Still another week's installment that does not disappoint ~ is it just me or does the profound and apparently irremediable idiocy seem to be spreading? ~ #s 7 and 8 are my favorites this week ~ ~ "live links" to more/corroborating info in the original ~ Sooz

AlterNet / By Janet Allon
10 Deranged Dispatches From the Right-Wing Wackosphere This Week
Holier than the Pope himself, Palin and Buchanan take Francis to task.

November 16, 2013 | It’s been a busy week for all manner of charlatans, religious and otherwise.

1. One-woman parade of idiocy, Sarah Palin: The Pope is too liberal; social programs are similar to slavery.

Sarah Palin was on book tour this week, telegenically spewing some of the stupidest nonsense we’ve heard since she announced she could see Russia from her house. We’d like to ignore her, but the fact is she’s hugely popular among a certain segment of the population, and her book about the “war on Christmas,” Good Tidings and Great Joy, is destined for best-sellerdom. Just don’t wish her “Happy holidays!” That is waging war, my friend.

As Christian as she is, though, during an interview with CNN, Palin complained about Pope Francis. She’s taken aback by his liberal attitudes, she says. Taken aback by his unwillingness to go after the LGBT community and atheists, we suppose, and his sympathy for the lonely elderly, and unemployed youth. As Bill Maher said, Palin's really going to be shook up when she finds out what Jesus said. Be sure to have tranquilizers available when she encounters the Sermon on the Mount.

Palin hopped right on that highly offensive bandwagon of equating the social safety net with slavery. “Our free stuff today is being paid for today by taking money from our children and borrowing money from China,” she said. “When that note comes due — and this isn’t racist so try it anyway, this isn’t racist — but it’s going to be like slavery when that note is due, right? We are going to be beholden to a foreign master.”

Insisting that you are not being racist when you’re comparing slavery to something far more benign is always a really convincing way to make people believe that you are in no way racist.

2. Pat Buchanan: The Pope is bordering on moral relativism. The horror!

Pat Buchanan is another conservative who is very upset that the Pope is not willing to use the Catholic Church to bully people anymore. Specifically, he misses license to bully atheists, women who use birth control and have abortions, and gay people. In his refusal to berate or convert atheists, and tell LGBT people that they are going to hell, Pope Francis is bordering on — cue music of dread — moral relativism.

Two of the statements that upset Buchanan the most: Pope Francis describing the attempt to convert people to Christianity as “solemn nonsense,” and saying that Christians should spend less time lecturing people than listening to them to “discover new needs.”

Why, that dastardly Pope Francis even acknowledged that people can be good no matter what their religious belief, or lack thereof. And he committed the cardinal sin (sorry, pun intended) of stressing helping the poor, rather than focusing on distractions like the gay lifestyle. As Buchanan wrote at Townhall on Friday, Pope Francis is leading “the Catholic Church to a stance of non-belligerence, if not neutrality, in the culture war for the soul of the West.”

A non-belligerent church?! What the hell?

3. Pat Robertson: Ask your gay son if he has been molested.

Ever the dispenser of sound parenting advice, 700 Club host, evangelical bigot par excellence Pat Robertson advised a caller to be “understanding” when talking to her gay son. By being “understanding,” he meant asking her son if the reason he is gay is because he was molested. Because that is always how people become gay.

“Is there a biological thing going on or has he been influenced — has a coach molested him?” Robertson asked the viewer who called in.

Either way, of course, the mother must immediately enroll her son in one of those gay conversion therapies; yes, the abusive form of pseudo-counseling that even ultra-conservative New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was forced to acknowledge should be illegal.

(h/t Right Wing Watch)

4. Sandy Rios: Gay-waiter-refused-tip story just a clever ruse to help ENDA.

No doubt you’ll remember the story two weeks ago of the Kansas City waiter who, in lieu of a tip, received a note from his oh-so-considerate Christian customers saying that, despite his superb service, they couldn’t let him share in their riches because they, and god, disapproved of his lifestyle. That story went viral, and even Bill Maher picked up on it, suggesting that if you want to be selfish and cheap, just do it. Don’t claim it’s for the worker’s own good.

Unfortunately, the behavior has spread, with another family refusing a tip this week to a server they assumed was a lesbian. They were even less nice about it, treating her rudely from the start, racking up a sizable bill and gleefully stiffing the hardworker, who happens to be an ex-Marine, out of her gratuity.

But wait, back up, this just in: Sandy Rios of the American Family Association says the first story was a ruse — a hoax staged by the tricky LGBT community to drum up sympathy for ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) to pass in the Senate.

“I smell a rat in this story,” Rios said. “I don’t believe a Christian couple wrote this note, I think it was a ruse because it was the week ENDA was being voted on.”

If only progressives were as willing to engage in dirty tricks and outright deception as ultra-conservatives. If only… hatred was something that was merely stagecraft.

5. Rafael Cruz: Atheism leads to sexual abuse of children.

Ted’s dad. At it again. Downloading his unique combo of spurious lies, bile and nonsense.

This week, speaking at a gathering of a group we must look into joining, OK2A, described on its website as “Oklahoma Premiere Second Amendment advocacy group,” Rafael Cruz said, straight up, that atheism leads to sexual abuse of children.

Here is the logic he laid out to the assembled gun-toting crazies: “If there is nothing, if there is no God, then we are ruled by our instincts.”

Atheism leads to moral anarchy, he said. “Do we know any politicians that have done that?” he asked the crowd.

“Hitler!” answered Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, who, coincidentally, was in the audience.

“Oh, we don’t have to go that far, Larry,” Cruz chummily replied. “Just go to Washington. Just go to the White House.” From there, it’s a short hop to sexual immorality, perversion and sexual abuse, Cruz concluded.

Follow?

6. “Historian” David Barton: True Christian soldiers wouldn't have PTSD.

Atheism is apparently a problem in the military, too. Because if soldiers were true Christians, they would not feel bad about killing enemies and sometimes non-combatants. They would not come home traumatized and have all these psychological problems.

Christian “historian” David Barton, the one who blamed Typhoon Haiyan on women having legal abortions, celebrated Veteran’s Day by criticizing veterans who feel at all guilty for what they do on the battlefield. If they read their Bible, he and televangelist Kenneth Copeland agreed on Believer’s Voice of Victory, they’d read in Numbers 32 that soldiers “shall return and be guiltless before the Lord” and that means that they wouldn’t have PTSD.

“You don’t take drugs to get rid of it, it doesn’t take psychology; that promise right there will get rid of it,” Copeland said.

When you go to war God’s way, Barton chimed in, “not only are you guiltless for having done that, you’re esteemed.”

So, get it together veterans!

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)

7. Rand Paul: Obamafascists are coming for your donuts.

This is truly terrifying. Right-wing libertarian wackadoodle Rand Paul took to the microphone this week to warn Americans that the federal government is targeting donuts. That’s what he said: “They’re coming after your donuts!”

Way to scare people. First, Madam Dictator Michelle Obama tries to get kids to eat more vegetables and exercise; now, the FDA is banning trans fats. Give me obesity or give me death! Or both, as the case may be.

You know who libertarian Paul is not so libertarian about? Gubb’mint employees.

"I say we should line every one of them up. I want to see how skinny or how fat the FDA agents are that are making the rules on this," he said in his rousing donut hysteria-invoking speech.

Donuts, as Esquire’s Charles Pierce pointed out, don’t need trans fats to be delicious. The two largest donut purveyors, Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts are making pretty tasty round pastries without them.

Credit where due, though: There’s no indication, yet, that Paul’s recent call to arms was plagiarized.

8. Rush Limbaugh makes deranged comments on Obamacare.

There have been a lot of deranged comments on Obamacare this week, including from the New York Times when it idiotically compared the bumpy rollout of healthcare.gov to Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina. Hmmm, website = hurricane. Thousands dead = millions potentially getting health insurance. Yep, that analogy works.

Actually, all kidding aside, it’s monstrous.

While arguably Rush Limbaugh is less influential than the Times, and perhaps a tad more right-wing, he was not to be outdone in the crazy Obamacare hysteria that ran rampant this week. Rush, of course, does not like women, or sluts as he calls them, who use birth control. And Obamacare making it easier for them to do so is one of the healthcare act’s greatest evils in his view. Because he cares so much about millennials and their virtue, Rush took it upon himself to warn them on Wednesday’s show not to fall into this trap. What Obamacare is really advocating is not safer sex, he says—it’s prostitution.

"If you like being promiscuous, you can keep on being promiscuous," Limbaugh, friend of the young, said. "If you like being a prostitute, then have at it!"

And summing up for emphasis:

"If you like your risky, promiscuous lifestyle, you can keep it. That's what Obama is promising."

Wait, that sounds kind of good, Rush. Thanks!

(h/t: Media Matters)

9. Phyllis Schlafly: Calling all border agents—be on the lookout for polygamist Muslims.

In a world that made any sense, conservative mouther-offer Phyllis Schlafly would have long ago faded into irrelevance. Frankly, we had assumed she was dead by now, but she’s alive and kicking, and still getting airtime to broadcast her ignorance.

While the Eagle Forum founder has long been preoccupied with fighting feminism, she also wants to make sure that those really sexist Muslims with multiple wives are not being let into our country. Yes, immigration, the changing complexion of America, and what that means for the welfare rolls is very much on Schlafly's increasingly enfeebled mind these days.

She expressed these concerns on a radio show called “Crosstalk” the other day, saying:


Luckily, a caller to the show had an answer. He asserted without an iota of doubt that the Obama administration was bringing in 40 to 50 million Muslims and that they will destroy our constitution and implement Sharia law.

On the bright side, Phyllis: feminism and Sharia law do not go well together. Time to make friends with the enemy of your enemy?

10. Louisiana official: Close the libraries so those Mexicans can’t learn English; build a jail instead.

Most immigration hardliners also believe that anyone who comes to this country damn well ought to learn English. No bilingual education, no chance of Americans ever rubbing elbows with people who don’t speak Amurrican.

But Lindel Toups, who sits on the Lafourche Parish City Council, is upset that Mexicans are trying to learn English, and he’d like to divert funding from libraries to a new jail because of that fact. Toups played down the importance of libraries in recent comments to the Tri-Parish TimesandBusiness News, by pointing out that the Spanish-language Biblioteca Hispana section helps Spanish-speakers learn English.

“They’re teaching Mexicans to speak English,” Toups said “Let that son of a bitch go back to Mexico.”

Libraries are apparently a great source of evil. “There’s just so many things they’re doing that I don’t agree with… Them junkies and hippies and food stamps [recipients] and all, they use the library to look at drugs and food stamps [on the Internet]. I see them do it.”

The citizens of Lafourche Parish are voting this week on whether to keep $800,000 in the library system or put it toward the $25 million needed for a new jail. That way, they might be able to avoid an increase in taxes.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/10-deranged-dispatches-right-wing-wackosphere-week?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

“They’re coming after your donuts!”

Omggggg...................I do see a lot of policepeople at donut shops!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yet another week's installment that does not disappoint ~ I now believe the profound and apparently irremediable idiocy is spreading like wildfire ~ ~ I also note the author seems to have skipped #4, so she might be reacting to dealing with her assignment for weeks ~ ~ "live links" to more/corroborating info in the original ~ Sooz

AlterNet / By Janet Allon
10 Ways America's Right-Wingers Went Off-the-Wall This Week -- Limbaugh's Rape Fantasies Edition
From Hasselbeck's idiocy to a healthy dollop irrational Christian haters, the right definitely delivered their dose of crazy.

November 23, 2013 | There were lots of right-wing lunacies tossed around throughout the Conservoverse this week, but first on that filibuster thing:

1. Rush Limbaugh managed to compare the change in the filibuster rule to rape

We have a sneaking suspicion that Rush Limbaugh is looking for an excuse to talk about rape. Just a hunch. Sure enough, a rape analogy popped into this profoundly misogynistic man’s mind to explain his objection to the change in the filibuster rule. Here he is, playing the role of what he, and his gullible listeners think, is an eminently reasonable man:


It’s a million kinds of wrong, starting with the presumption, when push comes to shove, men just want to rape women. Can you say “projection?”

h/t: Media Matters

2. Sorry, Elisabeth Hasselbeck is just a complete idiot

The background: In a recent interview with the BBC, Oprah, the “Queen of all Media,” said something mildly controversial, and mildly hurtful to old white racists. And, boy did Fox News have a conniption.

Talking about President Obama, Oprah had the audacity to suggest that, “There is a level of disrespect for the office that occurs, and that occurs in some cases and maybe even in many cases because he’s African American. There’s no question about that, and it’s the kind of thing that nobody ever says but everybody is thinking it.”

Wha-a-a-a-a-t?

That was bad enough, but it was this next part that really shook the Faux Newsians. She said that the issue of racism is largely generational. Specifically, she said that cultural prejudice in the U.S. will largely recede after the last generation of individuals have died off.

“I said this, you know, for apartheid South Africa, I said this for my own, you know, community in the South — there are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die," Winfrey said.

Ooh, that hurts. Because Fox News has some young white people, and they’re still racist. So what’s their excuse? Supposedly, they were not marinated in racism. They chose this way of seeing things.

Well, there was all sorts of frothing and foaming, and no one was frothier than Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who warned Oprah Winfrey that she “undermines racism” by pointing out that some of President Barack Obama’s critics disliked him because of the color of his skin.

Wait, undermining racism, that would be a good thing, right, at least in the parallel universe to Fox where there is a modicum of rationality. Surely, she misspoke. Let’s give her another chance to clear up that misconception. Her cohosts, Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade did keep the conversation going. “There’s so much rude stuff toward 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in my lifetime,” Kilmeade said. “Reagan was dumb, remember. George Bush was incompetent and illegitimate.” (Yeah, we’re with you so far, Mr. Kilmeade.) “Bill Clinton, we know where he ended up with the Monica Lewinski stuff. Where was the racism there?”

