotta be kidding me.

Policies to help the middle class back on its feet? Yeah, right.

No, friends, if you liked the Republican Congress during the Clinton years, you'll LOVE what it has planned for Barack Obama:

President Barack Obama has stubbornly taken a "look forward, not backwards" philosophy to possible criminal acts during the Bush administration. But Republicans are sending signals that they will not take such an approach if they are able to win back the U.S. House of Reprsentatives in the November elections.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is strongly indicating that he will launch numerous investigations of the Obama administration if he becomes chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Issa already has raised questions about possible White House interference in U.S. Senate races in Pennsylvania and Colorado. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Issa made it clear that aggressive investigations are coming if he replaces Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-NY) as chair of the Oversight Committee.

Regular Americans could wind up paying a huge economic price for Obama's timidity.

As we have stated on this blog several times, Obama could pay a heavy price for his decision to let Bush officials off the hook. Reports the Post:

From his perch as the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Issa has spent the last 15 months constantly blasting the Obama administration on nearly every controversy and calling for countless investigations that the Democratic-controlled committee refuses to order.

But Issa is finally starting to hit some of his targets. He was one of the leading Republicans in pushing the White House to reveal more details about its discussions to persuade Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) to forgo a Senate primary run against Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) in return for a possible government job. Sestak won the primary, and now another Senate candidate challenging an incumbent Democrat, Andrew Romanoff in Colorado, has acknowledged having similar discussions with White House officials. Issa has suggested the White House violated the law and may have offered Sestak "a bribe" in the process, assertions that have not been proved.

Issa, however, is not a single-issue attack dog. He has shown that he will go after Obama from multiple directions:

He is also demanding the administration release details of Cabinet officials' travel to events that might benefit Democratic candidates, continuing to cast Obama as embracing "politics as usual."

"It is abundantly clear that this kind of conduct is contrary to President Obama's pledge to change 'business as usual' and that his administration has engaged in the kind of political shenanigans he once campaigned to end," he said.

Veteran journalist Robert Parry has written numerous times at Consortium News about Bill Clinton's decision to let apparent crimes of the Reagan and Bush I presidencies go uninvestigated. Republicans rewarded Clinton by promptly launching investigations of the president when they took back Congress in 1994. Clinton was hampered for the final six years he was in office, and his presidency never fully recovered.

Parry writes in a recent piece at Consortium News and Truthout that Obama appears to be heading down the same path:

If Republicans gain control of at least one house of Congress, they would surely launch a wave of investigations against Obama, much as the GOP did against Clinton.

Because this country has nothing else to worry about, right?

I just wonder one thing: If there is another attack on this country while the Republicans are sniffing around the West Wing, who will be blamed?

Labels: assholes, Republican brownshirts, wussy-ass Democrats

Suddenly there is article after article after article about the demise of the American middle class. This is no longer a question of when the job market will improve, or when we get out of this recession. The American corporation has decided that Americans are simply not wanted or needed. They don't need us to build their products, they don't need us to buy their product, all we do is take up space and resources that could be put to better use expanding the wealth of those who already have more than they can possibly use.

The American working and middle class has been put out to pasture:

The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the ­multiple is above 300.

The trend has only been getting stronger. Most economists see the Great Stagnation as a structural problem – meaning it is immune to the business cycle. In the last expansion, which started in January 2002 and ended in December 2007, the median US household income dropped by $2,000 – the first ever instance where most Americans were worse off at the end of a cycle than at the start. Worse is that the long era of stagnating incomes has been accompanied by something profoundly un-American: declining income mobility.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French chronicler of early America, was once misquoted as having said: “America is the best country in the world to be poor.” That is no longer the case. Nowadays in America, you have a smaller chance of swapping your lower income bracket for a higher one than in almost any other developed economy – even Britain on some measures. To invert the classic Horatio Alger stories, in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe.

Combine those two deep-seated trends with a third – steeply rising inequality – and you get the slow-burning ­crisis of American capitalism. It is one thing to suffer ­grinding income stagnation. It is another to realise that you have a ­diminishing likelihood of escaping it – particularly when the fortunate few living across the proverbial tracks seem more pampered each time you catch a glimpse. “Who killed the ­American Dream?” say the banners at leftwing protest marches. “Take America back,” shout the rightwing Tea Party demonstrators.

Statistics only capture one slice of the problem. But it is the renowned Harvard economist, Larry Katz, who offers the most compelling analogy. “Think of the American economy as a large apartment block,” says the softly spoken professor. “A century ago – even 30 years ago – it was the object of envy. But in the last generation its character has changed. The penthouses at the top keep getting larger and larger. The apartments in the middle are feeling more and more squeezed and the basement has flooded. To round it off, the elevator is no longer working. That broken elevator is what gets people down the most.”

