Wingnutty Deliciousness

The new front in the culture war: postage stamps!

Have you looked at U.S. postage stamps recently?  They are childish, silly, and racist.  Growing up I remember that for years we would use stamps with the figures of Lincoln, FDR, Washington represented.  You'd send a letter and you could not help but be reminded of to whom we were indebted and what it was that they did. 

A 5 minute cruise of the USPS website shows that these kinds of men have been erased.  Here is the line-up as of today:

Polar bears, lots of women and blacks no one has ever heard of.  There's Julia de Burgos (who?), Mother Teresa (an Albanian saint), Oscar Micheaux (a black guy I never heard of), Kate Smith, Katharine Hepburn, Love, Pansies in a Basket, the Year of the Rabbit (Forever, a Navajo necklace, Anna Julia Cooper (a black woman I never heard of), Adopt a Shelter Pet, Butterfly, Tiffany lamps, Chinese bracelets, Kwanzaa,  Mary Lasker (who?), Richard Wright (another black guy), playing cards, balloons, daisies, cherries, all the NFL Teams, Hollywood personalities, the Simpsons, and don't forget...you guessed it...the all-important-never-thing-that-one-cannot-know-too-much-about...wait for it... Negro Baseball Leagues.

My God! There are black people Alan Fraser hasn't heard of? I am shocked, SHOCKED by this development!

Also, Richard Wright is "another black guy."

In other news, the next rise in stamp prices is clearly going to pay reparations for slavery.....

"I cannot believe Bill Hicks is dead and this motherfucker is still touring."

Not only is Gallagher not funny; he's also apparently a bigoted, homophobic, right-wing paranoiac.

Perry for President!

Oh please, please, please, please, please!!!!

I actually think Rick Perry could win the Republican nomination. He moved far enough right to win the Republican nomination for governor, something that was in question for awhile. So he's probably not going to be out-righted in a national primary. He comes from Texas, which Teabaggers love. He's completely insane, which they also love. Of course, he has the hair. He has the ambition almost for sure. He might even be able to unite the Republican Party more or less.

Of course, he's almost completely unelectable. This would be the greatest campaign ever, maybe even better than Palin. A Perry-Palin ticket would be the greatest gift I've received since the Yankees traded Jay Buhner to the Mariners for Ken Phelps.

And I know I can't wait for Perry's forthcoming book, which I'm real sure he wrote himself!

An Idea So Crazy I Can't Believe Rick Perry Didn't Think Of It First, Vol, 2

Dave Noon points out South Carolina Republican state legislator Mike Pitts has proposed a bill which reaches new level of lunacy:

South Carolina will no longer recognize U.S. currency as legal tender, if State Rep. Mike Pitts has his way.

Pitts, a fourth-term Republican from Laurens, introduced legislation earlier this month that would ban what he calls “the unconstitutional substitution of Federal Reserve Notes for silver and gold coin” in South Carolina.

If the bill were to become law, South Carolina would no longer accept or use anything other than silver and gold coins as a form of payment for any debt, meaning paper money would be out in the Palmetto State.

Pitts said the intent of the bill is to give South Carolina the ability to “function through gold and silver coinage” and give the state a “base of currency” in the event of a complete implosion of the U.S. economic system.

OK, obviously this is both totally insane and unconstitutional.  But like I pointed out the other day in discussing Utah's proposal to eliminate the mandatory 12th grade, you have to take these proposals seriously. Pitts represents a real strain of anti-government, hard-currency belief within the loony right wing of the Republican Party. By bringing these ideas up, Pitts gains credibility for himself and his ideas. And his last big idea, a gun tax holiday, was enacted, so it's not like in the feces-tossing atmosphere of the South Carolina legislature he's an isolated figure.

An Idea So Crazy, I Can't Believe Rick Perry Didn't Think of It First

Perhaps you've heard of the proposal in the Utah state legislature to eliminate the mandatory 12th grade. Seniors just screw around anyway, right? Also, I'm sure if that happened, senioritis wouldn't just transfer to the 11th grade or anything. Also, large numbers of teenagers hanging around with nothing to do has never caused any problems in society or anything.