Elisabeth’s turn to talk again: “But this is someone as powerful as Oprah instilling fear in those that may come to critique policy under a cloak of racism when it may not be there. So again, it undermines racism when it does occur.”

Oops, she did it again.

3. Climate denying group compares U.N. talks about climate change to the Holocaust—immediately after saying there’s no comparison

We know what you’re thinking. Oh no they di-int. Well, oh yeah, they did. But first, the head of the rabidly anti-science Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), wrote in a fundraising email unearthed by DeSmogBlog that nothing can be compared to what happened during the Holocaust at Auschwitz and Birkenau, which he had just visited. Certainly not the climate negotiations currently taking place in Poland.

“There simply is no parallel,” he wrote.

OK then, that’s that. Can’t be compared. Not going to do it.

“Surely, the political and policy battles we are fighting cannot even begin to compare to the horrors represented by those camps,” he affirmed.

Yes, yes. Why would anyone even go there?

And yet, having said he mustn’t, go there he does:

“Yet such examples from history are instructive to show just how far otherwise-civilized people can descend when they are gripped by false ideologies and twisted utopian ambitions.

“They reveal the loss of freedom, taken to its ugliest level.

“Right now, the UN is attempting to carry out what its climate chief last year termed “a complete economic transformation of the world.”

And this is why, believers in freedom, haters of Holocausts, you should give our organization money. So that we can keep fighting science, progress, international cooperation.

That’s it. That’s the argument. That’s all he’s got.

h/t: Salon

5. Fox’s Charles Payne: Obama’s Arab Spring thwarted by eunuchs

Fox News’ Charles Payne served two helpings of crazy when he spoke to a conservative audience recently: 1. President Obama has been trying to create an “Arab Spring sort of thing” in America, because, of course, he’s a Muslim, and that’s just what they do, or is it wage jihad, we always forget.

And 2. It didn’t work because even after Obama “succeeded in creating the kind of climate that is an economic and rhetorical tinderbox,” Americans didn’t have the balls for it? And the reason for this ball-less state is Social Security disability benefits, which have turned young American men into “modern-day eunuchs,” who Obama has “castrated at the soul.”

No, we don’t really understand it either.

“This tinderbox has a limp wicket,” Payne continued, in an orgiastic climax of mixed metaphors. “The White House is laying it on too thick. Consequently, that army of would-be rioters, well, they’re kinda chilling out, waiting for their next Xbox. They figured out how to game the system or they’re just going to sit in their parents’ basement, brooding.”

Wait, so he wants an Arab Spring? Color us confused.

If you enjoyed this little snippet, here is Wayne’s speech, via the Raw Story.

6. OK Governor finds a clever way to defy marriage equality—deny everyone spousal benefits

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin announced this week that her state is going to have a little hissy fit. It will no longer allow any married couples to apply for spousal benefits at any state-owned National Guard facility, regardless of whether they're same-sex or opposite-sex. If gays want equal rights, then you know what? Nobody gets rights. So there!

"Oklahoma law is clear,” Fallin said. “The state of Oklahoma does not recognize same-sex marriages, nor does it confer marriage benefits to same-sex couples. The decision reached today allows the National Guard to obey Oklahoma law without violating federal rules or policies. It protects the integrity of our state constitution and sends a message to the federal government that they cannot simply ignore our laws or the will of the people.”

Twenty-nine states have constitutional bans on same-sex marriage, but nearly all of them have decided to comply with the federal rules on recognizing couples in the National Guard in terms of benefits.

Fallin, no doubt was darn pleased with herself when she thought this one up. Heck, it might even stir up more hostility towards gay people. Wouldn’t that be a bonus?

7. Alabama Rep. introduces bill to eliminate overtime pay

This is nice. And just in time for the holiday season. Meet U.S. Representative Martha Roby, a.k.a. Cruella DeVille. While the Tea Partying 37-year-old is not fighting tooth and nail against people getting affordable healthcare, she’s coming up with ways to deprive employees and workers of their hard-won rights and protections.

This week she introduced a resolution euphemistically called “Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013,″ which would end the requirement of the Fair Labor Standards Act for employers to pay Time-and-a-Half to employees for every hour worked over 40 in one week. It’s called H.R. 1406, and here’s what the Congressional Budget Office has to say about it:


Long story short: It’s another way for employers to exploit workers with long hours and less pay. Note the use of the word, “flexibility,” which, when used by conservatives always affords more “flexibility” to employers, not workers, flexibility to work people round the clock, say, without paying overtime. Kind of like “right to work,” which is, of course, code for “right to be exploited, worked to death and fired for no particular reason.”

You know what would be good to take on next? Those silly laws against Child Labor.

8. Baptist church official: Wives who are not subservient violate biblical law

Equality in marriage is an abomination. We’re not talking LGBT rights here—although, of course, that’s an abomination too. We’re talking good old-fashioned heterosexual marriage. Husband and wife, cleaved to one another, as the bible somewhat creepily puts it. Not equal, this cleaving. Get it straight ladies.

To avoid the dreaded equality between spouses, Russell Moore, president of the Baptist Church’s ethics and liberty commission, cautions married men from getting “too close” to their wives.

“Sometimes you have people who are preaching a false gospel to themselves in their homes,” he said, “By men who aren’t loving their wives as themselves and wives who aren’t submitting to their husbands.”

He did get around, as he always does, to denouncing same-sex unions as well. And same-sex unions where nobody is subservient—we can only assume that the concept would make his head explode.

9. NC Christian school to require families to cast out gay relatives, and sign an anti-LGBT pledge

It’s not really enough not to be gay, lesbian, bi-, or transgendered, you must vow to hate people who are, and vow not to be related to them. That’s the approach Myrtle Grove, a Christian private school in Wilmington, NC, plans to implement with its “Biblical Morality Policy.” The policy would both allow the school to refuse admission to LGBT children, or children with any LGBT relatives at all, and to expel them if any relatives reveal those tendencies.

And then those solely heterosexual families with no gay relatives or friends must sign on the dotted line swearing—so help them god—not to participate, support or in any way affirm “sexual immorality, homosexual activity, or bisexual activity; promoting such practices; or being unable to support the moral principles of the school.”

Icing on the cake? Salon reported that in spite of the blatantly discriminatory policy, Myrtle Grove will still be eligible for taxpayer-funded government subsidies in 2014.

10. John Derbyshire: 12 Years a Slave is “abolitionist porn,” and no, I haven’t seen itBeing fired for being too racist for the National Review is its own kind of distinction, and maintaining that status requires constant stoking. Fortunately, for former National Review columnist John Derbyshire, it’s second nature. This week he sounded off about 12 Years a Slave, which he would never see, mind you, mostly because he does not like black people either on screen or in real-life. But he has no need, because he already knows how unfair this movie is to those nice white southern slave-owners, and also that it just won’t show the cheerier side of slavery. As Right Wing Watch reported, in his latest racist column, Derbyshire calls 12 Years a Slave “Abolitionist Porn.”

Here’s an excerpt:


We’d like to add that murder, hatred and torture can be irksome as well. And some people rather enjoy being enslaved. Dare we suggest that Mr. Derbyshire might be enjoying some fetishistic, S&M porn of his own.

Read more here.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/10-ways-americas-right-wingers-went-wall-week-limbaughs-rape-fantasies-edition?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

[i]7. Alabama Rep. introduces bill to eliminate overtime pay[/i]

Between its growing right to work movement, employment at will laws, overall anti-union propaganda and penchant, employer based health care and convoluted, confusing, employer friendly labour law, the United States is the only country I know of where its citizens are voluntarily submitting to slavery. Beneath the thin patina of freedom, touted mainly by right wing ideologues, American employers own and control the economic destinies their employees as surely as southern plantation owners of old.

we spent 150 years developing fair labor practices, only to watch them under CONSISTENT attack for the half century since.

Yet again, this week's installment does not disappoint ~ I can't decide which is more alarming: [1] that there are this many deluded [by choice] people with access to media exposure, or [2] this many deluded [by choice] people are recruiting others by force of their "personalities" ~ ~ "live links" to more/corroborating info in the original ~ Sooz

AlterNet / By Janet Allon
10 Outrages and Crazy Statements by Right-Wingers This Week: Pope Provokes Free-Market Freakout
The right freaks out about a compassionate pope and transgendered people, and spews some really bizarre conspiracy theories.

November 30, 2013 | Before the Thanksgiving floats, there was the usual parade of right-wing nuts this week, many of whom became apoplectic after Pope Francis’ much-publicized Joy of the Gospel document, which critiqued unfettered capitalism and insinuated that thoroughly discredited trickle-down economics is naïve and just plain wrong.

1. Stuart Varney lectures Pope Francis about capitalism.

Not even the pope is safe from the wrath of Fox. How dare the pope attack “deified markets” and the idolatry of money? Who does he think he is? God?

Fox Business host Stuart Varney was just stewing about the pontiff’s remarks. “Capitalism, in my opinion, is a liberator,” he lectured Pope Francis from his television pulpit. “The free choice of millions of people is the essence of freedom. In my opinion, society benefits most when people are free to pursue their own self-interest. I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it is not.”

It isn’t. It just isn’t.

Oh, yeah, and another thing. The pope has no business mixing politics with religion. Especially when his political views diverge with those of Fox. Varney again:


Pope John Paul II was much more to Varney’s liking because he was very against communism, and very into private property. He never made rich people feel bad for having too much, while millions of others went without.

2. Cliff Kinkaid: Marxists have infiltrated the Catholic Church.

The problem goes a lot deeper than Stu Varney (and Rush Limbaugh) had feared. The Catholic Church itself is infiltrated with Marxists. This conspiracy theory is brought to you by the right-wing, misnamed Accuracy in Media director, Cliff Kincaid.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not here to beat up on the pope,” Kinkaid insisted in a video recently uploaded to YouTube. “That’s not my job. But I can read. I can read this document. I can see what he is saying, and I can tell you right now that this is a very, very disappointing document, and it makes me wonder about the future of the Roman Catholic Church in this world and what they’re heading towards.”

Kinkaid says he has proof that there is an evil commie plot in the Roman Catholic Church, that it supports one world government and that Pope Francis is using “flowery language” to camouflage this sinister plot, or “what we might euphemistically call a new world order, a new world economic order.”

But he is not attacking the Manchurian Pope.

3. Pam Geller: How dare the Pope actually read the Koran!

It’s not the communism that Islamophobic blogger/activist Pam Geller is worried about with Pope Francis. It’s how nice he is to Muslims. It’s downright unChristian of him to imply that there might be Muslims who don’t want to kill the rest of us. He obviously condones the killing of Christians.

Talk about a leap of faith.

“At a time when Christianity worldwide is under siege by Islamic jihadists, the leader of the Catholic Church claims that the Quran teaches non-violence. As Christians across the Muslim world live in abject terror and fear kidnapping, rape and slaughter to the bloodcurdling cries of ‘Allahu akbar,’ the pope gives papal sanction to the savage,” Geller wrote on her blog.

What the pope actually did in his apostolic exhortation, which has sent shockwaves throughout the right-wing wackosphere, was to contrast “violent fundamentalism” with “authentic Islam.” The latter, he wrote, was “opposed to every form of violence.”

“How does he know that? When did he become an imam?” Geller writes.

Because you have to be an imam to read the Quran. Geller has read a few passages as well, especially the ones about slaughtering Christians in the name of jihad. Wait, so does that make her an imam?

4. Jeb Bush: Obama is taking revenge on Catholics by moving Vatican embassy.

So, even though the pope is a socialist and a Muslim, for some reason our socialist Muslim president is out to get the Catholic Church.

Jeb Bush took it upon himself to perpetuate the Republican lie that President Obama is attacking Catholics by relocating the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican. He’s very vindictive, you know, the president. And he wants to punish Catholics for the Church’s opposition to Obamacare. When Obama did all those mea culpas about the problems with Obamacare, that was just code for blaming the Catholic Church.

Here’s what former Florida governor Bush tweeted out last Wednesday:


Jeb is not the first Bush to be willfully ignorant of history and geography. A modicum of research reveals that the process of moving the embassy from its current location to the compound at the U.S. Embassy to Italy actually began under Jeb’s brother, President George W., whose administration purchased the buildings. The new location is actually a tenth of a mile closer to the Vatican. And, just for knowing, many Catholic organizations supported the Affordable Care Act.

But, hey, since when did actual facts get in the way of an ad hominem political attack on the country’s first black president?

5. Birther preacher Manning: Obama had mother of his lovechild killed.

Despite the pope’s apparent sanity, there was still plenty of lunacy in the right-wing pulpit this week. Take birther preacher (yes, that’s a category) Rev. James David Manning, pastor of Atlah World Missionary Church, who leveled this bizarre accusation: Remember the apparently mentally ill woman who was shot and killed after she tried to ram her car into a barrier outside the White House in October? Her name was Miriam Carey, and that was no random, tragic incident. According to Manning, that woman was the mother of Barack Obama’s illegitimate child.

The proof, says the good reverend—who also believes Michelle Obama was born a man and that the president was born in Kenya—will come when Miriam Carey’s young child is given a paternity test. Just to make extra sure.

While the incident is being investigated, neither the family nor their attorney has suggested this conspiracy. Their denial of the conspiracy, says Manning, is just more proof that Obama had his secret baby mama killed.

That’s the wonderful thing about conspiracy theories. Everything proves them right.

6. Dinesh D’Souza: Obama is a grown-up Trayvon. I take it back. No, I stand by it. No, I take it back.

Conservative provocateur Dinesh D’Souza called President Barack Obama a "Grown-Up Trayvon” on his Twitter page, earlier this week. “I am thankful this week when I remember that America is big enough and great enough to survive Grown-Up Trayvon in the White House!” was the tweet, according to Politico.

Then he deleted it. Then he defended it, saying the President himself had said he was like Trayvon, showing a deep understanding of the President’s compassionate speech. Then he deleted that.