Unsurprisingly, a growing majority of Americans have been telling pollsters that they expect their children to be worse off than they are. During the three postwar decades, which many now look back on as the golden era of the ­American middle class, the rising tide really did lift most boats – as John F. Kennedy put it. Incomes grew in real terms by almost 2 per cent a year – almost doubling each generation.

And although the golden years were driven by the rise of mass higher education, you did not need to have graduated from high school to make ends meet. Like her husband, ­Connie Freeman was raised in a “working-class” home in the Iron Range of northern Minnesota near the Canadian border. Her father, who left school aged 14 following the Great ­Depression of the 1930s, worked in the iron mines all his life. Towards the end of his working life he was earning $15 an hour – more than $40 in today’s prices.

[snip]

Thirty years later, Connie, who is far better qualified than her father, having graduated from high school and done one year of further education, makes $17 an hour. The pace of life has also changed: “We used to sit around the dinner table every evening when I was growing up,” says Connie, who speaks with prolonged vowels of the Midwest. “Nowadays that’s sooooo rare.”

Connie’s minimally educated father earned enough to allow her mother to remain a full-time housewife and still fund two children through college. Connie and Mark, meanwhile, struggle to pay off the stream of bills in a dual-income household. The state of Minnesota pays for Andy, their 20-year-old son, who suffers from acute autism, to study ­theatre at the local community college.

Strictly speaking, Connie actually lives in a four-income household. “When Andy was two, I was told to buy a karaoke machine because autistic children sometimes respond well to it,” says Mark, pointing at what can only be described as a postmodern antique. “That’s how I got into my karaoke ­business. I get about $100 every Wednesday evening. And on Saturdays I manage the local liquor store. We need all four jobs to keep our heads above water.”

So much for the rising tide.

From the point of view of most economists, the story so far is uncontroversial. Most agree on the diagnosis. But they diverge on the causes. Many on the left blame the Great ­Stagnation on globalisation. The rise of China, India, Brazil and others has undercut wages in the west and put America’s unskilled, semi-skilled and even skilled workers out of jobs. Manufacturing now accounts for only 12 per cent of US jobs. Think of the typical Detroit car worker 30 years ago, who had a secure middle-class lifestyle, good healthcare and a fat ­pension to look forward to. Today, he lives in Shenzhen.

Another group singles out the explosion of new technology, which has enabled the most routine and easily automated jobs to be replaced by computers. Think of the office assistant, who once took dictation and brewed the coffee. She is now a ­BlackBerry who spends half her life in Starbucks. Or the back office person who, much like those shoemakers in the fairy tale, now stitches your accounts in Bangalore while you sleep.

Then there are those, such as Paul Krugman, The New York Times columnist and Nobel prize winner, who blame it on politics, notably the conservative backlash which began when Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980, and which sped up the decline of unions and reversed the most progressive features of the US tax system.

Fewer than a tenth of American private sector workers now belong to a union. People in Europe and Canada are subjected to the same forces of globalisation and technology. But they belong to unions in larger numbers and their healthcare is publicly funded. More than half of household bankruptcies in the US are caused by a serious ­illness or accident.

. . .

Such are the competing (but not contradictory) ­theories of what causes it. The “lived experience”, as sociologists would say, is another matter. Much like the ­Freemans, whose street is boxed in for about a mile each side by long commercial roads pockmarked with boarded-up shops, ­dollar stores and fast food joints, the Millers could be living anywhere in the US. Only the sultry heat betrays that you are in Virginia and thus in the American South.

More...

I have a friend whose son has one more year of high school. She asked me not long ago what major I thought would be a good one for him to pursue -- and I didn't have an answer. In the short term, there will be opportunities in elder care. But just as home health aides usually make minimum wage while their agencies rake in four times that much from the person receiving care, so will elder care be a minimum wage job.

The American worker has been kicked out in the cold, and the door has been locked and bolted behind him. Now the question is this: What, if anything, can we do about it, other than what the American worker has been doing for the last 30 years -- voting Republican and beating up on their scapegoat-du-jour.

Labels: economic death watch

South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee...they have nothing on Florida where concentration of Teh Crazy is concerned:

In protest of what it calls a religion "of the devil," a nondenominational church in Gainesville, Florida, plans to host an "International Burn a Quran Day" on the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The Dove World Outreach Center says it is hosting the event to remember 9/11 victims and take a stand against Islam. With promotions on its website and Facebook page, it invites Christians to burn the Muslim holy book at the church from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

"We believe that Islam is of the devil, that it's causing billions of people to go to hell, it is a deceptive religion, it is a violent religion and that is proven many, many times," Pastor Terry Jones told CNN's Rick Sanchez earlier this week.

Jones wrote a book titled "Islam is of the Devil," and the church sells coffee mugs and shirts featuring the phrase.

