O’Reilly distills conservative cluelessness about race down to one perfect moment of stupid

Talking Points Memo: Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on Thursday advised Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett to get “gangsta rappers” like Jay Z and Kanye West to say their behavior is wrong if the White House really wants to improve minority communities.

President Barack Obama had invited O’Reilly to the launch of his new initiative called “My Brother’s Keeper” earlier Thursday. The program aims to create opportunities and improve conditions for young minority men, but O’Reilly said he doesn’t believe the White House sees the “urgency” of the situation in the streets.

"You have to attack the fundamental disease if you want to cure it," O’Reilly told Jarrett. "Now I submit to you that you’re gonna have to get people like Jay Z, Kanye West, all these gangsta rappers to knock it off."

"They idolize these guys with the hats on backwards, and the terrible rap lyrics and the drug and all of that," he continued, adding that high-profile figures need to hammer young people with that message to "reverse the peer pressure."

O’Reilly also challenged First Lady Michelle Obama to come on “The Factor” and tell teenage girls “You stop having sex. You stop getting pregnant. This is wrong.”

In O’Reilly’s world the biggest stumbling block for African-Americans is other African-Americans, with whites mere observers to some sort of cultural self-destruction they have absolutely nothing at all to do with. It’s a view that seems to be shared by your average conservative — racism is over and any problems that black people may face are now the fault of black people. “I’m not racist,” a typical rightwinger might say, “but black people are all the same.”

Worse, minority attempts to improve situation are always attacked as “reverse racism” or some sort of plot to steal money and power from white people (see ACORN). Income inequality isn’t a thing. Institutional racism in the criminal justice system isn’t a thing. Ongoing discrimination in hiring and pay isn’t a thing.

But kids listening to “guys with the hats on backward” — now that’s a thing. And O’Reilly is so damned smugly proud of himself for spouting this marshmallow fluff inanity that he practically craps himself with joy.

"[I]t’s yet another demonstration of the rules both prominent and ordinary black people have to live with," writes Paul Waldman. “Unlike white Americans, they are subject to an entirely different and far more wide-ranging kind of responsibility. A black senator has to answer for the remarks of every black activist, black musicians are responsible for the actions of every wayward teenager, and black people everywhere carry with them a thousand sins committed by others. That burden isn’t just psychological; as we’ve seen in cases like those of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, it can be deadly.”

It’s no wonder Bill O’Reilly has such a masterful grasp of the conservative mindset when it comes to race. Who better than a simpleminded clown to embody such a simpleminded understanding of America?

Conservatism as an excuse to be a prick: example no. 8,306,372

Raw Story: A restaurant outside of Oklahoma City is facing criticism after its outspoken owner made a series of inflammatory comments after one of his former customers, who is disabled, complained that he’d been banned from the establishment.

Matt Gard claims that the owner of Gary’s Chicaros restaurant, Gary James, banned him from the restaurant because of his wheelchair. James, however, says otherwise: “He created an issue. You only have one time here. You create an issue, you’re out forever.”

Gard claims that’s just “a weak excuse,” and that James’s real problem with him is that he’s on disability.

James doesn’t deny that he thinks some people shouldn’t patronize his restaurant. “Well if you work, you own a business, pay your taxes, you’re more than welcome here,” he told KFOR. “If you’re on welfare, stay at home and spend my money, there. I don’t deal with these people walking down the street with no jobs on welfare.”

Gard also claims that James has routinely turned away customers for decades. “He doesn’t like certain people of race, color, ethnicity,” Gard said of James.

James told KFOR that he’s owned Gary’s Chicaros for 44 years, so he “think[s] I can spot a freak or a f*ggot.”

There’s more and you should read it if you can stomach it, otherwise you get the idea. Why this clown hasn’t had the pants sued off him under the Citizens with Disabilities Act or any segregationist era laws is beyond me. The man’s a dinosaur.

"The restaurant’s official t-shirt makes it clear that a ‘f*ggot’ isn’t welcome in James’s establishment," the report goes on. "It features that word, the N-word, and threatens violence against Muslims, Democrats, and members of many minority groups."