Make up your racist mind, D’Souza.

7. Colorado school board member recommends castration for trans people.

Intolerance and hate comes in so many packages—this time, it's a little old white lady in Colorado who holds a small amount of local power. It came to light this week in Gawker, that Katherine Svenson, a school board member for the Delta County school district, recently suggested that transgender students not be allowed to use the bathroom corresponding with their gender identity unless they have been “castrated.”

Lovely.

“Massachusetts and California have passed laws relating to calling a student, irrespective of his biological gender, letting him perform as the gender he thinks he is, or she is,” Svenson said at the meeting. “I just want to emphasize: not in this district. Not until the plumbing’s changed. There would have to be castration in order to pass something like that around here.”

Given the chance to walk back those inflammatory remarks when questioned by a local news station, Svenson declined.

“I don’t have a problem if some boys think they are girls,” she said. “I’m just saying as long as they can impregnate a woman, they’re not going to go in the girls’ locker-room.”

(h/t Gawker)

8. Klingenschmitt: The devil sent transgendered boys to rape your daughters.

Discharged former Navy chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt has similar qualms about transgendered people. They are out to rape your daughters; the “demon of rape” sent them, Klingenschmitt ranted on his Internet broadcast recently. Even when the transgendered person is really young, like 6-year-old Colorado girl Coy Mathis, who was born a boy.

“He has been dressed as a girl by his parents because his parents have a political agenda to push these coed bathroom bills into Colorado state law,” Klingenschmitt declared, without any apparent evidence or need for evidence.

The parents, who have had the wisdom to accept their kid for what she is, and fight for her right to be who she is, are “abusive,” according to Klingenschmitt, and they are part of a broader movement, “to violate your daughters.”

Changing your gender identity to carry out rape. That’s a lot of trouble to go through.

(h/t: Right-Wing Watch)

9. Florida Tea Partier: GOP ‘gay thugs’ are forcing employers to hire effeminate males and masculine women.

The author of this little piece of absurdity is one Danita Kilcullen, co-founder of the Fort Lauderdale Tea Party, who is very upset that 10 Republicans joined Democrats to approve the Employment Non-Discrimation Act (ENDA) in the Senate. She blames that “thug organization,” the Log Cabin Republicans, for this turn of events, and promises that the act will force employers to “hire someone with orange hair, body/neck/face covered with tattoos, multiple piercings, or a man in a dress … or for that matter, a demonstrative effeminate male or purposeful butch-looking female,” according to an email obtained by the Broward County/Palm Beach Sun-Sentinel.

That would be terrible, especially if that orange-haired, tattooed, pierced person could actually do the job.

10. Alec Baldwin: Gay Fundamentalists?

Alec Baldwin, liberal actor with an anger problem and a streak of homophobia, flailed around this week after his temper got him into trouble once again, and cost him his flagging TV show. First, he compared his lashing out at a no-doubt extremely annoying paparazzo allegedly with a homophobic slur to Martin Bashir's suggestion that Sarah Palin be subjected to the slave punishment of defecation in her mouth. (Bashir later apologized. We forgive him.)

When that didn’t work, Baldwin blamed “gay fundamentalists” for his demise.

We just have one question, Alec: What are gay fundamentalists?

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/10-outrages-and-crazy-statements-right-wingers-week-pope-provokes-free-market?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

And the beat goes on ... and on ... and on ~ I'm thinking there MUST be a secret contest amongst GOP/TPers to out-do each other in willful stupidity ~ ~ there are "live links" to more/corroborating information in the original ~ Sooz

AlterNet / By Janet Allon
10 Biggest Doozies From the Right-Wing Wackosphere This Week
Who gets the prize for most deranged statement this week? Limbaugh? Palin? Santorum? Or maybe the RNC.

December 7, 2013 | The week that began with talk of the socialist pope, ended with right-wing absurdities about Nelson Mandela. Is nothing sacred?

1. Rush Limbaugh: The pope rips America, causing Obama to orgasm! And then Mandela really showed those American blacks how to do civil rights!

The man who has continually raised the ante on outrageousness brought his A-game this week, starting with comments about Pope Francis and President Obama. “The pope is ripping capitalism, ripping trickledown economics, ripping America. And Obama is having an orgasm,” Limbaugh spewed. “The pope has co-opted Obama.” Because what really gets this president’s motor going is “ripping this country apart.” (Are you listening, Michelle?) Obama demonstrated his ejaculatory pleasure in criticizing America a few days later when he had the audacity to say that “increasing inequality is most pronounced in this country.” The nerve!

Nelson Mandela’s death provided fodder for the right-wing radio ranter to reach new paroxysms of offensiveness and denounce the civil rights movement in America, which of course helped bring about Obama’s presidency. Here’s his case:


Of course, Mandela went on to decry the ongoing “cancer of racism” in America and elsewhere. He did not think racism had ended (unlike the RNC, it seems: see item #3 below).

(h/t: mediamatters)

2. Sarah Palin: Thomas Jefferson and I agree. Those meanie atheists are trying to abort Christ from Christmas.

Sarah Palin managed to combine those dreaded atheists with abortion, Christ-killing and the dastardly war on Christmas all in one fell swoop in a speech at Liberty University. She was, of course, promoting her new book Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas, and the former not full-term Alaska governor is nothing if not good at self-promotion.

She also revealed a new talent for channeling the founding fathers. She knows exactly what Thomas Jefferson would do if he were alive today: He’d go on Fox News to complain about the war on Christmas. In other words, he’d be Sarah Palin.

That’s because—and this might come as a surprise to those who have read the part of the Constitution about separation of church and state—Jefferson and his buds wrote the constitution specifically for religious people. Nonreligious people, in other words, amoral people, are not capable of understanding the Constitution, and they are therefore not able to follow its precepts.

Here’s an excerpt from this marvelous bit of oratory:


There’s some more rambling after that, but you get the idea.

From there, she jumped back to her favorite topic and the one that promotes her book, saying Jefferson would agree with her that “angry atheists armed with an attorney” had set their sights on destroying the religious themes in Christmas celebrations.

“Why is it they get to claim some offense taken when they see a plastic Jewish family on somebody’s lawn—a nativity scene, that’s basically what it is, right?”

A plastic Jewish family. Is that in the scripture?

(h/t Raw Story)

3. Tin-eared RNC: Racism and sexism have ended.

The national Republicans deftly demonstrated how they can appeal to both women and blacks this week. They started offering lessons to candidates on how not to say offensive things about women, especially when you are running against one, as Todd “legitimate rape” Akin did. Clearly, a steep learning curve there. Emergency reinforcements may be needed.

Over the weekend, the RNC declared that racism has ended in a tweet marking the anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and celebrating Rosa Parks’ famous act of civil disobedience. “Today we remember Rosa Parks’ bold stand and her role in ending racism,” they said. Hilarious tweets ensued under hashtag #racismendedwhen, with answers like “when Mr. Drummond adopted Arnold and Willis,” “when Bill Clinton played the sax on Arsenio Hall” and “when the Fresh Prince moved to Bel-Air.”

Realizing their mistake after, well, millions of people ridiculed them, the RNC amended the tweet, “clarified it,” by saying Parks fought to end racism. But, let’s face it, they really think racism has ended. We’ve got a black president and the Supreme Court itself ruled there is no need for a Voting Rights Act anymore. That ought to settle it.

Does anyone still wonder why more than 90 percent of black America votes for anyone but the GOP?

4. Rick Santorum: Obamacare is like apartheid. And I am like Mandela. O’Reilly: Oh, you mean that commie?

Wow. Flabbergasting things happen when you combine two idiots on Fox with the death of a great man.

Here’s Santorum on Mandela:


Apartheid and affordable healthcare. Yes, very similar. And that would, of course, make you Mandela-like in fighting this injustice. Amirite? We’ve seen some questionable analogies before, i.e. Obamacare and Katrina, Obamacare and the Fugitive Slave Act, Obamacare and the Nuremberg Laws, but this one might be the biggest doozy of them all. Points for creativity, Rick!

O’Reilly couldn’t top that, so he just kept repeating the one thing he did have to say about Mandela.


So, uh, wait? Does that make Santorum a communist?

5. Fox News: Sharia law is here and the proof is that Muslim girls are taking swim classes at the Y.

Head for the hills. Sharia is here and it’s coming after your women. Fox continued its quest to stoke the fires of Islamaphobia when it targeted a seemingly harmless YMCA swim class in St. Paul Minnesota that offers hour-long swim practice once a week for Muslim Somali-American girls between the ages of 5 and 17. The YMCA (that’s “C” for Christian, hello) even makes considerations for the girls’ modesty and religious beliefs. On Fox & Friends, an outraged Heather Nauert said this is just one more piece of evidence that "Sharia law is now changing everything."

Modesty considerations have long kept observant Somali-American Muslim girls from learning even basic swimming skills, which, of course, is the problem that the program is designed to overcome. This pernicious tolerance trend is spreading all over the Midwest, Fox reports. Thankfully, Nauert promised viewers that Fox will keep an eye on it.

We are sure they will.

6. S.C. Sheriff refuses to fly flag at half mast for Mandela.

Another great American with a modicum of power and a desire to use it, Rick Clark, the sheriff of Pickens County, S.C., is taking a bold stand against... ummm... Obama’s tyranny? Sheriff Clark is refusing to lower the flag to half staff in honor of Mandela on December 9, 2013, as the president ordered.

Now, we know what you are thinking, but this has nothing to do with race, Clark swears. It has to do with Amurrica. "Nelson Mandela did great things for his country and was a brave man but he was not an AMERICAN!!!” Clark wrote on his Facebook page. “The flag should be lowered at our Embassy in S. Africa, but not here."

Clark knows full well when it is appropriate to lower that flag. He did it last Friday in honor of a deceased deputy, and on Saturday in honor of Pearl Harbor Day. But then it’s straight back up for Ole Glory. Unless another Amurrican dies.

7. Texas Republican Rep: Minimum wage, schminimum wage.

Sometimes the best defense is a good offense. So, in a week when low-wage workers went on strike to demand an increase in the minimum wage, and President Obama finally acknowledged that inequality is the defining challenge of our time, Rep. Joe Barton decided to be deeply offensive.

Abolish minimum wage, he told the National Journal. “I think it’s outlived its usefulness,” he said. His view is that it was only useful during the Great Depression.

Raising the minimum wage is bound to be on the list of things not to do in the Republican obstructionist playbook, now that Obama has announced making structural inequality the focus of the rest of his presidency.

Think Progress reports:


But while many of them won’t raise it, Barton’s going one better.

Let them eat cake!

8. House Chair of Science Committee Lamar Smith: Climate change, no way; aliens, sure.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), who chairs the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, has no use for climate change science, and less use for the efforts to regulate carbon emissions. Setting standards for polluting power plants is partisan politics, he recently argued, blasting the EPA for trying to do so, not science. And the petroleum industry favorite knows from science. He’s using one of the seven days left on the legislative calendar to talk about extraterrestrials in a hearing called, “Astrobiology: Search for Biosignatures in our Solar System and Beyond.”

Well, if there are aliens out there living on some other planet, that could help give people a hint about where to go when the Earth becomes uninhabitable due to global warming, which isn’t happening, of course, no matter what 97 percent of scientists say.

9. California GOP-er: It’s part of Middle Eastern culture to lie.

Rep. Duncan Hunter must have been a cultural anthropology major. He displayed his deep knowledge of Middle Eastern culture in an interview with CSPAN this week when he expressed his opposition to the recent treaty with Iran. They lie, he said, in essence. Not only do they lie, they revere lying. Here’s how he knows. He’s heard about how bargaining goes on over there. "In the Middle Eastern culture it is looked upon with very high regard to get the best deal possible, no matter what it takes, and that includes lying," Hunter said.

His interlocutor gave him the chance to add some nuance to this keen geopolitical observation, and asked if he meant "all Middle Eastern countries are this way."

Yep, he said: "They like to barter there."

In damage control mode later, his communications director clarified that Hunter was talking about Middle Eastern political leaders, not all the people, especially Iranians.

Furthermore, Hunter, who also thinks U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants should be deported and opposes gays in the military, recommends using a nuclear bomb on Iran if necessary.

"I don’t think it’s inevitable but I think if you have to hit Iran, you don’t put boots on the ground, you do it with tactical nuclear devices and you set them back a decade or two or three."

Then you can go back to the bargaining table.

(h/t TPM)

10. GOP Rep: "I wake up every day not thinking about social issues."

Virginia Rep. Scott Rigell is up for re-election next year, and he just wants to clarify what does and what does not keep him up at night. He apparently told Politico: “I wake up every day not thinking about social issues.”

You have to admire his succinctness!

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/10-biggest-doozies-right-wing-wackosphere-week?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

More from those living in an alternate reality ~ ~ there are "live links" to more/corroborating info in the original ~ Sooz

AlterNet / By Janet Allon
10 Certifiably Insane Rants from the Right-Wing Fringe This Week: War on Santa Edition
Megyn Kelly, Donald Trump and Pat Robertson vie for the craziest prize.

December 14, 2013 | 1. Megyn Kelly: This is for all you kids out there: Santa is white! Hear me? He’s white!

Why? One is only left to scratch one’s head and wonder why, why, why? Why was it so important to Fox host Megyn Kelly to repeatedly look into the camera and tell America’s children that Santa is “just white”?

It is laughable, yes—and Jon Stewart helped us laugh at it when he asked, “Who is Megyn Kelly talking to? Children who are sophisticated enough to watch the 10 o’clock news, yet naïve enough to believe in Santa, and racist enough to be upset that he might not be white?” That is, as he points out, a fairly narrow segment of viewers.