Obviously we can make fun of these wackos in any number of ways. But let's take this proposal seriously for a minute. Because it now represents a serious policy idea in the conservative world. If you went back 40 years and suggested that much of the current Republican agenda would be mainstream and that even the Democrats would have adopted much of it, you'd have been laughed out of the room. Since Americans don't want to pay taxes under any circumstances and they also don't want big deficits (except for the military of course. Support our troops!!!!11!!11), we can expect crazier and crazier cuts to domestic programs. Cut the 12th grade? Eliminate all busing for high schoolers? Why not!

Of course, this isn't going to pass. The same laziness and greed that makes us not want to pay taxes makes us not want to deal with the consequences of not paying taxes either, particularly when that means we have to figure out what to do with our kids. But don't be surprised to see similar ideas pop up around the conservative blogosphere and filtering into Republican politics and mainstream political discourse in coming years.

Total Republican Insanity

It's no secret that I am deeply despairing for the nation's future. I've been working on a post for awhile about how the Senate's collapse is the greatest threat to democracy this nation has faced in over a century. I fret about our inability to get anything done, to solve any social problem, to even admit that climate change is a problem.

So I am hardly surprised but am deeply saddened to see these poll results from Research 2000/Daily Kos asking self-identified Republicans about their beliefs. A few "highlights"

Should public school students be taught that the book of Genesis in the Bible explains how God created the world?
Yes 77
No 15
Not Sure 8

Should contraceptive use be outlawed?
Yes 34
No 48
Not Sure 18

Would you favor or oppose giving illegal immigrants now living in the United States the right to live here legally if they pay a fine and learn English?
Favor 26
Oppose 59
Not Sure 15

Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not?
Yes 39
No 32
Not Sure 29

Do you support the death penalty?
Yes 91
No 4
Not Sure 5

Oh boy...


Sara Robinson provides some really first-rate analysis to these numbers, particularly noting that on the issue of contraception, it's more useful to watch what people do rather than what they say. But rhetoric matters and we are seeing the impact of 40 years of crazy right-wing rhetoric reach fruition today, something that seriously threatens the future of this nation.

Worst Blog Post of the Year

Treason in Defense of Slavery Yankee on the cop killing in Tacoma makes the "connection" that because left-leaning Evergreen State University is 30 miles away, it's probably some leftist tied to the school.

Meanwhile, in reality the killer turns out to be someone Mike Huckabee pardoned while governor.

In comments that TIDOS Yankee quickly deleted, I suggested a more plausible connection--that there are killer whales nearby in the Puget Sound and that they have declared war on local police. I also recommended that he go back to his more respectable posts--such as asking readers for donations after a wind storm broke his grill just after complaining about federal assistance to Katrina victims.

Today in Wingnuttery

1. 1/3 of Georgia Republicans are for secession. If Texas goes, why not Georgia too. I'd love to be the person who sets Atlanta on fire again. Actually that's not true. Atlanta is full of good working-class people. I'd love to burn Cobb County to the ground though. The Atlanta suburbs are some of the worst places in America.

2. It sure is hard to be a white man these days. Only making around 124% of what a woman makes, not getting pulled over by the cops for nothing, at the top of nearly every corporation in the country, holding the vast majority of U.S. senate seats. And now, soon we will only have 6 of the 9 Supreme Court seats! I sure do understand racism now! What the marchers went through in Selma is nothing compared to the oppression I face every day! Damn, it's tough now that the women and the blacks hold all the power in this country. Where is a white man to go? We can't even go to South Africa anymore? Now I really want Texas to secede!

3. Jonah Goldberg is scared that Obama will appoint Anita Hill to the Supreme Court. This would be, by far, the greatest Supreme Court nomination in history.

4. Meanwhile, Veronique de Rugy provides the best advice I've ever heard:

And so did Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, in the same way as they vote for every spending bill in sight. In addition, Congressional Quarterly notes this morning:

Maine’s two senators, Snowe and Susan Collins, are among the Republicans most likely to vote with Democrats on policies such as energy, entitlements and social issues such as support for abortion rights.