"Appalling, bigoted, discriminatory behavior is regularly displayed at this establishment," says one Yelp reviewer. “The owner, Gary James, refuses to serve wheelchair bound persons, black people, Hispanics, mixed race couples, gay people, people who wear hats, people who ask for Budweiser, liberals, men with longish hair, people wearing clothes he doesn’t approve of, people with facial piercings, on and on, ad nauseum.  If you pass first inspection, don’t think you’ve got it made - if he doesn’t approve of an overheard conversation, if he decides you are too effeminate, if your politics don’t agree with his, if you don’t like the way your steak is cooked, if you cheer for the wrong team, etc etc, Mr. James will charge you more for your meal.”

Bonus fun: the food sucks. The reviewer complains of a “mediocre steak” and says the menu is short on side dishes. “At Chicaro’s the only things you get with your meat are hate, indigestion and stale cigarette smoke,” the reviewer concludes.

Of course, this is just another example of a conservative using conservatism as an excuse to be a dick. There are people who trollishly thrive on negative reactions and use hate to trigger them. The American right is sadly full of these clowns. What’s more disturbing is the fact that he’s been in business for 44 years. If he’s been this bigoted all that time, then what the fuck is wrong with Enid, Oklahoma? This is KKK level stuff. If the food is as bad as they say, then it’s hard to fathom why people would frequent the place other than to support this sort of bigotry (I refer back to the t-shirts as evidence — that alone should drive people who aren’t actual Nazis away in droves).

Apparently, we’ve discovered a whole community of assholes who either hate like neo-Nazis or think it’s funny to watch people react to neo-Nazis. Either way, fuck this town.

Perpetual victims find new and bad reason to declare perpetual victimhood

Politico:

Maybe the rightwing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww: the adorable new #Cheerios ad w/ biracial family. http://t.co/SpB4rQDoAR
— msnbc (@msnbc)
January 30, 2014

The liberal cable news network MSNBC posted a tweet on Wednesday night in which it suggested that conservatives hate biracial families.

“Maybe the rightwing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww:  the adorable new #Cheerios ad w/ biracial family,” read the tweet, which was accompanied by a link to an MSNBC.com article about the Cheerios ad.

MSNBC has deleted the tweet and apologized, but for the life of me I can’t understand why. For your consideration:

Daily Mail, 2011: A majority of Republican voters in Mississippi believe interracial marriage should be made illegal.

The recently conducted phone poll, by credible firm Public Policy Polling (PPP), slipped the unambiguous racial question into a broader survey about the political chances of Republican candidates.

PPP, a Democrat-affiliated polling firm based in Raleigh, North Carolina, said it ‘surveyed 400 usual Mississippi Republican primary voters from March 24 to 27’.

Within the usual questions about candidates and whether the respondent viewed them favourably or unfavourably, the survey then asked the simple question: ‘Do you think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal?’.

While 40 per cent of respondents said interracial marriage should be legal, 46 per cent said it should be illegal - and a further 15 per cent were undecided.

I’m sorry guys, but I’m afraid your victim card has been declined.

[photo by Jeffrey]

Climate ‘skeptics’ fail to understand that ‘global’ and ‘local’ have very different meanings

AlJazeera America: Meteorologists predict record-low temperatures for large swaths of the United States on Sunday and Monday.

The cold snap, which comes after snow blanketed much of the northeastern United States last week, has also led to confusion surrounding how weather relates to global warming.

[…]

That skepticism could be seen in full force recently as snow covered the New York City headquarters of Fox News, from where the station broadcast several reports suggesting that recent cold weather conflicted with scientists’ assessments of climate change, or even suggested the globe may be cooling.

Fox News hosts weren’t the only ones taken aback by the cool weather. Donald Trump tweeted that the ship of scientists that was until recently trapped in antarctic ice was proof that climate change is a lie. And U.S. Rep. John Fleming, R-La., wrapped up the confusion between weather and climate succinctly when he tweeted, “‘Global warming’ isn’t so warm these days.”

Here’s the thing: the US isn’t the world. Global warming means global warming — not just warming in your neck of the woods. And when did any climate scientist ever argue that climate change meant it there would never be ice, cold, or snow again? If they didn’t, then the appearance of ice, cold, or snow proves jack.