But what Kelly’s insane rant really shows is just how mean-spirited she really is, that her vaunted empathy extends only to white working women, or rather to white working right-wing women who think like her. Her empathy deficit is front and center in the repetition of the word, “kids,” and the use of the word “just.” When she says, Santa is “just white” to the “kids” out there, and they are just going to have to deal with it, it seems that she is also talking to non-white kids, if they are lucky enough to be watching. Just deal with it, you non-white kids. Santa’s not for you.

In the ensuing kerfuffle, she accused her detractors of race-baiting — and claimed it was an off-handed remark, that she was just kidding — and made the same claim with emphasis. In response to a thoughtful article on Slate by Aisha Harris, which chronicles the genuine pain she felt reconciling Santa’s “whiteness” with her African-American family’s Christmas celebration, Kelly ratcheted up the jerkiness. “Just because it makes people uncomfortable, doesn’t mean it has to change.”

Because you can’t change the facts of a made-up story about a jolly man who flies around and gives children toys. And made-up stories belong on the news, kids.

Kids!? Are you listening?

2. Pat Robertson: Letting lesbians into your house could turn your kids gay.

Patty Robertson slays us. He really does. His delusional view that gayness is a contagious germ was revealed this week when a viewer named Catherine wrote in for some advice. She had recently reconnected with an old best friend who, it turned out, was a lesbian. She had invited her to meet her children, but became concerned when her old friend wanted to bring her life partner along.

Big mistake, the 700 Club host told her. Having lesbian friends in her home could turn her children gay, and “you don’t want your children to grow up as lesbians.”

Exactly how this transmission of sexuality would occur, he did not explain. It, like the lord, works in mysterious ways, but suffice it to say, "Danger!"

While Catherine should not risk infecting her children with acceptance of the lesbian lifestyle, Rev. Pat said nor should she shun her old friend. Because, who knows, maybe Catherine could infect her friend with the good Christian, heterosexual lifestyle.

Failing that, he counseled: “It doesn’t hurt to tell somebody, ‘Look, I love you and we’re going to do what we can to be friends if we can, but I have my lifestyle, it’s Christian. And you have yours, it’s not. And so, I’m sorry, we can’t indulge in certain things together.’”

Like lesbian sex, we’re presuming. That’s out.

3. Trump rejoices at having his birther conspiracy confirmed.

Perhaps Trump’s obsession with the wide-ranging conspiracy to obscure President Obama’s real birthplace could be better sorted out by a psychiatrist, one who specializes in racist delusions. Know anybody?

Of course, the wonderful thing about conspiracies is that everything proves them. And so it was this week that a tragedy gave the real estate tycoon Spy magazine dubbed “the short-fingered vulgarian” further fodder for his ongoing crusade to prove the president is a “furriner.” (Note that we high-minded, progressive scribblers would never make fun of someone for physical attributes they can’t help, so we won’t repeat that short-fingered thing again. Vulgarian, maybe.)

Loretta Fuddy, the 65-year-old Hawaii state health director who authorized the release of Obama’s birth certificate was killed in a small plane crash over the coast of Hawaii. Nine other passengers survived. “How amazing, the state health director who verified copies of Obama’s 'birth certificate' died in plane crash today. All others lived,” the Donald tweeted.

The implication is clear. The president had his thugs kill her. How? you ask. Or, more to the point, why? Since the birth certificate is released, confirmed Obama’s Hawaii birth and the matter closed for everyone except the truly irrational.

Dunno.

Maybe the comb-over can explain.

4. Jim Garrow: Of course, Obama was in on that plane crash, and he also tried to nuke America (God stopped him!).

The Donald is not the only eminently reasonable man who thinks Obama arranged that plane crash. He enjoys the company of Conservative nutjob Jim Garrow, who also knows for a fact that Obama killed Andrew Breitbart, Michael Hastings and Tom Clancy. Oh, yes, and he tried to nuke America.

“There are no coincidences with this administration and with the thugs that have brought Chicago tactics to bear,” Garrow said. “We’re seeing murder.”

His theory: Fuddy was killed with neurotoxins before the plane crash.

Dastardly plan revealed. Mwah-ha-ha-ha, the president said in a statement.

5. Beck manages to make the strange story of the fraudulent sign language interpreter at Mandela’s funeral even stranger.

For many, truth can truly be stranger than fiction. Much of what is in the news would not be believable in a fictional universe. The revelations about the fraudulent, schizophrenic sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s funeral, who may have thought he was signing the voices inside his head, was one such story. It was all the responsible media could do to keep up with the bizarre facts as they were revealed. But for Glenn Beck, mental illness and a history of violence were not enough. Something else, an even more sinister plot, had to be at work. He wants the man’s blood tested, he said on his radio show "to find out if anybody jacked him on anything." Why, you say?

"This is exactly the kind of guy," Beck said, "you hire to stand next to all of the world leaders at something like this hoping that he will do something. I believe it is not unreasonable to check his bloodstream to find out if anybody jacked him on anything to have him hallucinate ... It might have just been enough to say somebody caused some kind of problem at this, for whatever the reason. But something is really wrong here."

For the crazies, there are no simple or even massive screwups.

6. Todd Kincannon: The left likes school shootings.

The Twitter war launched by gun nuts in the immediate aftermath of the Arapahoe school shooting, which coincided with the anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting, reached new levels of viciousness.

“Allow law-abiding school employees who will go through weapons training to carry guns at school. Solved. But the Left likes school shootings,” Todd Kincannon, former executive of the South Carolina GOP tweeted.

Kincannon is not a nice man. Some of his earlier tweets include suggesting transgendered people be put in camps, and lamenting to an Iraqi veteran that the enemy did not have better aim. It should be mentioned that he was pushed out of his leadership role with the South Carolina GOP. Still, the gunnies love him, and he definitely has his followers.

“I bet gun-hating commies are just giddy that a bunch of children got shot in one of their 'gun free zones.' More propaganda for them,” he continued.

And still more:

“Obama started the day using Christmas to push socialized healthcare. Now he can use children killed by gun control to push gun control.”

One of his followers chimed in that since the left likes abortion so much, it only stands to reason that they like school shootings too.

See, this is just another example of how when it comes to fighting dirty, Democrats, progressives, the left, is totally, well, out-gunned.

7. Gun lobby uses Newtown anniversary to raise money.

While the parents and family members of the 20 children and six adults massacred in Newtown a year ago celebrated the sad anniversary of these horrific murders by urging others to perform acts of kindness for their fellow humans, the gun lobby celebrated in its own way: by using the anniversary as a way to raise money.

On the eve of the anniversary, Gun Owners of America, one of the most aggressive pro-gun lobbies, posted a message on its website celebrating all of its achievements in the past year. They failed to include that, by Mother Jones’ estimate, at least 194 children have been killed by guns in the year since Newtown, many of them at home, by family members, many by accident, simply because there was a gun around.

More guns is the solution. And more money for Gun Owners of America, in order that they may attain their goal of a fully armed America, and the defeat of this naïve notion that schools should be gun-free zones. A fully armed and cocked nation—that will cut down on the gun violence.

8. Eric Cantor calls Capitol police to bully singing children away.

Some children gathered outside GOP leader Eric Cantor’s office last week to sing Christmas carol tunes with immigration reform lyrics. They were pretty cute, and of course, their singing carried a poignant message about not tearing their families apart. Apparently, Cantor was unmoved. Instead of coming out and talking to them and the adults who were escorting them—or even giving them lip service like most politicians—he called the Capitol police to come and bully them away. That they did. Large men with booming voices came and told those kids to stop their caterwauling, comprende? Or else. They did stop singing—the littlest among them looking a bit frightened. Two minutes later, the big men reappeared and told them that arrests were going to start happening.

What was Cantor doing during all this? Speculation is that he might have been reading the GOP White Paper on how to talk to women without offending them, soon to be followed by the GOP White Paper on how to talk to children without scaring them.

9. Wait, did the head of the Virginia GOP just threaten Obama’s life?

What’s a little humor among friends? Well, if the friends are Virginia Republicans, it can be vaguely incoherent and a little menacing. Last weekend, Pat Mullins, chair of the state’s Republican Party joked to about 450 party members at a party retreat that President Barack Obama was “so close to death” that Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) needed to buy a life insurance policy.

You might have thought such a gathering would include some soul-searching about the drubbing Virginia Republicans recently received in all three statewide races, for the first time in 24 years.

You’d be wrong. It was the media’s fault Ken Cuccinelli lost, Mullins said, because they keep hammering away on that whole fictitious “war on women” thing when all Cuccinelli wanted to do was ban abortions and oral sex.

“This is false narrative by false prophets… Republicans do not win when we are mini-Democrats or Democrat-lite,” he said. Or even, reasonably modern people-lite.

But the certain failure—or should we say, fervently wished-for failure—of the healthcare law is what Republicans will continue to pin their hopes on. And that was when he made this creepy pronouncement.

“Obama’s so close to death that Terry McAuliffe is about to buy life insurance on him,” Mullins joked. “I’m looking forward to taking the gloves off!”

Oh those Republicans. Such cards.

10. Steve King: Don’t vote on immigration; keep fruitlessly fighting Obamacare.

Elsewhere in the country, similarly delusional Tea Partying fools continued to rally supporters despite the fact that there does not seem to be any more tea to dump into Boston Harbor.

Iowa Tea Partier, rabid anti-immigrationist Steve (cantaloupe calves) King remains desperate not to let the nation or President Obama move on to immigration reform, which he fears will further divide the Republican Party. (On that he might be right.) “Only bad can come from passing anything in the House that has to do with immigration,” he portentously told the far-right birther site WorldNetDaily. The bad he fears, will be those immigrants who will erode the law by voting Democratic.

He would prefer just to keep debating Obamacare forever, refusing to acknowledge that that ship has sailed.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/10-certifiably-insane-rants-right-wing-fringe-week-war-santa-edition?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

More guns is the solution. And more money for Gun Owners of America, in order that they may attain their goal of a fully armed America, and the defeat of this naïve notion that schools should be gun-free zones. A fully armed and cocked nation—that will cut down on the gun violence.

Well, it might not cut down on gun violence but a fully armed and cocked nation would certainly make it easier for the mass shooters to carry their guns to school.

It's gotta be a tough job to hold each week's installment down to 10 since the idiocy seems to be feeding upon itself ~ ~ there are "live links" to more/corroborating information in the original ~ Sooz

AlterNet / By Janet Allon
10 Ways Right Wingers Went Cuckoo This Week -- 'Duck Dynasty' Meltdown Edition
How Chris Christie and a host of right-wingers went off the deep end.

December 21, 2013 | 1. Conservative Hootenanny Over Firing of Duck Dynasty Star.

In every cloud there is a silver lining. Phil Robertson may have lost his reality show over his vile comments about gays and blacks unrepentantly spewed to GQ magazine, but look at all the marvelous new friends he made, many who seem ready to anoint him to sainthood. If Mother Teresa had only known that all she had to do was imply that homosexuality leads to bestiality and promiscuity (in that order) and black people thoroughly enjoyed their subjugation in the Jim Crow south, she would not have had to spend so much time taking care of all those poor, sick people.

Okay, okay, we’re exaggerating. No one actually compared the duck patriarch to Mother Teresa. That’s crazy talk. Who would do that? Newt Gingrich just compared him to Pope Francis. Conservative radio host Mike Slater said he is like Martin Luther King, Jr. Monica Crowley, Megyn Kelly, Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin all called him some combination of a First Amendment martyr and an example of a good Christian. Illinios GOP Congressional candidate Ian Bayne called him “the Rosa Parks of our generation,” and the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer called him an American hero then warned darkly that Robertson's suspension is “the Mark of the Beast.”

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

2. Chris Christie’s true colors truly revealed. Astonishing pettiness. Total willingness to abuse power.

Can there be any lingering doubt that Republican darling, Chris Christie, must not be allowed anywhere near presidency? If you have ever sat in traffic trying to cross the George Washington Bridge (or anywhere, for that matter) assuming all the while that it cannot be helped. That’s the way it is. There are a lot of cars—too many. Accidents happen. Work must be done. Security must be maintained. These are assumptions that can no longer be made in Chris Christie’s New Jersey.

Chris Christie revealed himself as a man perfectly willing to settle a petty political score (the Mayor of Fort Lee, the New Jersey town just over the bridge from New York, did not endorse Christie for re-election, and Christie’s henchman closed lanes to the bridge on the flimsy pretext of a traffic study to punish him) and to hell with the tens of thousands of people just trying to get somewhere.

Do not let this out-of-control, bullying man anywhere near the reigns of the IRS, the NSA, the list goes on. Do not.

3. Rick Santorum delivers unhinged, illogical rant about nationalized healthcare.

We may need to run this excerpt from a Rick Santorum speech in its somewhat cleaned up entirety, because we’re still trying to make sense of it. But it seems very ominous. It is about that death-deliverer, government-subsidized healthcare. Even the Iron Lady herself, Margaret Thatcher, was too frightened to take it on. And she was so tough. That’s how scary it is! Then there is this leap of logic that has us scratching our now totally terrified heads. Because if you get sick, and you don’t have healthcare, you die. (Question: So, why isn’t that an argument for providing healthcare to more people?) And, as if dying weren’t bad enough, you also don’t get to vote if you die. So the whole system is rigged, because only living people can vote. And only living people can get healthcare. See?

Here’s Uncle Ricky to explain:


We’re sure this thought-chain makes perfect sense in Rick Santorum’s head. But only in Rick Santorum’s head, where it must be very lonely indeed.

Want to see tape and the slightly perplexed crowd at the Young Americans for Freedom event at Reagan Ranch? Click here.

4. Rep. Jack Kingston: Poor kids should be forced to clean floors for their lunch.

And they say Republicans don’t care about poor children. Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston, who is running to replace Senator Saxby Chambliss does. He’s really worried that children living below the poverty line are getting the wrong ideas about how the world works, and about how work works. He’s worried they’re learning that there might be such a thing as a free lunch. His suggestion: Make them pay. Oh, they don’t have money? Oh, you say that’s what poverty is actually all about? Here’s another idea he suggested:

Kingston: “… maybe sweep the floor of the cafeteria—yes . . . that would be an administrative problem . . .”