Then, how can they complain with a straight face that their party is not accepting enough of their "centrism"? I am not a party person, but if the concept means anything, it seems to me that the GOP might, in fact, be too accepting.

Yes, that's absolutely true. The GOP is WAY too accepting of diversity in their ranks.

Oh please, please, please, please follow this advice!

"Dangerous University Courses"/Insane and Flat-Out WRONG Rhetoric on Immigration

In light of the recent discussions here on the role of academics and universities, let me remind everyone that while Klein may be wrong, some people are just insane. Yes, Family Security Matters has released its list of "America's most dangerous college courses." (h/t Michael Berube). It is generally laughable, as is Rantz's, commentary, though there is one portion of his post that I take rather personally. In adding , Rants writes:

All you need to learn about immigration law I can teach you in this one sentence: it is illegal to enter our country without permission, bypassing our laws. Get in line, and we’ll welcome you – so long as you do not have nefarious purposes, of course.

Well, Mr. Rantz, all I can say is:

You. Clearly. Know. NOTHING. About. Immigration. Law.

Without getting too personal, I've been on the front lines of the immigration issue now for almost two years, trying to help somebody get into the country 100% legally. This individual has followed every step exactly as advised, hired a lawyer to help with the process, remained on top of the paperwork, in short did everything absolutely as the U.S. government demanded (including no fewer than 3 changes in policy over 3 months at the beginning of 2007). Yet the government has used ineptitude, incompetency, shifting policy, and labyrinthine bureaucracy to suggest to the individual in question that his/her presence in the U.S. will be granted if he/she follows all of the paperwork, details, examinations, and inquiries (many of which would make Americans blush and proclaim they have a right to privacy), then the U.S. might begrudgingly accept the individual as a U.S. resident. If there is one thing that infuriates me more than anything else from the right (and left, too), it's this insane notion that the United States is ready and willing to accept immigrants if they do things legally. If any of these idiots actually had to wade into the immigration process for even 2 months, even they would have a hard time denying that, at best, the U.S. will tolerate legal immigrants, but only after they have faced more bureaucratic pressure, more invasive questions and exams, and more concentrated efforts to simply pressure them into giving up, than any normal person could reasonably be expected to handle.

Conservapedia's Entry on Henry Kissinger

In the comment thread to this Dave Noon post over at LG&M, many people were playing with Conservapedia ("The Trustworthy Encyclopedia"!) and laughing about the Obama entry there. Obama's entry is indeed a gold-mine of laughs -among other things, he was "allegedly" born in Honolulu, he has referred to "my Muslim faith," and he could be sworn in on the Koran! (And the footnotes for every one of those is as funny as the claim they support).

However my favorite part of the Obama entry is the claim "President Obama will be the first person having ties to a known former terrorist to gain control over America's nuclear weapons." Of course, I thought of a previous member of the cabinet whose activities could be called "terrorist," so I went ahead and looked up Henry Kissinger's entry at Conservapedia.

Not so surprisingly, it's not as long as one might think (Wikipedia's entry being far more detailed). For example, in dealing with Latin America, the entry devotes an entire 169 words, and only mentions Chile in detail - no Argentina, Paraguay, Ecuador, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico - nobody. And on Chile, it simply claims, "Kissinger and Nixon permitted covert operations by the CIA and military]] designed to destabilize the anti-American Allende regime in Chile. Allende was overthrown by the Chilean military with no help from the U.S., but hatred of Kissinger on the left escalated another notch as their favorite regime collapsed. " Nevermind those declassified documents that show how close Kissinger and Pinochet were in bed after the latter launched mass murder and torture, and nevermind those documents that put CIA agents on the ground when the coup took place. Kissinger is just blamed because of the hatred of Kissinger on the left!