Muslims and many other Christians -- including some evangelicals -- are fighting the initiative.

The church launched a YouTube channel to disseminate its messages.

"I mean ask yourself, have you ever really seen a really happy Muslim? As they're on the way to Mecca? As they gather together in the mosque on the floor? Does it look like a real religion of joy?" Jones asks in one of his YouTube posts.

"No, to me it looks like a religion of the devil."

Religion of JOY? This fuckwit is calling his flavor of Christianity a "religion of JOY"? His is a religion which says that if you don't believe EXACTLY AS HE DOES, a man in the sky is going to cast you into a fiery pit for all eternity. Now perhaps Pastor Terry Jones, who presumably is not THIS Terry Jones:

...gets his rocks off by imagining heathen burning in a fiery pit. With this kind of wackadoo, you never know. But I'll tell you this much -- Christians like this are ALMOST enough to make me put on a hijab myself.

Labels: batshit crazies, Christofascist Zombie Brigade, lunacy, Religious Intolerance, Teh Stoopid

“The bottom line is I'm not an expert, so don't give me the power in Washington to be making rules.” – Rand Paul, while seeking a job as a lawmaker

(By American Zen’s Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

It would be hard to find a more intelligent and erudite yet more ignorant and more passively racist candidate than Rand Paul. Beloved of Libertarians that he’d inherited largely by default from his father’s failed presidential campaign, shunned by the establishment GOP (Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell threw his toxic support behind Paul’s primary opponent Trey Grayson) and reviled by liberals, Rand is actually nonetheless leading by a comfortable margin in the polls against his Democratic rival, Jack Conway.

The support is inexplicable until one remembers what many people in Paul’s adopted state of Kentucky do for a living. Paul prefers smaller crowds yet seems as equally tongue-tied with them as he was during his Hindenburg interview with Rachel Maddow a day after his primary victory. These are multigenerational coal mining people, people whose livelihoods depend upon an energy industry whose fortunes, we’re told by people like Paul, ride entirely on the amount of regulation we impose on them.

More regulations, say pro-corporate Libertarians such as Paul, means a smaller bottom line. Smaller bottom lines inevitably turn into layoffs, with the surviving workforce obliged to work harder for the same pay. What these coal-mining families seem to forget is that regulation could mean less empty seats at family gatherings, meaning less coal mine explosions and less collapses.

So what’s even more inexplicable than Paul leading Conway in the straw polls is why these people who would vastly benefit from a progressive such as Conway are rallying to Paul’s side as if he was the Second Coming.

As with so many other Republicans and Democrats, Paul’s main appeal seems to be as a neophyte, an outsider, someone whose stunning lack of qualifications for public office and complete absence of a legislative track record has somehow, maddeningly, been turned into a set of attractive bullet points. Yet if Rand Paul needed to write a position paper stating his views, it would be virtually indistinguishable from any other pro-corporate, scorched earth Republican, including Mitch McConnell.

With Paul, conveniently running under the banner of a Republican Party that’s doing its best to pretend he doesn’t exist, we’d see a complete lack of regulation even to the point of repealing the hallowed Civil Rights Act of 1964, regulatory standards on the energy industry and virtually anyone else with a bit of property, money and power. In fact, Paul’s actually saying, like Reagan before him, “Don’t look for help from the federal government to whom you pay taxes and don’t look to me for any solutions, either, even if you elect me.” What Paul hasn’t explained is, if he doesn’t think making rules should be within his job description as a US Senator, then why is he running for public office?

Small wonder his own campaign, as with fellow Tea Bagger darling Sharron Angle’s, is keeping Paul more under wraps than al Qaeda is keeping Osama bin Laden. We saw and heard the same thing with the McCain campaign, with media access to both McCain and Sarah Palin being severely restricted. In other words, buy sight unseen and don’t ask any questions.

There’s a dangerously thin line between the Republican/Libertarian laissez faire, anti-regulation, sink-or-swim mantras and the sometimes hysterically anti-government, borderline sedition/treason of the Tea Party movement. It’s a No Man’s Land thinner than that between light and shadow yet one on which conservatives like Paul seem comfortable teeter-tottering.

It’s a stretch to say that Paul’s entire support base is from the Tea Bagger movement and liberal journalists and bloggers are more than most responsible for this misperception. As stated earlier, many of his supporters are working-class Kentucky coal mining families whose personal family fortunes are symbiotically tied to that of the coal companies for whom they work.

But between shifts in the largely de-regulated coal mines, these same families ought to read the sardonic article written by Jonathan Miles for Details.com before Election Day then Karoli’s post about this article on Crooks and Liars.

Here’s a sample of some of Paul’s infuriatingly stupid comments:

“We've had a couple accidents in the coal industry, and we just had a big accident in the oil industry. And they'll use that as an excuse for more rules, more control.”