Us: Right, but that’s absolutely the only problem with it, the administrative thing.

Kingston: “And it would probably lose you (the government) money.”

Us: Yeupp, that’s the only other problem with it. It does not, for instance, stigmatize kids whose parents are poor or going through hard times, or expose them to cruel teasing or bullying, or segregate them from their more well-off peers.

Perhaps, Mr. Kingston has spent some time with Mr. Newt Gingrinch (sic) who also thought there was some untapped potential in developing a janitorial labor force of poor children, and said so, to great reception on the presidential campaign trail.

And here’s the thing, Kingston is considered the reasonable one running to replace Chambliss. Yikes.

5. GOP lawmaker: Income inequality is real and it could be a good thing.

It has often been said that the first step towards solving a problem is acknowledging that it exists. That progression went astray, however this week when Minnesota lawmaker David Hann, the State Minority Leader, acknowledged that income inequality was indeed quite real—but, not a problem. No, not just not harmful, good. Because, if rich people don’t get to stay rich, they won’t pay taxes and that will be bad for the government.

News bulletin for Mr. Hann: Rich people already don’t pay their share of taxes.

There’s ample evidence of this, for example, from Huffington Post:


And, if anyone still needs yet more evidence that drastic income inequality does not serve the common good, the Associated Press provided it when it surveyed more than three dozen economists about income inequality; a majority of them said the gap is hurting the economy.

Basically because, many many people cannot afford to spend much money at all. Duh.

There is, as it turns out, no such thing as a no-brainer.

6. Meet the new tea-partying, public-school hating, Jesse Helms worshipping, secession-backing, wacko-bird candidate for North Carolina Senate.

Greg Bannon is a doctor, an ostensibly educated man. Sometimes education has been shown to help counter the problem of ignorance.

Not in this case. Where shall we start? Greg Bannon opposes public education, period. He supports nullification, which is when a state can choose to ignore federal laws. He moved to North Carolina because he worships the late segregationist/secessionist/obstructionist Senator Jesse Helms and wants to be more like him. Somewhat terrifyingly, Greg Bannon is an obstetrician/gynecologist who refuses to give his patients information about contraception or abortion. Shouldn’t one lose their stirrups for that?

Bannon may be ready to hang up his speculum (phew!) because he’s running for Democratic Senator Kay Hagan's seat next year. (uh-oh! Doesn’t North Carolina have those awful voter suppression laws?)

Rand Paul, Erick Erickson and Ann Coulter all like him. And, should he (gasp!) win, he’ll fit right in with the cuckoo-bird caucus in the Senate including Paul, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.

7. Tea party leader: Blacks should stop bitching and moaning about slavery.

A New Mexico tea partier by the name of Glynis Racine has made the determination that it is time for black people to get over the whole slavery thing. Enough already. The Lincoln Country Tea Party patriot made this helpful suggestion somewhat obliquely while celebrating—in her own extremely festive way—the 148th anniversary of the end of slavery.

“White Irish slaves were treated worse than any other race in the US,” she tweeted. “When is the last time you heard an Irishman bitching & moaning about how the word owes them a living.”

Honestly, we can’t actually recall an occurrence where we heard either an Irish person or a black person “bitching & moaning” about that.

Quite a lot of flack ensued twitterspherically, some perfectly valid points about the obvious racism of her statement, and failure to grasp the totality of black suffering during and, of course, well after slavery. Some tweeters insulted Irish people, instead. The courageous tea partier removed her tweet, we’re sure having learned a very valuable lesson.

h/t: RawStory

8. N.C. GOP-er: Obamacare is like Hitler .. . . again? Yawn.

Another dispatch from the great state of North Carolina, where, unfortunately, right wing loonies are ascendant. By now, we’ve heard that Obamacare is a catastrophic law of epic proportions, tantamount to the Nuremberg laws, Indian Removal Act, Fugitive Slave Act, ummm, what else, pogroms, genocides, hurricanes, typhoons, nuclear bombs, tsunamis—and it may have turned Santa black.

Well, my friends, it’s not that bad. It’s much, much worse. According to North Carolina state Sen. Bob Rucho, Barack Obama is worse than Hitler, Stalin and Osama bin Laden and quite likely Voldemort.

This week, Rucho tweeted:


People complained. They thought the tweet unreasonable. Perhaps, a tad hyperbolic. But Rucho stood firm, tweeting back:


Later, when Rucho also spoke with Mark Binker of WRAL.com he softened his stance a bit, saying that he was just trying to highlight the economic consequences of Obamacare vs. the murderous tyranny of Nazis, Stalinism and radical Islam. He said: “I was concerned about the fact that there are 6 million people who have lost their healthcare due to Obama.” This is a completely fabricated number when it comes to Obamacare. Hmmm, though, rings a bell. Where might he have gotten the figure 6 million from?

It turns out that Rucho is a frustrated op-ed writer. He’d like to explain his points more fully, but no one will print his op-eds. Wonder why.

9. Creationist: Evolution is a silly story for silly people.

Once upon a time this week a man named Dr. John Morris—what kind of a doctor, we do not know—of the Institute for Creation Research (words that hardly go together) said some laughable ridiculous things on the radio. Here’s a sample: “No truly helpful discovery has come from evolution” since evolution proponents, unlike Creationists, “rely on silly evolutionary stories to make us believe it.”

These silly people he pointed out should really not be “gullible enough to think that a frog changed into a prince.”

There it is, evolution in a nutshell. He's certainly read his Darwin.

Silly, silly scientists. What they will come up with next? That gravity holds us on the earth?

See more here.

10. Crazy Libertarian radio host: You get MLK, Jr. We get Santa.

Paleolithic radio ranter Neal Bortz made such a reasonable point this week about that whole Megyn Kelly, White Santa debate. Why didn’t we think of it? Mr. Bortz pointed out that Martin Luther King, Jr. is always portrayed as black, you know, like in photographs and documentary footage. What a scam!

And that, my friend, proves Santa is white. “Deal with it,” Mr. Bortz helpfully said.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/10-ways-right-wingers-went-cuckoo-week-duck-dynasty-meltdown-edition?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

In the past those people would have been committed indefinitely to some mental institution.
Now they are successfully earning a living.

Is this country great or what?

Here's this week's installment ~ I'm rethinking how I often feel comfort at the idea of "some things never change" ~ ~ there are "live links" to more/corroborating info in the original ~ Sooz

AlterNet / By Janet Allon
8 Worst Things the Far Right Wing Said This Holiday Week
Ignorance reigns with Geraldo Rivera, Sarah Palin, and the Wall Street Journal's longing for return to white rule.

December 28, 2013 | 1. Joseph Epstein in Wall Street Journal: The problem with America is the collapse of white rule.

There just are not enough rich, white men in power in America anymore. It is a terrible problem. Instead, what we have is some sort of self-styled meritocracy, where instead of the good old-fashioned ruling elite, people who have overcome adversity and achieved success by dint of hard work and effort, rather than their lineage, are in charge. Ugghh! This must be why society is going to hell in a handbasket.

So goes the argument of writer Joseph Epstein, who penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last weekend bemoaning the collapse of white rule. Not just white rule. WASP rule.

The column, which resembles satire, but apparently is not, argues that modern-day “corruption, scandal and incompetence” are hallmarks exclusive to this new era of non-white rule. Because that shit never happened when whites were in charge. If only, he laments, colleges still admitted more legacies and didn’t encourage applications of non-white students. Then maybe, instead of a Senate that is 95% white, we could go back to the 100%.

And don’t even get him started about the president.

2. Paul Ryan lectures his hero, the Pope, on capitalism.

It seems that another conservative, Christian politician thinks he knows better than the Pope. Rep. Paul Ryan, the sham “compassionate conservative,” who happily held the line against extending unemployment benefits for 1.3 million struggling Americans, has lately insisted that he really cares about the poor. So much so, that he now considers Pope Francis more of a role model than his previous role model, Ayn Rand—quite a shift. The deeply caring Congressman recently told the Milwaukee Sentinel how glad he is that Pope Francis is talking about the poor, and how we should all be helping each other out more, “soul to soul.”

But, still, despite his avowed love for the Pope, Ryan points out that the Pontiff is kind of dumb about capitalism. Not his fault, though. He’s from a non-capitalist country. “The guy," Ryan said. (Wait, the guy? Isn't that kind of disrespectful?), “is from Argentina, they haven’t had real capitalism in Argentina. They have crony capitalism in Argentina. They don’t have a true free enterprise system."

Ryan has said that he, like the “guy from Argentina,” wants to figure out how to solve poverty. If the past is any indication, the solution will involve plenty of discipline, deprivation of needed government help, and possibly, neckties—or as Ryan prefers to call it “tough love.”

Holy holy holy.

3. Geraldo Rivera: Alec Baldwin’s comments not homophobic because everyone used to be homophobic.

Geraldo Rivera often says things that are surprising, even startling, but he is reliably wrongheaded. He recently made the leap of comparing the dust-up over “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson’s evident homophobia and racism, stated clearly in a GQ interview, to Alec Baldwin’s troubles. The common thread, as Rivera sees it, is that this shadowy group of “gay fundamentalists”—no we don’t know exactly who that is or why those two words have been put together—is behind the loss of both men’s TV shows. You’ll remember that Baldwin, a liberal darling with either an impulse control problem or deeply held homophobic feelings (or both), was said to have called a photographer a “cocksucking faggot” while Robertson merely speculated in his widely circulated interview that homosexuality and bestiality were on the same continuum (and blacks were happy under Jim Crow laws.)

Rivera defended Baldwin’s right to make homophobic slurs on the grounds that they were commonplace when he was growing up.

Interesting defense. Many people, unfortunately some even today, are growing up in that kind of ethos, so are they covered as well? And how far does such a defense go? Does it defend, say, racism? Any manner of hatred? Murder? Ethnic cleansing?

Previous Rivera idiocies include saying women on George Zimmerman's trial jury would have started shooting at Trayvon Martin before George Zimmerman did, and, of course, that hoodies, such as the one Trayvon was wearing the night he was killed, are thug-wear.

But again, can someone please tell us what the hell “gay fundamentalism” is?

4. Alabama Lawmaker calls ‘Duck Dynasty’ star a hero.

So, sure enough, the “Duck Dynasty” controversy raged on as conservatives and so-called Christians rushed to defend Phil Robertson’s right to say things that may lead to violence against gays, and blacks, or at least reinforce those lingering feelings that black people preferred their second-class status under Jim Crow. Just to recap, Robertson, the bearded, ignorant, born-again Christian star of a reality show we would never watch has been compared to everyone from Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King, Jr. (no, we cannot provide the logic of those nonsensical statements.)

A highly enlightened Alabama state Senator by the name of Jerry Fielding added his voice to the chorus of hosannas for Phil this week when he called Robertson a "hero." Not content to just call him a hero, he introduced a resolution lauding him as a hero, according to the Daily Home.

Here, in all its glory, is that proposed legislation:


Don’t you just love democracy!

5. Brilliant and incisive, Bristol Palin ranks haters. LGBT community is the worst!

On Friday, Bristol Palin, expressed her solidarity with the "Duck Dynasty" star by taking to her Patheos blog to attack the LGBT community and condemn A&E, the network that initially kicked Phil Robertson off his reality show, then caved under pressure and reinstated him.

"Everyone needs to leave Phil Robertson alone for expressing his beliefs," Bristol wrote, obviously with great passion. "I hate how the LGBT community says it's all about 'love' and 'equality.' However, if you don't agree with their lifestyle, they spread the most hate. It is so hypocritical it makes my stomach turn."

Someone, please get poor Bristol an ant-acid.

6. Sarah Palin defends Duck Dynasty star without actually reading what he said.

You know the old saying about the apple, and the distance from which it falls from the tree. Bristol's mom Sarah, too, was outraged at how mean people were being to Phil Robertson. No, she never actually read what he said that made people upset. That’s hard. Lots of words. Small type. She’s just a staunch defender of people’s right to say racist and homophobic things and that’s what she heard he was doing.

She has some rock solid reasoning behind not bothering to inform herself about the actual content of his statements. She knew—or heard through the grapevine, whatever—that he was invoking the Bible. That about covers it. Anyone who questions that is questioning Scripture, and those are bad, bad people. “He was quoting the Gospel,” she told gal pal Greta Van Susteren. So people criticizing him need to take it up with the Gospel.

Which she hasn’t actually read, probably, either. But she’s heard about it.

7. John Hagee spreads Christmas cheer by suggesting that people who don’t like hearing ‘Merry Christmas’ get on a plane and leave the country.

Suggesting atheists and their horrible humanist friends leave the country is one of right-wing pastor John Hagee’s favorite pieces of advice, and he got into the Christmas spirit by suggesting atheists scram again during a sermon to his congregation. It's almost like he talks to atheists more than he talks to his actual congregation.

He told those atheists that “if you pass a manger scene and someone is singing ‘Joy to the World,” you can take your Walkman (yeah, Walkman in 2013) and stuff it into your ears, or you can call your lawyer, or you can just exercise your right to leave the country; planes are leaving every hour on the hour, get on one.”

Planeloads of atheists leaving the country as we speak.

8. Mat Staver: If gay marriage is legal then everyone will do it and society will cease to exist?

Obviously the only thing preventing everyone from being gay and getting gayly married is the law against it. With gay marriage legal in New Mexico and Utah now and just generally havng had a watershed year, right-wing homophobes are in full panic mode.

Liberty Counsel head Mat Staver sounded the warning this week that with full marriage equality, everyone is just going to decide to marry someone of the same sex, and that of course means that society will “cease to exist” altogether. The whole country will become a childless, disease-ridden dystopia, he told Vic Eliason of VCY America. With more and more states embracing marriage equality, we guess you can expect more of the same such pathetic fear-mongering.