No doubt, Conservapedia defendants would claim Wikipedia's length and detail is just due to "leftists filled with hatred" for Kissinger, but given how vaguely Conservapedia glosses over some key portions of Kissinger's acts, or even totally ignores them (as in the case of the Khmer Rouge, East Timor, or anywhere in Africa, particularly Angola), it seems far more likely that Kissinger is such an unforgiveable piece of filth, even Conservapedia doesn't have that much good to say about him. And that truly is amazing, given the steaming piles of allegations that pass at Conservapedia.

It's Hard Out There For A Cracker

It's real hard to be a racist white these days. We have a black man as president of the United States. Black people are president of our universities. We have to listen to hip hop blaring on campus.

And now a good clean cut white fraternity can't even wave the Confederate flag.

It's hard out there for a cracker.

Mike Adams has already shifted to pushing white resentment in the face of the Obama election (although he probably was before the election too.) Not only does Adams tell the sad story of a University of North Carolina-Wilmington fraternity that got in trouble for flying the Confederate flag, but he says that it is less offensive than hip hop. Hip hop uses the "n" word after all. And of course, Adams says the real reason they got in trouble is because the United States elected Barack Obama as president.

Adams uses this sad, sad story as a metaphor for the decline of white privilege throughout America. And I know, it's tough. Pretty soon, white men won't make up over 90% of CEOs of top corporations, most of the U.S. Senate and the Supreme Court, and control an enormous amount of the nation's wealth. And what kind of a nation would that be?

Probably a pretty good one.

Via Anti Neo-Confederate

Worst. Tattoo. Ever.

In reading up on the regional and city politics in NYC (my home-to-be in about a month), I came upon this, and all I can say is: Ew.

Mr. Stone, who has referred to politics as “performance art,” is a longtime
Republican consultant known for hardball politics and a cloak-and-dagger
sensibility. He started out as a teenager in the campaign of Richard
M. Nixon, and has a tattoo of the former president’s head on his back.

Charles Krauthammer: Crack Smoker of the Day

Why? Well, he must be on some kind of first-rate drug. In his analysis of Bush's "Axis of Evil" six years after its announcement, he declares Bush 1 for 3--having succeeded in Iraq!!!!!!!!

Well, I'd hate to see the failures.

Krauthammer is still seething about our inability to invade Iran, claiming "the intelligence bureaucracy, in a spectacularly successful coup, seized control of the policy with a National Intelligence Estimate that very misleadingly trumpeted the claim that Iran had halted its nuclear program."

He also compares George W. Bush to Abraham Lincoln and David Petraeus to Ulysses S. Grant. And he's serious!

The real question here is what do I gain from reading Charles Krauthammer? Nothing of value, for certain. It's a window into the crazy mind of the neoconservative though. And crazy indeed it is.

Those Damned Lefty Professors!!!

Kate Sheppard reports on the new Family Security Matters list of the top 10 most dangerous classes in American colleges.

This list is absurd on so many levels. First, it clearly reflects the bias of Jason Rantz, the wingnut who put it together. Thus, there are two courses from Occidental College, including "Movements in Social Justice," which seems to have made the list because Rantz didn't like the professor when he took it. Leave it to the right to make only the most theoretically rigorous decisions.

Other courses on there include "Islam in Global Context," "Introduction to Labor Studies," and "Imperialism in American History." Sounds like a pretty awesome semester to me.

What disappoints me is that I am not on the list. I know I'm new and everything, but I hate America as much as these other professors (which is to say not at all). Certainly my "Hurricane Katrina in Historical Perspective" course this spring should be competitive. After all, I'm assigning a chapter from Michael Eric Dyson's Come Hell or High Water, entitled "Does George W. Bush Care About Black People." Of course, the answer is no. But hey, telling the truth means you hate America.

So come on Rantz--include me on your next list! I'll even pay you for the honor!!!!

Michael Medved Defends Slavery

Yep, that's right. Here's the link.

He says he's exposing myths about slavery. Here are his six talking points, which Medved actually calls his Six Inconvenient Truths.