Well, duh. Regulation and regulatory agencies are created to help save lives and preserve the ecosystem. That’s like Paul and other conservatives saying, “Well, just because you just got shot during a mugging, are we supposed to go after the guy that did it and impose rules on him?”

Note, also, the casual shrug of the shoulder. A “couple of accidents” (one costing 26 human lives) and the one in the Gulf (another 11 lives). Deregulation, to Republicans, never seems to add up to human lives and corporate greed and irresponsibility. At this point, Paul is just one shrug way from the equally anti-regulatory George W. Bush who’d years ago melted down the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians as a mere “comma” on the glorious road to Democracy.

Here’s another, this one from a give and take at the Harlan Center:

“I want to be compassionate and I'm sorry for what happened, but I wonder: Was it (the Big Branch disaster ) just an accident?”

As karoli says, No, it was not, Mr. Paul. It was the result of Big Government that you still brand as meddlesome allowing coal companies such as Murray Energy and Massey Energy (the owner of the Big Branch mine) to remain lawless, self-dealing entities that places human life at the bottom of their list of priorities.

It ought to be mentioned that a huge bubble of methane, what killed those 26 miners, was the identical reason for the Deepwater Horizon explosion that claimed 11 more lives.

It isn’t as if the GOP is diametrically opposed to everything that comes out of Rand Paul’s mouth: They are in perfect agreement when he inveighs against the evils of Big Gubmint regulation, the evils of depending on Big Gubmint to which we pay taxes being expected to do something for us once in a while. The GOP hates Rand Paul because he isn’t in lockstep with them every step of the way. Paul, like his father, has come out in opposition to the Iraq War. Paul isn’t yet part of the Ole Boy network presided over by McConnell but he’s trying to gain membership in it and the government he professes to distrust.

Rand Paul might as well have been named after his idol, pro-corporate Goddess Ayn Rand. He is a bouncing, squeaking, semen-flecked, Vaseline-smeared love doll for every corporate interest that ever set up a lobbying office on the Beltway. In spirit, he is absolutely indistinguishable from virtually every other Republican politician and aspirant in the land. It’s not surprising that his campaign immediately moved to put him under wraps. If I was his campaign manager, I would’ve moved for duct tape being stapled across his big mouth.

And, once again, people aren’t listening to this very dangerous man even as these people will be robbed to pay Paul over $170,000 a year to shrug his shoulders at them.

Because I haven't done one in a long time, here is your reading assignment for today:

Digby on how the knee-jerk outrage and instantaneous outrage over Shirley Sherrod shows the NEED for far too many people to erase the Jim Crow era as if it never happened. I'm sorry, but a black man in the White House whose hands are tied by his own childhood emotional baggage and his own party doesn't qualify as a sign that whites are now the target of rampant racial discrimination in this country -- certainly not white males like Andrew Breitbart.

Driftglass this week consulted People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck (whom I had the pleasure of working with during the publication of that book during my Simon & Schuster days) to explain Breitbart and his ilk.

Over at BP Oil Slick, proof that all the oil is NOT magically gone, no matter how much the media tells you that all it took was banishing Tony Hayward to Siberia.

The New York Crank on the furor, most of it OUTSIDE New York City, about the mosque that will be part of a community center TWO BLOCKS from the World Trade Center site.

Keeping our boycotts straight requires constant vigilance. Konagod reveals that shopping at Target is no longer OK, while Ken at Down with Tyranny explains why Home Depot is OFF the fecal roster. (Bob Nardelli is long gone, and they also recycle CFCs.)

Matthew, one of These Bastards, on Ezra Klein's This Is Your Brain On Tax Cut Expiration - Any Questions? deficit graphic at WaPo.

Roy Edroso almost makes me rethink my policy of not taking any ads for wingnuttia. Almost. He's better at it than I am.

If you live in Michigan's 8th district, and you are planning to vote in Tuesday's Democratic primary, go read Laffy's profile of write-in candidate Lance Enderle. Alvin Greene may be the out-of-nowhere candidate that the media wants to talk about, but this guy sounds like he might be the real deal.

It's been a long time since I took a look at Kevin Drum's cats. The TBogg boys, however, are quizzical.

Dave Johnson on Strengthening Social Security.

Blue Girl on local politics in St. Louis.

And finally....perhaps the American people aren't waking up yet and realizing that their problem isn't black former civil rights workers or Imokalee tomato pickers -- it's the fact that we live in a job-based economy where there are no jobs, and aren't likely to be any. Ever. Robert Reich wrote about it last week, so did Michael Lind. So if our economy is no longer going to be based on jobs, on what will it be based? Are we going to just demonize those who are already casualties until we join them, or are we going to create something else? And how? What will it look like?

Labels: bloggers