Sigh.

h/t: rightwingwatch

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/8-worst-things-far-right-wing-said-holiday-week?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

I actually read in another group where someone said "being gay is a fad that started in the early 90's"

A fad? OMG, like the hula-hoop or mood rings? If I'd only known..........

Dayum, I'm certainly not trendy.

So there were no gay people before the early 90s?

Nope.
And only happy ones in that nostalgic past that never was.

A few days belatedly, here's last week's installment ~ I remain stunned at the seemingly unlimited depth of ignorance, dishonesty, and knee-jerk bigotry from "some" ~ ~ there are "live links" to more/corroborating info in the original ~ Sooz

AlterNet / By Janet Allon
Surprise! Right-Wing Buffoonery Continues in 2014: Pope Pisses Off Rich Republicans Edition
Can someone please give David Brooks a doobie?

January 4, 2014 | 1. Ken Langone: Pope Francis, stop pissing off rich people... or else.

Pope Francis has been shaking a lot of conservative Christians up by de-emphasizing the church’s view of gays and atheists as sinners. But the people he is upsetting the most are super-rich so-called Christians, who apparently had no idea that this Jesus fellow was so sympathetic to the poor and downtrodden. And the Pope’s indictment of greed and the implication that trickledown economics doesn’t work, and isn’t something Jesus would condone, is just a step too far.

Them’s fighting words to billionaire Home Depot founder Ken Langone, who issued a warning to the poverty-conscious pontiff this week. In a nutshell, Langone said, shut up with your criticisms of rich capitalists or we’re not going to give any more money to charity. One of Langone’s favorite charities is the Republican Party, so no great loss there. But Langone also said “his friends” might be less inclined to give money for the restoration of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York if that mean old pope does not stop hurting their feelings by saying they lack compassion for the poor.

Right, the old “my friends” story. And where is people’s compassion for the rich? Meanies.

2. David Brooks: Don’t legalize it, even though I got to smoke it, and yeah, it was pretty fun, but....

Apparently, David Brooks is a haunted man. See, way before he became a conservative columnist for the New York Times, he made an embarrassing speech in a class. The reason: that ole devil weed. He smoked it at lunch and was too stoned to function in English class.

The memory of that embarrassing episode still keeps Brooks up at night sometimes. He would very much like to help prevent other teenagers from having bad memories like that. He would also like to prevent teenagers (and others) from having the silly fun and bonding experiences he admits he had while smoking pot as a youth. Curiously, he is less concerned about preventing kids, especially and statistically, black kids, from having nightmarish, life-ruining experiences with the criminal justice system after being caught with even small amounts of pot. His main point is that although he smoked it, and kind of liked it at one point, other people shouldn’t be able to because they won’t be able to modulate their use like he was able to. And they won’t pursue higher moral pleasures, like being David Brooks.

3. Maine GOP senate candidate: The system is terribly unfair to domestic abusers, like me.

Integrity. That’s something we can all agree Washington is sorely in need of. We might however have different ideas about what constitutes integrity. For Erick Bennett, who is running in the primary against Senator Susan Collins, serving time in jail for assaulting his now ex-wife proves he has integrity.

"The fact that I have been jailed repeatedly for not agreeing to admit to something I didn’t do should speak to the fact of how much guts and integrity I have," he explained to the Bangor Daily News. “If I go to D.C., I’m going to have that same integrity in doing what I say, and saying what I do, when it comes to protecting people’s rights, as well as their pocketbooks.”

Bennett is a fighter, all right. He battled his conviction all the way until the Maine Supreme Judicial Court shut him down in 2004, denying his claim that the court treated him unfairly. He’s going as far as he can with this line of argument, saying his opponent supports the system that railroads innocent men facing domestic abuse charges.

Salon’s Katie McDonough reported that to show he isn’t a single-issue misogynist, Bennett has also called Maine Rep. Michael Michaud a “closet homo.”

That’s integrity, all right.

4. Donald Trump and Stu Varney: Global cooling has been proven by the recent chilly weather.

As we all know, Donald Trump and Fox Business anchor Stu Varney are PhD climate scientists and have dedicated themselves for years to the close observation of snowfall in Central Park. Both habitual climate change deniers were considerably cheered this week by weather news they claim proves approximately 100 percent of the scientific community is wrong. Trump, whose preferred method of communicating his philosophy is Twitter, spewed: “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice.”

Previously, a snowy winter inspired Trump to demand that Al Gore’s Nobel prize be rescinded.

Stu Varney similarly crowed this week that his theory of “global cooling” had been once and for all proven correct. Unable to suppress his trademark smirk, Varney said. “The ship, sent to the Antarctic to study climate change, has been stranded in the ice for 10 days. Attempts to rescue the passengers using ice breaker ships failed. Rescuers finally got through using a whopping, great big helicopter that was landing on the supposedly, very thin ice.... So, it looks to me like we are looking at global cooling. Forget this global warming. That’s just my opinion.”

We can only assume they both enjoyed the snowstorm on the East Coast this week, very, very much.

5. WSJ’s retired David Wessel: I was wrong about, well, basically, everything. Oops!

One of the Wall Street Journal’s best-known economic columnists, David Wessel, wrote his swan song column this week, in which he admitted making at least two big mistakes in his 25 years at the paper during which he was a staunch defender of unfettered American capitalism. Oops, the middle class is not actually better off; and oops, Wall Street is capable of causing a global financial crisis.

Wow! Those would seem to be pretty big mistakes for an economic columnist. Kind of important, too. Wonder how long he was keeping those under his hat.

“Looking back over that quarter-century, four surprises stand out,” his New Year’s Day column said, starting with “the middle-class hasn’t done better,” a claim he had painstakingly made in books and columns. He wrote:


Two of his other big “surprises” were China’s economic explosion and the fact that the 9/11 attacks in 2001 didn’t have a “longer-lasting harmful economic effect.”

But his other big mea culpa concerned the financial market’s supposed inability to cause great economic dislocations after indulging in greed-driven bubbles. Amazingly, Wessel said he and other economists thought that would never happen.


I wonder if Wessel’s new bosses, at the Brookings Institution where he’ll be the new director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, know he’s sounding practically like a socialist.

6. Anti-LGBT hater/crusaders: 'Trans-people are circus freaks.'

LGBT haters had a tough week, what with Robin Roberts’ coming out and being shown all that love by everybody. Then there’s the apparently unstoppable-even-in-Utah march toward marriage equality. It’s all just a little too much for Peter LaBarbera, director of Americans for the Truth (ha!) About Homosexuality. In a radio interview, he spewed all the bigoted venom he could muster, disparaging Roberts, calling transgendered people “satanic” and saying the “homosexual so-called marriage movement” is a force of “evil” designed to “corrupt children.”

His host, Vic Eliason of Voice of Christian Youth (VCY) America’s radio show on Thursday joined right in, upping the ante by calling transgender people “circus freaks” and agreeing with LaBarbera that “Satan” is working through them.

“Every coming out is a tragedy,” LaBarbera said regarding Roberts. Even Michelle Obama, he sighed, is in on the pro-homosexual agenda, which he likened to “evil empire.”

These are not nice people, and perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked. But we can’t help it — we still are.

7. William Gheen: I’m not a racist. I just think white rule is best.

Gheen is head of a rabid anti-immigrant group called Americans for Legal Immigration (ALIPAC). And he’s extremely worried that immigration reform might be on the agenda in the new year. But it hurts his feelings when people call him a racist because of his anti-immigrationist views. He is not a racist, he explained to a radio host in Idaho this week — he’s just against the people who are trying to change America’s history of being “predominantly governed by people of European descendancy.” And by that, he doesn’t mean whities, although those are the people of European descent.

And it isn’t racist.

How could you even think that?

8. Another anti-immigrationist: Hispanics lack strong family values.

The Center for Immigration Studies is sometimes portrayed as a more sober think-tanky anti-immigration group, if such a thing exists. But it showed its true racist colors this week when senior policy analyst Stephen Steinlight, according to Right-Wing Watch, told a Washington Times communities blogger that immigration reform would cause “the unmaking of America” because it “would subvert our political life by destroying the Republican Party” and turn the United States into a one-party state similar to Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Sounds like he’s a teensy bit nervous.

Hispanics, he went on to claim, “don’t exemplify ‘strong family values’” due to “illegitimacy” rates and “anti-social behavior such as teenage child-bearing....”

Just remember, up is down, black is white. That will help you understand what these people are saying.

Read more here.

9. Franklin Graham: It’s your Christian duty to defend Phil Robertson.

Some Christians fell down on the job recently, when they failed to berate critics of Phil Robertson, the “Duck Dynasty” star who has expressed his charming views on homosexuality, black people, and as it turns out, the rightful (married sex-and-kitchen-slave to older men) place of 15-year-old girls. Christians who didn’t defend Robertson, said the son of Billy Graham, who is head of his own evangelical empire, are, well, wimps.

“I appreciate the Robertson family’s strong commitment to biblical principles and their refusal to back down under intense media pressure over Phil Robertson’s comments in a recent interview,” Graham wrote in a statement this week. “As the Robertson controversy winds down—at least for now—I have been amazed at how many churches have apparently ‘ducked’ out on the issue (sin).”

He chastised those churches for having “fallen into the trap of being politically correct, under the disguise of tolerance,” adding ominously, “God is not ‘politically correct,' and He is certainly not tolerant of sin.”

Hear that, all ye sinners? And non-defenders of Saint Phil Robertson?

Read more here.

10. N.C. Rep. councilman resigns in Klingon.

There have been a lot of strange doings in North Carolina’s legislatures lately, most of them bad. But when David Waddell, a conservative councilman of a town in suburban Charlotte, tendered his resignation to the town’s mayor in Klingon, absurdity reached a new kind of height (or depth).

For those unfamiliar with Klingons, they were the alien race from Star Trek who eventually made peace with the Federation (that’s the good guys). Fortunately, for non-trekkies CNET has verified that the resignation note contained "beautiful, pointy-looking written Klingon language of Kronos."

The mayor was not amused. "It’s an embarrassment for Indian Trail, and it’s an embarrassment for North Carolina," Mayor Michael Alvarez said.

Sadly, for residents of North Carolina, including blacks, women, teachers and children, this is far from the worst or most embarrassing thing that has happened in North Carolina politics of late.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/surprise-right-wing-buffoonery-continues-2014-pope-pisses-rich-republicans?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

Here's this week's installment ~ I'm convinced there has to be some secret contest going amongst the GOP/TPers with a humongous prize for whoever can be the most ignorant, most cruel, and most offensive most often ~ ~ there are "live links" to more/corroborating info in the original ~ Sooz

AlterNet / By Janet Allon
9 Right-Wingers Who Said and Did Colossally Stupid Things This Week
Limbaugh claimed the recent front of freezing temperatures was a media invention.

January 11, 2014 | New Jersey’s vindictive governor may have grabbed all the headlines this week, but that doesn't mean other right-wingers failed to dish up their usual combo of inane and offensive statements.

1. Ohio politician not sorry at all for sending out racist email.

Apologies can be so very lame. It’s true. And they have such a variety of ways of being lame. There’s the non-apology apology, aka the faux-pology, which often starts something like, “I’m sorry if I offended you....” There’s the apology that has to be pried out of someone under duress, a last-ditch effort to salvage a situation that has gone very public and very south — witness Governor Christie this week. (He seemed much sorrier that he was caught or supposedly lied to than he was that millions were inconvenienced and possibly endangered.) Then there is the apologist who apologizes so easily and readily that the apologies are meaningless. To them we say, don’t apologize, just stop doing the wrong thing. Stop being an a**hole.

And then there’s the flat-out refusal to apologize, even when an apology is so clearly in order. That was the situation in Ohio this week. Bob Carleton, a 71-year-old city councilman from Norwalk, OH, fully admitted he sent out a, shall we say, totally questionable holiday email in December. This week, the Toledo Blade brought that email to light, and when Carleton was asked about it, he said he just thought it was funny. That’s all.

The email was sent under the heading “Spelling Bee Champ.” Carleton did not make it up, so no points for creativity; the text of it has been going around the Internet for at least five years, and says: (Caution, unbelievably offensive stuff ahead):


Hard to know where to start here, so we’ll just say, WTF is wrong with people?

Carleton found this hilarious. He apparently did not notice it was appallingly racist. And he felt no need to apologize.

Fortunately, not everyone on the receiving end agreed, and many immediately tried to distance themselves from it. Norwalk Mayor Rob Duncan had a mixed reaction. He said it was “nothing we would condone or endorse.” At the same time, he added that he did not think Carleton would do something “malicious” and “intentional.”

Hmmm, we’re confused because we thought we knew what those words meant.

Read more here.

2. Art Laffer: 'The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act.'

Speaking of racism. Don’t you love it when conservatives fight against a morsel of social justice, like raising the minimum wage, by pretending to care about the plight of black teenagers? That’s the tack so-called economist Arthur Laffer took on his recent turn on Fox News.

“Yeah, well the minimum wage makes no sense whatsoever to me. I mean, honestly, it’s just the teenage — black teenage unemployment act” (yup, he not only said that, he stopped himself and added “black” into the sentence), “and this is the very group that we need to have jobs not be put out of work because of the minimum wage so I’m really very much in favor of at least for teenagers getting rid of the minimum wage so we can bring them back into the labor force….”

Laffer, you may remember, was a Reagan economic advisor and author of the discredited Laffer curve, which nonsensically posited that lowering taxes would bring in more revenue for the government. He was invited to appear on Fox News’ “Happening Now” with another charmer of a human being, Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, to discuss the plight of the long-term unemployed. It’s rather like inviting serial murderers to discuss the treatment of cancer patients. Not to be outdone, Strain suggested lowering the minimum wage for the long-term unemployed to $4 an hour.