Right now, Australia and New Zealand are experiencing a heat wave and drought, driving wildfires. And it’s not even the entire US that’s freezing right now; the west coast is experiencing an abnormally warm winter. Further, snow and cold was late to Scandinavia.

But if you really want to fully grasp how little sense these statements make, consider them in the context of another common climate flatearther argument. For years, they’ve argued that a long term warming trend is just natural variation in global temperature. But then they turn around and insist that every heavy snow or exceptionally cold few days is supposed to be proof positive that global warming is a hoax. So big changes over time are just fluctuations — while fluctuations are PROOF THAT THIS ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’ HOAX IS A COMMUNIST PLOT TO DESTROY AMERICA!! GAH!! PANIC!!!

In order to be a climate denier, you either have to have no idea what you’re talking about or pretending to be that ignorant. So the question, as it so often is when dealing with wingnut extremists, is whether they're lying or stupid.

Either way, there’s no reason to give them the time of day.

'Duck Dynasty' story is just another symptom of conservative demographic doom

The common thread among defenses of Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson’s bigotry — beside completely ignoring the racist aspect of it — is that A&E is buckling under pressure for special interests interested in “political correctness.”

This is, of course, wrong. What’s going on can be demonstrated by looking at polling data. In July, Gallup asked voters whether they’d vote for a referendum to legalize same-sex marriage in every state. The result of the study showed that such a referendum would win with 52% of the vote. And when we break it down by demographics, we see that the strongest support came from: #1. liberals; #2. those with no religion; #3. Democrats; and #4. 18-34 year-olds.

And that’s where conservatives misunderstand A&E’s reaction. They think it’s all about demos #1, #2, and #3. The truth is that it’s about #4. The 18-34 demo is the TV goldmine — young adults, mostly without children, who spend money more freely than any other demo. It’s not political pressure that has A&E spooked, it’s the market. Concern for the market — which conservatives claim to love — is at its heart undemocratic (which is why conservatives generally prefer it). 18-34s are a minority of Americans, but their spending habits give them outsized influence.

Firing Robertson has nothing to do with “political correctness” on A&E’s part. It’s about who brings the bread and butter.

Conservatives do not.

Megyn Kelly, Duck Dynasty, and the 'Debate' Over Sexual Orientation

“Is he ever coming back? It remains to be seen, but that will certainly shut down debate. There really won’t, I mean, he’s a Christian man — I grant you, he did not say this in the kindest way – but why can’t there be a debate about it? Why can’t there be a back-and-forth, a discussion — you know, that’s how he feels, and you say how you feel, instead of saying, ‘You are fired, you are basically canned.’”
— Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, defending Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson, who was suspended for remarks in an interview comparing people in the LGBT community to drunks, thieves, and prostitutes. Robertson was suspended indefinitely by A&E for the comments.

Here’s the thing Megyn, we’ve had that conversation. We’ve had that debate for decades. What more do you think we need to say here? And what new info did this clown supposedly bring to the table here?He’s not the first guy who’s ever said, “Them homersexuals is bein’ immoral ‘cause th’ Bible.” He’s not exactly breaking new ground here. How long are we supposed to sit back and listen to the same tired, unconvincing, insulting arguments and over and over?

Kelly isn’t calling for a debate — and neither are the rest of Roberston’s defenders. She’s asking for the right to hurl insults at people in the LGBT community, while members of that community shut up and take it.

Sorry folks, that part of the “debate” is over.

After Starbucks Fiasco, Gun Enthusiasts Point Fingers at Gun Nuts

"It was you that turned Starbucks into a political battleground. It was you that couldn’t just take the victory of Starbucks saying it would abide by local laws rather than ban guns. It was you who had to push the limits and do things utterly unacceptable among almost any normal community in the United States just so you could brag to your equally moronic Facetwit buddies. You did this. You gave the entire Second Amendment movement a huge black eye. You just educated America, all right, you educated them into believing that gun owners are a bunch of retarded monkeys who’ll throw feces the first chance they get if it’s legalized."
--Gun enthusiast site Pistol-Training.com, in an open letter to open-carry extremists who politicized Starbucks and wound up getting guns kicked out of the chain.