1. Slavery was an ancient and universal institution, not a distinctively American innovation.
2. Slavery existed only briefly, and in limited locales, in the history of the republic - involving only a tiny percentage of the ancestors of today’s Americans.
3. Though brutal, slavery wasn’t genocidal: live slaves were valuable but dead captives brought no profit.
4. It’s not true that the U.S. became a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor: the most prosperous states in the country were those that first freed their slaves.
5. While America deserves no unique blame for the existence of slavery, the United States merits special credit for its rapid abolition.
6. There is no reason to believe that today’s African Americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained behind in Africa.

I hate to waste my time, and God knows I have other things I should be doing this evening. But I can't let this slide. So here we go.

1. Slavery was an ancient and universal institution, not a distinctively American innovation.

And that makes it OK? Fine, let's see where this game takes us. Oh, here's one! "Anti-Semitism was an ancient and universal institution, not a distinctively German innovation." Hell, why don't we just kill all our Jews? I mean, everyone else once did it!!!

2. Slavery existed only briefly, and in limited locales, in the history of the republic - involving only a tiny percentage of the ancestors of today’s Americans.

Medved simply has no understanding of American history. First, slavery was very common in the North at the time of the Revolution. There were slaves in New York as late as the mid 1830s. He plays a tricky little game too. By claiming that slavery existed only "briefly" in the history of the republic, he's trying to marginalize it in American history. But of course, his definition of "briefly" happens to be a mere 79 years (1776-1865). Plus, he simply ignores the 147 years before that. Totally irrelevant of course.

The idea of slavery existed only in "limited locales" made me laugh out loud. Oh, you mean only the entire American South? Is that all? And not the South narrowly defined like today, but also Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, and Delaware. And again, there were many slaves in the North.

The argument that only a tiny percentage of the ancestors of today's Americans gets thrown out all the time by right-wingers. It serves to deny the existence of white privilege that even today makes life easier for whites. Medved says, " Of course, a hundred years of Jim Crow laws, economic oppression and indefensible discrimination followed the theoretical emancipation of the slaves, but those harsh realities raise different issues from those connected to the long-ago history of bondage. " Well, not really. They are closely related. Medved uses this to sever the history of racism in America from the issue of reparations, which is at least part of what he's trying to attack here. Is reparations even an issue these days? I think Medved is trying to relive the Republican glory days of the late 90s.

3. Though brutal, slavery wasn’t genocidal: live slaves were valuable but dead captives brought no profit. Like Point 1, I say, so what? It's entirely unclear to me what point Medved is trying to make. But what he doesn't say is that this was not the choice of American slaveholders. Rather, they had to keep their slaves alive because they were too poor to afford more. In other parts of the New World, particularly in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and Brazil, slaves were so cheap that they were treated like dogs. If they died, no one cared. Plantation owners could just buy another boatload. All that makes Americans different is that they lived in an economic backwater of the New World and could not grow a product that made them enough money to treat slaves like they really wanted. Where North Americans got the closest, on the rice plantations of South Carolina, slaves were treated worse than in Virginia and the tobacco regions.

4. It’s not true that the U.S. became a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor: the most prosperous states in the country were those that first freed their slaves.

Now this is just stupid. Medved either is ignorant of US history or is just lying. First of all, there was great wealth in the South. It may have been concentrated in a few hands, but those with lots of slaves made a tremendous amount of money for the time. Second, he completely ignores American economic history and the first years of the Industrial Revolution. For the North made tons of money off slave labor too. It's just that they bought the cotton that southern slaves grew and turned it into profits in their textile mills. They could not have done so without those big cotton plantations in the South and they made few if any complaints over the fact that their profits came from slave labor. The North and South were intricately connected in these years. They were far from the two distinct societies many claim. I could go on about northern owned slave ships or yet again discuss slaves in the North, but I'm going to scream if I write about this much longer.

5. While America deserves no unique blame for the existence of slavery, the United States merits special credit for its rapid abolition.