Everyone agreed that was a grand idea.

Full story here.

3. WSJ writer says women are to blame for the rise of fatherless children.

It’s a terrible thing when conservatives fight. They’re usually such loving, caring people. But James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal got really pissed at his fellow conservative Kay Hymowitz this week. While the two are in complete agreement that marriage is the great and powerful Oz, the solver of all social problems, they just don’t see eye-to-eye on who’s to blame for the fact it doesn’t always work out and single moms end up raising the kids.

For Taranto, there’s a one-word answer when it comes to who’s to blame for social ills: women. Hymowitz, however, had the audacity to suggest that men who abandon their children are to blame. What a biotch!

Here’s how Taranto knows full well it’s those pushy, liberated broads who are the problem. Female careerism is problem numero uno, Taranto believes, because economic independence gives women less incentive to get hitched. “Female careerism” is an interesting term in and of itself. As Amanda Marcotte points out on Slate, “if you Google ‘female careerism,’ you get a bunch of links, but if you Google ‘male careerism,’ Google asks if you really meant ‘male careers’ or even ‘mahle careers.’ ‘Careerism’—the pathological need to have paid employment—is an affliction that only affects women, apparently.”

We suspect James Taranto did not Google “female careerism.”

Taranto also blames the pill, of course, because now men and everyone else can have massive amounts of sex and avoid having babies if they don’t want to, which is a terrible, terrible thing. In the good old days, women could get men to marry them simply by withholding sex. Oh, how we miss the days of the shotgun wedding.

Good times!

4. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert: 'The state won’t recognize legal same-sex marriages.'

What do you have when the governor of the state won’t obey the law? Anarchy, that’s what. Also, in the case of Utah Gov. Gary Herbert’s refusal to recognize the spousal rights of lawfully wed same-sex couples, you have discrimination.

Nevertheless, this week Herbert’s office directed state agencies not to recognize as valid the legal marriages of same-sex couples performed after a federal court ruled in favor of marriage equality in December.

A pitched battle over same-sex marriage has been going on in Utah. It had seemed that the forces of enlightenment had won and that same-sex marriage would be legalized in Utah, but then on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a stay in the marriage challenge while the lower court decision is on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Before the stay was issued, more than 1,000 same-sex couples were legally married in Utah.

But thanks to Herbert, they won’t get their spousal privileges. He and that idiot Trestin Meacham, who went on a hunger strike to stop gay marriage in Utah, must be awfully pleased with themselves.

5. Rush Limbaugh: 'Media created polar vortex hoax to perpetuate global warming hoax.'

Shockjock Rush Limbaugh must believe the liberal media has some mythical powers, all right — including the ability to lower the temperature of a huge swath of the continental United States and make everyone freeze their asses off. If only. Of course, the reason liberals in the media created the "polar vortex" was to advance that climate change "hoax." We love that hoax. It’s our favorite. Scientists also love that hoax, 97 percent of them do anyway. (Not sure what the other 3 percent love—pretty sure it’s not science though.)

"We are having a record-breaking cold snap in many parts of the country,” Rush cleverly pointed out on his radio show this week. “And right on schedule the media have to come up with a way to make it sound like it's completely unprecedented. Because they've got to find a way to attach this to the global warming agenda, and they have. It's called the 'polar vortex.' The dreaded polar vortex."

Well, it was pretty dreadful if you happen to live in the Midwest or East Coast. So were those bats dropping out of the sky in Queensland, Australia due to the extreme, and yes, unprecedented heat. Another liberal plot, no doubt.

6. Georgia GOP Senate candidate: 'Dems just want to put illegal aliens on welfare and get them to vote for them.'

Democrats, as we all know, buy votes. That’s the only way they can get them. But they don’t have as much money as Republicans do, so what those Democrats sometimes do, very sneakily, we must say, is create programs that help people, like food stamps, or unemployment benefits, or health insurance, or public schools, and then they buy the votes with those programs. If that theory sounds familiar, it’s because Mitt Romney floated it during his presidential campaign. (Remember the 46 percent?) Another version of this theory surfaced this week on Georgia Public Radio, when Senate candidate and House Republican Paul Broun argued that the only way Democrats can compete in Georgia is by giving undocumented immigrants both welfare and the vote.

“The only way Georgia is going to change is if we have all these illegal aliens in here in Georgia, [and] give them the right to vote,” Broun sputtered. “It would be morally wrong; it would be illegal to do so, under our current law. Actually, all these illegal aliens are getting federal largesse and taking taxpayers’ dollars. That’s the only way this state is going to become Democratic again, in the next number of decades.”

Later, he added, “The Democrats want to make them all basically dependent on the federal government so they can continue their radical, big government agenda.”

When he is not going after Democrats and immigrants, Broun has another favorite target: the theory of evolution, which he has called a lie “from the pit of hell.”

7. Ted Cruz: 'Obama should lock up pot users.'

Desperately seeking to remain relevant, Ted Cruz took up another hopeless cause this week. The Tea Partying, futilely filibustering junior Texas senator suggested that Obama start locking up pot users again. Just because he technically can. Even though pot is now legal in Colorado, it is still against federal law, and Cruz thinks that’s enough reason for Obama to drive through Colorado and start rounding up those pot smokers.

Why, you say? Well, partly to get a laugh. He was speaking at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Policy Orientation (yes, we agree that sounds redundant, but that’s the name).

“A whole lot of folks now are talking about legalizing pot. The brownies you had this morning, provided by the state of Colorado,” he quipped during his keynote speech.

“And you can make arguments on that issue,” Cruz continued. “You can make reasonable arguments on that issue. The president earlier this past year announced the Department of Justice is going to stop prosecuting certain drug crimes. Didn’t change the law.”

Fortunately, the Department of Justice announced in August 2013 that it would not target for arrest adults who used marijuana in compliance with state laws. But Cruz said the Obama administration should continue imprisoning people for using marijuana until federal law is changed.

Just ‘cause. It would be fun. Jails need more nonviolent offenders, and Cruz very much enjoys the thought of imprisoning people. When he thinks about it, he gets that shit-eating grin that shows he’s getting his buzz on.

8. Maine Gov. Paul Le Page: 'New Year’s Resolution: Get those 12-year-olds back to work again.'

Maine, of all places. Such a mild-mannered state. Such a crazy governor. Recently, Tea Partying Gov. Paul LePage suggested it was time to make it legal for 12-year-olds to work again. “Work never hurt anybody,” he said. “I worked when I was 11 years old.”

Currently, children in Maine younger than 16 who want to work must be enrolled in school, be passing a majority of their courses and obtain a work permit before starting a job. School-age children get those permits from a local school superintendent, and from there, the paperwork is sent to the Department of Labor.

According to the Bangor Daily News, LePage wants to change that requirement so students can bypass the superintendent during the summer months and go straight to the Department of Labor, to speed up the process.

As the Bangor Daily News notes, “The initiative falls short of LePage’s stated desire to lower the legal working age to 12."

Oh well. Oh, and he also wants to lower the minimum wage for those child laborers to $5.25, you know, cause that’s the whole point of having child laborers.

9. Followup: Congressman who suggested poor kids work for their lunches, expensed $4,200 in lunches for himself—to the taxpayers.

A little while back Rep. Jack Kingston from Georgia was eager to teach the poor children of his state the lesson that “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” Not for them anyway. He helpfully suggested they be required to do some janitorial work in the cafeteria for their subsidized lunch. Well, new development: it turns out that there is such thing as free lunches, if you are Jack Kingston.

An investigation by Georgia’s WSAV Channel 3 found that Kingston, who is currently running for Senate had expensed as much as $4,182 worth of lunches for his office over the past three years, the equivalent of about 2,000 free lunches.

Want a little hypocrisy with those mashed potatoes?

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/9-right-wingers-who-said-and-did-colossally-stupid-things-week?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

That'll be news to king Edward the second of England. What was that--thirteenth century?

Here is this week's installment ~ it's really hard to accept that these people hear/understand/believe what they themselves are spewing ~ ~ "live links" to more/corroborating information in the original ~ Sooz

AlterNet / By Janet Allon
10 of the Nuttiest, Nastiest Right-Wing Statements This Week
Republican lawmakers, Fox News idiots and David Brooks outdid themselves this week.

January 18, 2014 | 1. Nancy Grace: People on pot shoot, stab and strangle each other.

Nancy Grace made it extremely clear, in case anyone did not know, that she has never smoked, or known anyone who smoked marijuana this week. How did she do this? By hysterically claiming without a scintilla of evidence that marijuana is highly addictive, and that it causes people to go on bloody killing sprees.

Her guest, Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), tried to inject some reason into the conversation, by pointing out that “marijuana’s addictive properties have been found to be actually pretty mild compared to alcohol and tobacco, and even caffeine.”

Grace interrupted him to say: “So you — you are admitting it is addictive.”

Oohhhhh, madame prosecutor! Gotcha!

When Tvert again tried to reason with her by saying that potsmokers are not so unlike people who might have a cocktail at the end of the day to unwind, she could not resist interrupting again. (Where are your manners, Nancy Grace? Honestly.)

“The reason I’m against legalization is that I’ve seen too many felonies — felonies,” she said. “I mean people on pot that shoot each other, that stab each other, that strangle each other, that kill whole families — wipe out a whole family.”

So, we’ve established that Nancy Grace views "Reefer Madness" as a Ken Burns documentary.

2. David Brooks: Poverty is not an economic problem.

David Brooks started his Friday column sounding somewhat annoyed: “Suddenly the whole world is talking about income inequality,” he wrote. How dare they? This is very irritating to David Brooks because it means that he has to patiently explain to everyone that income inequality is all poor people’s fault.

How? You might ask. Because poor people’s moral failings are the reason that they don’t make as much money as rich people do. If poor people would just marry better—like rich people, who have the good sense to marry other rich people—and if poor people would just stop getting born to the wrong parents, they would be a lot better off. That’s why raising the minimum wage will not help poor people. It’s a crazy idea to think that more money would somehow make poor people less poor.

That really is his argument in a nutshell. He spends more words on this absurd line of reasoning because, for some reason, the Times persists in giving this moron a lot of column inches.

3. Another great Republican idea: People should have to show ID to get food.

Republican determination to humiliate people for the crime of being simultaneously hungry and poor continued this week. Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana suggested that a photo ID be mandatory for food stamp recipients attempting to buy food. Otherwise: No food for you!

Nevermind that millions of low-income Americans have no photo ID, and can’t afford to buy one (as anyone who recently had to renew their driver’s license, passport, etc. will attest—they cost money.) No, no, we must continue to deny food to the hungry, because they are con artists. Especially, those hungry children—they are the biggest con artists of them all. Don’t even get us started on hungry babies. Some of them are just pretending to be babies. They are actually grown ups.

Fraud is the way Republicans explain the increase in costs for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program which are roughly double what they were in 2008. It could not have anything to do with the fact that there is more poverty, and that people cannot even live on their low-wage Walmart and fast-food jobs. Reality check (thanks to ThinkProgress): “Food programs have the lowest fraud rates of any public program. At 1 percent, SNAP fraud rates pale in comparison to the rate of fraud in the farm assistance programs that conservatives like Vitter are attempting to shelter from cuts in the ongoing farm bill fight.”

4. Fox News Host says Americans don’t know their history—then proves it by not knowing her history.

On Wednesday during Fox News’ The Five, co-host Andrea Tantaros took Americans to task for not knowing their history. So true. What was ingenious was how she proceeded to demonstrate that. She could not have scripted it better.

Tantaros and her fellow panelists were lamenting a new report from the Heritage Foundation, which ranked the U.S. merely 12th in the world for economic freedom. Estonia beat us, Tantaros said, because they "actually know their history, and they study their history, and they study ours and what we’re doing here."

Americans, by contrast, are lazy, ignorant and stupid.

"If you ask most people, they don’t even know why we left England," Tantaros said. "They don’t even know why some guy in Boston got his head blown off because he tried to secretly raise the tax on tea. Most people don’t know that."

It’s true, most Americans don’t know that. You know why they don’t know that? Because it didn’t happen, that’s why. Politifact did some thorough investigating to see what Tantaros was talking about, and said:


It’s a charitable interpretation at best.

But what we do know is that no one secretly tried to raise the tax on tea. It was all out in the open, and part of what was called the Townshend Acts in 1767. And this Townshend fellow was neither in Boston, nor did he get his head blown off.

Read more here.

5. Ted Nugent demonstrates that he is insanely racist . . . again.

We’d attribute the NRA’s favorite rock ‘n’ roller’s most recent rant to a bad case of Cat Scratch Fever, but that would be an insult to cats. And no, we should not be surprised at anything Ted Nugent says anymore, but . . . well, he managed to up his already sky-high ante on vile, racist utterances in a recent op-ed for what Salon called that “batshit insane right-wing fever swamp of a site known as WorldNetDaily.”

The recent viral video of an African-American toddler cursing was like catnip to Nugent and his fellow bigots:

“Just when you think it can’t get any uglier, some street rat will slither out of the sewer and do something that shocks even the most hardened and calloused among us, me included.” He said the video showed “the continuing and unbroken cycle of street-rat savagery” and called the boy’s family “a bunch of gangster thugs, punks, degenerates and criminals.”

All this dysfunction is the fault of the War on Poverty and Democrats, of course, “the result of Fedzilla’s $16 trillion and 50-year-old so-called war on poverty, which created a cycle of dependency, destruction and culture rot for black America.”

The venom-spewing rocker works in Martin Luther King Day by saying that African-Americans have no business celebrating it. Instead, they must, “admit to the self-inflicted destructo-derby they are waging and begin to tell their liberal Democratic slave drivers to take a hike.”

Sorry. No joke for this one. Nugent is the joke.