This whole story actually backs up a long-standing theory of mine; that a lot of people are conservative because it gives them permission to be jerks. These clowns weren’t parading around with assault rifles and shotguns to make some sort of point, they were doing it to rub peoples faces in it. They’re just contrary children who, on being told to go to bed, cry and shriek that they’re never going to go to bed ever again, nevereverever! They want to be allowed to carry guns everywhere; but not because they think Starbucks is an especially dangerous place, but because they think it makes liberals mad.

And that’s what’s going to screw them in the end, as it’s screwed them here. Assholery is not rewarded, because no one likes assholes. As Pistol-Training.com explains, “You can croon about how you’re educating the public all you want, but it’s bullcrap. And here’s a perfect example. Did you convert the average American? No. But you scared enough soccer moms, kids, and coffee jockeys that Starbucks was forced to take action.”

They forced this setback on themselves. And it’s going to keep happening to them, as long as they use the Second Amendment as nothing but an excuse to poke liberals with a stick.

In which conservative hatred of bureaucracy and red tape is exposed as a sham

Raw Story: A Fox News guest on Thursday argued that hungry students would have a “teaching moment” if they were refused access in the cafeteria line to school lunches because their parents hadn’t properly filled out the right paperwork.

During a segment on Fox & Friends, therapist and school counselor Thomas Kersting told host Gretchen Carlson that he approved of a New Jersey school district’s plan to reportedly “throw the meal away” if kids didn’t have enough money to pay for lunch.

“I agree with the superintendent,” he said. “I think it’s a little harsh. You know, I don’t think they’re going to throw the food out right in front of the kid and embarrass the kid.”

Kersting explained that some parents had allegedly told their children to accept the lunches before the paperwork had been completed and filed, and so the Willingboro School District had decided not to feed students unless their parents had signed the proper forms and been enrolled in the Free and Reduced Lunch program.

So no lunch for you until your mom has filled out the proper 27B/6. If we have children actually eating without the proper forms on file, why that’s a short step away from anarchy. It’s much more efficient to simply throw the lunch away, because… Well, never you mind about the because. Because central processing says so.

Kersting continued to explain how this was the smartest thing ever in the whole wide world. “We have more food than any other nation. You know, no kid is going to starve,” he went merrily on. “You know, if one day a kid doesn’t have lunch, right, maybe that’s a teaching moment when that kid doesn’t have lunch. That may sound harsh saying that, but we’ve got to get people to start being responsible for themselves.”

The fact that “we have more food than any other nation” is meaningless if we’re throwing away food, rather than letting people eat it. You wonder if this guy understands that eating isn’t some sort of pleasure reserved for the deserving, but is rather a necessity to, you know, live and stuff. And that “teaching moment” stuff? That’s the sort of “let them eat cake” shit that would’ve cost you your head in the French Revolution. Marie Antoinette here only thinks he’s making a compelling argument.

But really, conservatives are all about mindless, faceless bureaucracies these days. They’re making people jump through bureaucratic hoops to vote, to have access to an entirely legal abortion, and now to eat. When conservatives complain about bureaucrats, their really complaining that the privileged aren’t n some sort of express lane around all the bureaucratic BS they expect everyone else to navigate through like a rat in a maze trying to get to the cheese.

If a big banker needs a little government oversight, that’s freakin’ Big Government Run Amok. If a kid misses a meal because his mom didn’t sign the proper 27B/6, well that’s a teaching moment. Please observe as we dispose of the Sloppy Joe in the proper government approved receptacle, in the government approved manner.

Now let that be a lesson to you.

One conservative’s response to shocking and bloody war crimes: ‘Yay!’

The latest news out of Egypt confirms mass murder by the military coup government there.

New York Times: The Egyptian government acknowledged that its security forces had killed 36 Islamists in its custody on Sunday, as the country’s military leaders and Islamists vowed to keep up their fight over Egypt’s future.

The deaths were the fourth mass killing of civilians since the military took control on July 3, but the first time so many had died while in government custody.

While the murders of 36 prisoners hardly amounts to a genocide, the motives in those killings is definitely genocidal. There is no pretense to legal executions here, this is killing people who have become a problem. In a just world, the Egyptian military personnel responsible for this would be dragged in front of a court in the Hague for war crimes.

So what is the reaction of Stephen Green at Vodkapundit?