Ha Ha Ha Ha. That's really funny. This comes from the AMERICA IS THE GREATEST NATION IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT YOU ARE A DIRTY COMMIE theory of American history. While I agree that the US does not deserve "unique blame for the existence of slavery," it does deserve some blame for allowing an institution to flourish that directly contradicted its founding principle. But the idea that the US "merits special credit for its rapid abolition just makes no sense." I would say the nation that deserves said credit in Britain. The British abolished slavery 32 years before the US. The British went out of their way to suppress the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Meanwhile, Americans were trying all they could to smuggle fresh slaves into the country to get around the 1808 constitutional abolition of the slave trade that Southerners bitterly regretted soon after they agreed to it.

6. There is no reason to believe that today’s African Americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained behind in Africa.

Wow. I have nothing but contempt for Medved, but even I'm surprised he pulled this out. This is nothing but racism. Medved is rehashing the old slavery-is-good-for-the-savages argument that was really popular during the years of slavery. Of course, it remained popular after too, just with "colonialism" replacing "slavery." Medved is a racist. I really wonder if Medved would do anything but wave the flag if the United States or Europe were to recolonize Africa. This is just disgusting.

It's a real wonder the Republican Party is increasingly strictly the party of white people with characters like Medved speaking for them. Racism runs in a powerful current through the heart of the Republican Party. The fact is that lots of right-wingers are reading this and loving it. They agree with everything Medved, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Colter, Malkin, and the rest say. Thank God history and demographics are against these racists. I would like to personally thank all of these people for driving every non-white person in this nation into the hands of the Democratic Party.

Via Nicole Belle.

Punk'd Again

I think maybe Charles Johnson needs a vacation. A couple days ago, the bedwetting bigot got took by what turned out to be a movie still. Today he spews his milky outrage over this Jerusalem Post story, which claims to show photos of what Johnson calls a "barbaric honor killing in Gaza" (with Johnson, you can be sure that, whatever they're doing in Gaza, it's barbaric). Not so much, says Charles Levinson, noting that the photos come from a video of a murder which took place in Iraq in 2004. Oops. That's what you get for believing what you read in the Jerusalem Post, I guess, but I am always amazed at how Johnson is able to work up concern for the deaths of Palestinians when, and only when, they're killed by other Palestinians.

Step away from the keyboard, Charles, go out, take a walk. Give yourself a furlough from the War against Islamofascism. We can spare you (believe me, we can spare you). There will still be a whole religion and culture for you to slander when you get back.

Giuliani: Bringing the Crazy to a World Near You

My new piece on Giuliani's war cabinet is up at The American Prospect.

Move Out, Get a Job, and Share an Apartment with Southeast Asia

Strengthening my thesis that he is the Andy Rooney of the More Rubble Less Trouble set, Victor Hanson tells the Middle East to grow up, already!

No, really. He tells a loosely defined geographic region to grow up. Hanson gets extra points for rehearsing the moldy old "Islamists hate Western culture, but they use cellphones!" bit as if it were a devastating "gotcha!" It's gotten so that pointing out that there isn't a cliche in existence which Hanson won't boldly deploy in his war against accurately assessing the Islamist phenomonon is itself a cliche.

Carrying the Torch for Constantine XI

Mark Krikorian, living in a small, rough lean-to and feeding on roots, berries, and moss out beyond the farthest frontiers of Wingnutistan:

We shouldn't let May 29 pass without noting the anniversary of one of the great tragedies of history, the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Sure, the Byzantine Empire was already finished at that point, but its final snuffing out by the Turks was an important milestone in the jihad we continue to face.

Wow. Does this mean that we should celebrate our allies', the Mongols', sacking of Baghdad in 1258 as a victory in the war on terror? Or lament the Quraishi defeat at the Battle of Badr in 624 as the moment when 9/11 really became inevitable? Here we have incontrovertible proof that education and knowledge do not necessarily make one smarter; in many cases they just provide a grander framework for one's preexisting resentments and prejudices, a larger stage upon which to rehearse one's stupidity.

Also, I think Krikorian is letting those damn back-stabbing Paulicians off too easy. If only they hadn't weakened Byzantine resolve in the 9th century, we wouldn't all be speaking Turkish now.

How I hate the Paulicians.