Is this terrible? Yes. Are innocents being killed? Almost certainly. Am I weeping? Not this time.

Being an Islamist, a jihadi, being a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, means being ready and able to kill innocents in the name of Islam. This is what they do. So once Mubarak was gone and the lid was off, something like this violence was bound to happen. The question is whether the military will be violent enough to put down this revolt quickly. Otherwise the place really will devolve into a combination of the worst parts of Syria and Somalia.

The complete lack of anything even resembling logic is notable here. Green admits that innocents are being killed, but also says good riddance — because they were supposedly ready to kill innocents. I don’t expect much at all from the rightwing blogosphere, but keeping your cognitive dissonance in check long enough to write two short paragraphs really shouldn’t be much of a challenge.

And just because you’re protesting in support of Morsi doesn’t mean you’re a violent jihadist. The right gets the Muslim Brotherhood wrong as a matter of propaganda — MB disavowed violence and embraced democracy years ago. The equation of them with terrorists is more a matter of wingnut’s anti-Muslim bigotry than anything else. And the idea that Egypt is headed toward becoming the next Somalia is so astonishingly ignorant that I won’t even waste my time with it.

But how worthless is Green when he looks at a bloody war crime and basically says, “Yeah, they deserve it.” To look at a report that says the prisoners had “been shot and tear-gassed through the windows of a locked prison van” and conclude that those people aren’t worth worrying about?

This is why I dislike conservatives. There are far too many de facto Nazis among them and those who aren’t these pro-“kill everyone I disagree with” dicks are far too tolerant of said genocidal dicks.

A perfect demonstration of the inability of many conservatives to see racism

The Washington Redskins have been playing football for over 80 years and their name is no more derogatory to Native Americans than the New York Giants is to vertically challenged people.
—Aaron Goldstein, of the conservative American Spectator.

You see, as a non-Native American, Goldstein believes he’s in the perfect position to dictate to Native Americans what they can and can’t find offensive. He doesn’t seem capable of understanding that if the Redskins name has been around for 80 years, it only means we’ve tolerated this kind of racism for 80 years.

You have to imagine that Little Black Sambo had defenders like this; “It’s not racist — why, Sambo is a beloved children’s character! How can it be racism when we don’t hate Sambo?”

And there’s rightwing racism in a nutshell — so deeply ingrained in their entire worldview that they have no clue that they’re even doing it. Goldstein has no idea that his statement is in itself racist.

And I’m willing to bet he’s not interested in learning any different.

Rightwing blogosphere catches a dose of Mad Deer Disease

This one’s kind of hilarious, once you get past the sad. So here goes the sad: a bunch of armed government agents raided a Society of St. Francis animal shelter in Wisconsin to take out a baby deer. No doubt, they were concerned about Chronic Wasting Disease, which is like Mad Cow for deer. When you come across an orphaned fawn, you’ve got to wonder what happened to mom, especially when you’re fighting a contagion that constantly threatens to turn into an epidemic. In any case, it’s a violation of law to keep wildlife.

OK, so that’s the sad.

It turns out that the wingnut blogosphere got wind of this, including the National Review’s Mark Steyn, who’s regarded as one of the smart guys on the right. Anyhoo, this is the worst thing ever and an example of big federal gummint overreach and here comes communism and HIDE THE CHILDREN FOR THE SWEET LOVE OF GOD!

The whole thing was done under the auspices of the Department of Natural Resources. If that federal agency doesn’t ring a bell, that’s because it doesn’t exist — not as a federal agency, anyway. It’s a state agency. A Wisconsin state agency. A Wisconsin state agency that’s part of the administration of Tea Party hero Gov. Scott Walker. It’s not an example of federal government gone mad, it’s one of local government losing it’s marbles under one of their beloved authoritarian ideologues.

Let the furious backpedaling begin.

[photo by star5112]

Conservatives shocked to discover that the White House practices leadership

Fox News: The federal government is hiring what it calls a “Behavioral Insights Team" that will look for ways to subtly influence people’s behavior, according to a document describing the program obtained by FoxNews.com. Critics warn there could be unintended consequences to such policies, while supporters say the team could make government and society more efficient.

While the program is still in its early stages, the document shows the White House is already working on such projects with almost a dozen federal departments and agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture.

"Behavioral sciences can be used to help design public policies that work better, cost less, and help people to achieve their goals," reads the government document describing the program, which goes on to call for applicants to apply for positions on the team.

The document was emailed by Maya Shankar, a White House senior adviser on social and behavioral sciences, to a university professor with the request that it be distributed to people interested in joining the team. The idea is that the team would “experiment" with various techniques, with the goal of tweaking behavior so people do everything from saving more for retirement to saving more in energy costs.

Needless to say, the rightwing blogosphere believes this is the worst thing ever! Who knows, maybe they’ll manage to work themselves up into a Benghazi-style hysteria over it. In any case, it’s definitely a Benghazi-style scandal — i.e., not a scandal at all.

How long as government been doing this sort of thing? Pretty much forever. From the Forest Service’s Smokey Bear campaign to the Department of Health and Human Services ads raising awareness of various health issues, government tries to shape behavior without resorting to legislation.

I suppose the freak out may be over the fact that the White House isn’t trying to legislate behavior. After all, that’s the “limited government" conservative approach. From when you’re allowed to be free of pregnancy to who you’re allowed to love and marry, rightwingers are all about micromanaging people’s lives.

Maybe they look at efforts to shape behavior like this and think, “You’re doing it wrong!"

Being a conservative is easy

[via Tweeter Economy]

After marriage equality ruling, conservative leader plays the victim card

Wow, who could’ve seen that coming, huh?

Steve Benen: The Heritage Foundation’s Jim DeMint published a daily essay this morning on marriage equality, which struck me as … what’s the word I’m looking for … hilarious.

The crux of the piece is that opponents of equal rights for all Americans “deserve to be treated with dignity" — the classic “be tolerant of my intolerance" sort of schtick. Consider this gem:

[The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act] denies dignity to the millions of Americans and their elected officials who have voted to pass laws that tell the truth about marriage.

I’ve read that sentence several times, trying to make sense of it, but I’m at a bit of a loss. In fact, I’m not sure if DeMint even knows what “dignity" means, exactly. The former senator seems to be arguing that the nation has a choice: we can extend basic human decency to all Americans and eliminate the need for second-class citizenship or we can make proponents of discrimination feel good about themselves. We’re apparently supposed to endorse the latter.

Benen has more, but the point I want to make is that — no matter what the issue — Republicans are always the victims. DeMint has no legitimate argument to make, so he lays down the well-worn conservative victim card.

But DeMint’s op-ed isn’t meant to change anyone’s mind about marriage rights. What it’s meant to do is solidify the base who dearly cherish their own victimhood. Always outraged, always convinced that America is beset by enemies from within and without, always certain they’re the heroes in their little drama-queen narratives, the rightwing Tea Party base loves nothing more than to be told that they’re being disrespected/deprived of their rights/attacked by forces that only Republicans are capable of resisting.

Jim DeMint’s sad defense of institutional homophobia may be hilarious, but it’s also calculated to anger the Republican base with their imaginary status as perpetual victims.

Why the one thing that should be a scandal definitely won’t be

Here’s a random collection of conservative pieces (and pieces about conservatives) on the massive PRISM data-mining program:

Wall Street Journal: “Thank You for Data-Mining”

National Review: “A Small Price to Pay”

Jennifer Rubin: “Unwarranted hysteria over Verizon data collection”

Forbes: “NSA’s PRISM Sounds Like A Darn Good Idea To Me: This Is What Governments Are For”

Mediaite: “Kirsten Powers Defends NSA Data Grab: ‘Didn’t Have A Problem With It Under Bush, Don’t Have A Problem With It Now’”

Washington Post: “Congress all but silent on surveillance of Internet records”

The rightwing blogosphere is mostly up in arms over the program, but they’re up in arms if Obama has pancakes for breakfast. They haven’t really noticed that no one pays attention to them anymore. Their audience is the choir. The growing consensus on the right is that this most definitely is not a scandal, but Barack Obama finally seeing the wisdom of embracing his inner neocon.

The Atlantic’s Elspeth Reeve explains that a big part of the problem is tech-illiteracy — they don’t know what “metadata” means, so it can’t possibly be very important.

But the bigger part is cowardice. Conservatives are not brave. Brave people don’t support torture, hide behind assault weapons, blindly throw money at the military in the name of “defense,” or embrace a “security at any cost” mentality. As Ben Franklin said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” This is why the right is always first to suggest war and the first to demand we throw away rights in the name of being “tough on crime.” They have no backbone and insist that government do everything in its power to guarantee them a risk-free life. They support the data-mining operation only because they’re terrified of giving up a sliver of possible safety in the name of greater freedom.

The next time one of these people tells you how they love America and liberty, feel free to laugh in their face. They do not.

[photo by Shayan (USA)]

Heritage Foundation’s downward trajectory

The last we heard from the rightwing Heritage Foundation, they were nursing a self-inflicted credibility wound after releasing a BS report on the cost of immigration reform — a report written in part by an anti-Latino racist. Now they’re back, this time with economist Selim Furth testifying before a Senate committee on the restorative wonders of austerity.

The problem wasn’t that the testimony was bullshit, the problem was that it was such obvious bullshit that it would never convince anyone in a million years. He cherrypicked numbers and left out others — in short, outright lying to support his case.

Steve Benen: …Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) pointed during the hearing that Furth’s claims about [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] numbers are largely the opposite of the figures from the OECD itself.

“I am concerned that your testimony to this committee has been meretricious,” Whitehouse told Furth. “I am contesting whether you have given us fair and accurate information.”

For a Senate Budget Committee hearing, that’s pretty tough language. Indeed, the senator was effectively accusing an economist from the nation’s preeminent conservative think tank of presenting deliberately misleading information on an important issue.

Which leads Paul Krugman to wonder if Heritage has finally just jumped the shark entirely:

One does wonder, by the way, whether Heritage may at this point be destroying its own usefulness. Its purpose was never to do real research; it was always a propaganda arm of the movement. But it was supposed to create a plausible illusion of intellectual rigor, good enough to take in gullible journalists.

But is there anyone not a committed right-winger who, at this point, believes anything coming out of Heritage? And in that case, what’s the Foundation for?

That’s a good question. Heritage is a bullshit factory; the propaganda shop for the far right in America. But is propaganda worth anything when it’s such obvious lies that no one could ever believe it? At this point, they’re pretty much just crazy-assed talk radio dressed up nicer. Limbuagh, Hannity, Beck, etc. don’t convince anyone, all they do is rile up the base and get them to the polls. But that base is becoming too small to make the difference and are mattering less and less every cycle. Talk radio is a steadily declining influence in American politics and Heritage is right behind it.

How about that visionary leadership from Heritage leader and former Sen. Jim DeMint, huh? Everything started to come apart over there after he signed on.

Say what you like about Jim DeMint, but he sure knows how to get a plane to the ground in a big hurry.

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

Boston man chews out stooge from Alex Jones’ InfoWars

[h/t Raw Story]

Boston bombing suspect rejected mainstream Islam

Boston Globe:  Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the brothers accused of bombing the Boston Marathon, angrily disrupted a January talk at a Cambridge mosque when a speaker compared the Prophet Mohammed and the peace activist Martin Luther King Jr., the second time in recent months that Tsarnaev’s radical theology collided with mainstream Muslim faith at a public religious talk.

In the days since the suspects were identified last week, a picture has emerged of 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev — the elder of the two brothers, who was killed Friday in the battle with police — as an increasingly militant immigrant, whom family members described as unhappy and mean.

[…]

In disrupting the talk in January at the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s shouted at a speaker: “You are a Kafir” – a nonbeliever, according to Yusufi Vali, a spokesman for the mosque. Tsarnaev went on to say the speaker was contaminating people’s minds, and accused him of being a hypocrite.

The congregation disagreed, according to Vali, and “shouted him out of the mosque” on Prospect Street.

Take a swing through the rightwing blogosphere and you’ll learn that all Muslims believe the same things because the Koran has crazy, genocidal passages like this:

Suppose you hear in one of the towns Allah is giving you that some worthless rabble among you have led their fellow citizens astray by encouraging them to worship foreign gods.  In such cases, you must examine the facts carefully.  If you find it is true and can prove that such a detestable act has occurred among you, you must attack that town and completely destroy all its inhabitants, as well as all the livestock.  Then you must pile all the plunder in the middle of the street and burn it.  Put the entire town to the torch as a burnt offering to Allah.  That town must remain a ruin forever; it may never be rebuilt.  Keep none of the plunder that has been set apart for destruction.  Then Allah will turn from his fierce anger and be merciful to you.  He will have compassion on you and make you a great nation, just as he solemnly promised your ancestors.  “Allah will be merciful only if you obey him and keep all the commands I am giving you today, doing what is pleasing to him.”

Oops, sorry. That’s the Bible. Where it reads “Allah,” go ahead and substitute “the Lord your God.” Not sure how I got things all mixed up like that. We regret the error.

It’s weird. It looks like the congregation at the Cambridge mosque treated Tsarnaev the way you hope a Christian congregation would treat someone using that Bible verse to call for genocide. It looks like maybe all Muslims don’t believe the same things and even that the terrorist interpretation of Koran verses is the minority view.

Throwing all Muslims in the same pigeonhole is ignorant, bigoted, and un-American. This belief on the right is just a way for cowards to justify being jerks. And worse, they’re ignorant, bigoted, un-American, cowardly jerks who are also lazy — because the only reason you’d believe it is because it’s too complicated to try to figure out who’s a criminal and who’s not. You just throw all Muslims in the criminal pile and be done with it, because you’re an intellectually lazy and immoral slob who’d rather prosecute the innocent than determine guilt on an individual basis.

[photo from the FBI]

Panicked, gullible rightwing bloggers get the story exactly wrong — again

CNN:  Evidence uncovered so far supports the theory that the two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings had no help, authorities said Saturday.

“From what I know right now, these two acted together and alone,” Watertown Police Chief Edward Deveau told CNN. “I think we have to be ever vigilant, and we’re learning as we go along, but as far as this little cell — this little group — I think we got our guys.”

Deveau said investigators were continuing to look into where Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. and Dzhokar Tsarnaev, 19, may have gotten the resources to amass the cache of weapons used in the bombings and afterward. “We have to figure that out,” he said. “There’s a lot more work to go.”

But, asked whether Boston residents can rest easy, Deveau said, “We got our two guys.”

You might recall that during the weekend, the rightwing blogosphere was breathlessly repeating a Daily Mirror report about an FBI investigation into a 12-person “sleeper cell” who were responsible for the bombings. No one else was reporting this anywhere, but the rightwing blogs ate it up — just as they’d fallen for the New York Post’s Boston bombing fan fiction. All of these people need to print the following sentence out in giant letters and paste it over the PC’s they blog with: TABLOIDS ARE BULLSHIT FACTORIES!

The problem with the wingnut blogosphere is that they’re more interested in propaganda than in facts. So they’ll repeat the scariest stories, because that serves their agendas. They seem to think that sooner or later, GWB’s torture and wiretap legacy will get turned around by the facts and they’ll grasp at any straw that will make them look less like panic-stricken idiots who followed neocon monsters in the eyes of history.

But the facts never seem to do that job — mostly because they actually were panic-stricken idiots following neocon monsters. So they’ll keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over, because reality is never going to come to their rescue.

So just point and laugh. Because the only other option is to feel sorry for them… And they don’t deserve that.

[photo by thebudman623]

Are rightwing blogs allowing themselves to be led astray by a tabloid again?

The rightwing blogosphere demonstrated their endless gullibility in the Boston bombing by running with the New York Post’s ridiculously bad reporting. The New York tabloid had misidentified suspects — twice in a row — and reported 12 dead. The first clue that this was all wrong should’ve been that the Post was almost alone in their reporting of these “facts” and that the only other sources reporting them cited the Post.

Now the wingnut blogosphere is once again running with a tabloid news story. This time, from the UK’s Daily Mirror, which is running a story about the FBI investigating a 12-person “sleeper cell” in relation to the bombings. Once again, almost no one else is reporting this and it’s all based on unnamed sources. While it’s too soon to say it’s not true, it’s absolutely true to say it looks a whole lot like BS — especially considering the tabloid’s recent history of inaccuracy.

Once again, I find myself wondering how on Earth anyone can ever take these people seriously.

[photo released by FBI]