6. Senator Bob Goodlatte’s jobs plan: Restrict abortion.

If you’re scratching your head over that heading, don’t worry. So are we. But the Senate Judiciary Committee Chair really made this absurd claim, in an attempt to defend his party for wasting precious time once again on legislation aimed at controlling women’s bodies, when there are obviously many more urgent things to attend to. Like job creation, or restoring unemployment benefits. Here’s his convoluted logic in action:


You know what else is “not harmful to job creation”? Lots of things. Hunting. Twiddling your thumbs. Being a pyromaniac. Actually, that last thing is good for job creation. More need for firefighters, then construction workers to rebuild the things that burned down.

Oh, is that a stretch? Our bad.

7. Louie Gohmert: Judges for same-sex marriage need plumbing lessons.

That cut-up of a Tea Partier from Texas, Rep. Louie Gohmert, was at it again this week when he criticized the homosexual-loving federal judges who keep ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.

It’s been a rough month for people who spend all their spare time worrying that people who love each other might be allowed to get legally married. This week one federal judge ruled Oklahoma’s ban on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional. And a similar decision was handed down in Utah last month, but the Supreme Court has since put that ruling on hold.

Gohmert’s interpretation of those rulings: "'Basically, we haven't seen any biological evidence to support marriage being between a man and a woman,'" according to Roll Call. Then he quipped, “They need some basic plumbing lessons.”

Oh. Hahahahahaha.

Gohmert was joined by other Republican comedians, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and Iowa Rep. Steve King, at a "Conversations With Conservatives" event hosted by the Heritage Foundation.

Care to venture a guess on the collective IQ of that panel?

8. Fox’s News’ Dr. (!!!) Keith Ablow: Being transgender is a myth!

Keith Ablow is a doctor, supposedly. A Fox News doctor.

So, one assumes he speaks with a certain calm authority, and has a passing familiarity with the many varieties of the human condition. This week, he felt the need to give his medical opinion on issues which affect the transgender community, first by denying that they exist.

"I don’t believe we have definitive data (although many psychiatrists with very impressive credentials, who seem to mean well, assert that we do) that any male or female soul has ever in the history of the world been born into the wrong anatomic gender,” Ablow wrote in a column on Fox News' website.

“Let me put that more clearly: I am not convinced by any science I can find that people with definitively male DNA and definitively male anatomy can actually be locked in a cruel joke of nature because they are actually female."

Wow, so why exactly would people go through this painful process and transition that often subjects them to horrific bullying, hate and violence?

Dunno. Ablow does not say. Because what he is really going after is that dastardly liberal California Governor Jerry Brown’s bill that allows transgender youth to use whatever bathroom and join whichever sports team they feel matches their gender identity. Dr. Ablow thinks that is “toxic.” Just as Chaz Bono’s appearance on “Dancing with the Stars” was toxic.

Our suspicion is that it is not a medical issue for Dr. Ablow. Psychiatric, possibly. But extreme, irrational ignorance and hatred for people who are unlike you in a way that you are unable to fathom, unlike being transgender, seems to be a choice.

9. Another one from Fox’ repository of crazies: Elisabeth Hasselbeck wonders if girlie men are a threat to national security.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck and her guest, Australian author Nick Adams, both know a real man when they see one. They shoot guns, watch football, hate feminists, and don’t let anyone tell them what they can and cannot do. Adams was invited on the show to talk about his book in which he blames feminists for pretty much everything, above all, the “war on men.” You know, the Fox fictional storyline that they pursue when the “war on Christmas” season is over.

Adams has a wonderful way with words, for example, he pointed out how, because of feminists, men who once “wrestled alligators” now “wrestle lattes,” which, despite its apparent humor prompted Hasselbeck to ask a very serious journalistic question. Are feminists and these effeminate men a threat to national security?

No, seriously, stop laughing. She asked that.

“Absolutely, without a doubt,” Adams said. “Weeps and wussies deliver mediocrity. And men win. And what America’s always been about is winning.”

We always suspected Starbucks was responsible for our country's downfall.

h/t: Salon

10. Ken Buck: Pregnancy and cancer, very similar.

Tea Party favorite District Attorney Ken Buck is running for Senate again in Colorado. He’s a very empathic guy. He’s had cancer. So he understands women. Now, don’t get us wrong, he’s not saying that being female is like having cancer. That would be outrageous. He’s saying being pregnant is like having cancer. Wait, whaaa . . . . ? But although you may want to get rid of cancer, you don’t want to get rid of pregnancies.

“Yes, I am pro-life,” he said during a radio interview this week. “While I understand a woman wants to be in control of her body — it’s certainly the feeling that I had when I was a cancer patient, I wanted to be in control of the decisions that were made concerning my body — there is another fundamental issue at stake. And that’s the life of the unborn child.”

Therefore, men and cancer patients get to have control over their bodies, but women don’t. But, he’s sympathetic to women, really. Because he had cancer.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/10-nuttiest-nastiest-right-wing-statements-week?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

"I don’t believe we have definitive data (although many psychiatrists with very impressive credentials, who seem to mean well, assert that we do) that any male or female soul has ever in the history of the world been born into the wrong anatomic gender,” Ablow wrote in a column on Fox News' website.

I'd like to hear what he would say about those born hermaphrodites. There are tons of documented cases....

As usual, ignorance abounds.

Keith Ablow is a doctor, supposedly. A Fox News doctor.

Apparently, he is a doctor.
Do your homework or look as silly as FOX.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Ablow

oskar, I read that comment as heavily sarcastic ~ she has often written about him and his goofy, from-another-universe ideas ~ he is not a doctor I would ever trust, even [or maybe especially] just to give advice ~ she's 100% correct that he is "a Fox News doctor" ~

Sooz

By law he is a doctor... unless he's had his credentials yanked. Hell,he isn't even self-certified like a certain ophthalmologist (sp?).
I never said he was a competent.
More like a brain-damaged Dr. Phil.

Here is this week's installment, which emphasizes how the far-right's desperation is becoming more and more obvious ~ there are "live links" to more corroborating information in the original ~ Sooz

AlterNet / By Janet Allon
10 Most Absurd Right-Wing Lunacies This Week: Pity the 1% Edition
A super-wealthy venture capitalist complains that the 1 percent are being treated like the Nazis treated Jews. And more!

January 25, 2014 | So much right-wing craziness this week, it's difficult to know where to start. So, we'll just dive in.

1. Thomas Perkins: The 1% are treated the way Nazis treated Jews.

If you’ve been spending your time worrying about the plight of the very poor, the long-term unemployed, low-wage workers or even the strapped middle class, stop it! You need to get some sensitivity training about the persecuted 1%. You know, it is just not easy being mega-wealthy. People are mean to you, In fact, it’s like the Nazis.

Wait. Whoa. What?

Thomas Perkins, the super-wealthy venture capitalist who once owned the largest private yacht in the world as well as multiple mansions, penned a letter to the editor to the Wall Street Journal this week about how scary it is to be part of the 1%, so scary it brings to mind how the Jews must have felt in Nazi Germany.

“Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’”

From there he talked about the ongoing “demonization of the rich,” in the San Francisco Chronicle, the resentment about the Google buses, and rising real estate prices, and the “cruel attacks” on his ex-wife, author Danielle Steel, calling her a “snob” despite all she’s done for the less fortunate.

Here’s the kicker: “This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking,” he wrote. “Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?”

Bet you didn’t know that progressive radicalism, with its desire to see the ultra-rich kick in higher taxes, was descended from Kristallnacht, a night of murder and mayhem directed against members of an ethnic group for no reason other than their ethnicity.

Seriously inflammatory, irresponsible stuff, and of course, WSJ printed it.

2. We heart Huckabee, and so will you, once you get that libido under control.

Mike Huckabee is nothing if not a creative thinker. Just when you thought you had heard everything, this week he made one of the most convoluted, crazy arguments against providing women with birth control we have ever heard.

It’s an insult, he said! It’s an insult propagated by the Democrats because it suggests women are interested in sex. That they have libidos. Libidos they can’t control. And that might cause them to get pregnant without birth control.

We’re not exaggerating. Here he is in his own oh-so-colorful words, speaking to a meeting of the Republican National Committee: “If the Democrats want to insult women by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it.”

Then he added: "Our party stands for the recognition of the equality of women and the capacity of women. That’s not a war on them, it’s a war for them.”

We just have one question. Has Mike Huckabee ever met a woman?

3. Laura Ingraham does not think Sarah Silverman is funny. Sarah Silverman is crying about this.

Comedian Sarah Silverman has made a hilarious five-minute video featuring Jesus Christ himself which utterly destroys right-wing arguments against giving women access to reproductive healthcare and abortions. It is fantastic. Silverman hangs out with Jesus, who jokes that life begins “at 40,” and watches NCIS with her. At one point, Silverman points out that sperm has been found to have a sense of smell, which means that sperm is alive, which means that men should have to undergo painful procedures with things stuck up their penises, all of which might make them think twice about masturbating.

We should warn you that Laura Ingraham, whom Katie McDonough at Salon calls that “famous comedy expert,” does not think it is funny. It actually makes her hopping mad. She went after Silverman in her radio show this week, calling her “unfunny” (ouch!), and “out of touch.”

McDonough writes: “Comedy Expert Ingraham also called Silverman 'a Nobel Prize winner' (sarcastically, of course) and a 'degenerate, foul-mouthed, slob of a person.' Take that, Sarah 'Unfunny' Silverman. Case closed on your un-funniness."

4. Iowa Republican Party posts incredibly stupid chart on racism.

The Republican Party is proving almost as adept at courting “minority” voters as it is at courting women. (Also, the LGBT vote, what with longtime gay Republican activist Jimmy LaSalvia loudly leaving the GOP and calling them “hopeless.”)

It almost stretches credulity how completely out-of-touch these wankers are, and how unembarrassed they are to parade their ignorance. The Iowa Republican Party posted a flowchart defining “racist” on Friday, which was fairly easy to follow. Someone is racist if they are white and you don’t like what they are saying. “If you think this flowchart isn’t funny, then this flowchart is racist,” it noted at the bottom.

Boy, they have some clever people working there. This is just too funny. They must have been in stitches when they thought it up.

At some point it must have become less funny to them because they took it down, and the chairman of the party apologized for it, saying it was in bad taste, and blaming some mysterious “contractor” for the post.

All in all, a great way to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Republican Party stating its intention to appeal to non-white voters.

Anyway, racism is dead. Fox News’ Eric Bolling says so, you know, because we have a black president, black senators and black entertainment channels. He’s tired of it already.

Read more of his ridiculousness here. If you want to get a gander at that deleted flowchart, click here.

5. Chicago GOP hopeful: Autism and dementia are God’s punishment for LGBT rights.

God is one wrathful, spoiled dude. And he hates gays. Haaaaates them. Hates anyone who likes them, accepts them, tolerates them, or doesn’t fight tooth and nail against them having equal rights. So, to punish us, he sent autism and dementia. He is nothing if not inventive with his scourges.

So says a most-enlightened, oh-so-charming Republican candidate running for Congress in Illinois. Her name is Susanne Atanus, and she has a personal, direct line to God, so she knows.

“I am a conservative Republican and I believe in God first,” Atanus told the Chicago Daily Herald this week. “God is angry. We are provoking him with abortions and same-sex marriage and civil unions.”

And here we thought God was just sending a lot of bad weather to retaliate for LGBT rights and abortions.

6. Oklahoma lawmaker: If gay people can get married, then no one should get married.

A Republican lawmaker in Oklahoma has proposed the legislative equivalent of destroying all his own toys so no one else can play with them.

If same-sex couples are allowed to get married, says state Rep. Mike Turner, then maybe no one should be allowed to get married.

“[My constituents are] willing to have that discussion about whether marriage needs to be regulated by the state at all,” Turner told a local TV station.

So there.

That’ll teach all you would-be monogamists in committed relationships.

7. Montana GOP rep: Force women to have babies because abortion robs men.

No one talks about men when they talk about women’s reproductive health. That’s just not fair. Men, like fetuses, are people too.

One brave Montana Republican legislator, Vicky Hartzler, has spoken out, telling conservative audiences that women should be forced to go through with unwanted pregnancies, because abortion “robs men” of their right to be fathers.

They should be forced to carry those babies to term, no matter what. If they don’t comply, they can be put in restraints, or perhaps induced into a coma.

Why? Because abortion hurts everyone. “It ends a beating heart, it leaves emotional wounds with women that they carry for life and it robs men of the privilege of fatherhood,” she said. “That’s why we must do everything in our power to end this devastating practice.”

It also makes God mad, creates storms, and brought us autism and dementia. Oh wait, that’s the other Republican lawmaker. No, but Hartzler says that if abortion wasn’t legal, “perhaps we would have had a cure for cancer now.”

No, she did not explain that. Must be that old magical thinking again.

8. GOP congressman: A wife should submit to her husband.

Say what you will, those Republicans sure do have a way with the ladies. As a sideline, Rep. Steve Pearce of New Mexico, specializes in giving people advice on how to have happy, fulfilling marriages. In his recent memoir, he said both parties have a role to play, and the wife’s role is obedience.

“The husband’s part is to show up during the times of deep stress, take the leadership role and be accountable for the outcome, blaming no one else,” Pearce says in the book. “The wife’s submission is not a matter of superior versus inferior; rather, it is self-imposed as a matter of obedience to the Lord and of love for her husband.”

Now, he knows this is not going to be popular with everyone, he just has to call it as he—and the Bible—see it.

Ladies, are you ready to submit?

9. South Carolina Sen. candidate: Teachers should carry machine guns.

As every good gunnie and the NRA know, the solution to gun violence is always more guns. In a year that has already horrifyingly averaged a school shooting every other day, South Carolina State Senator Lee Bright—yeupp, a Republican—says it’s time to pull out the big guns and give them to teachers. Preferably machine guns.

Bright had already proposed a bill to create high school courses on how to use a firearm. He expanded on this notion on Fox News Radio’s Alan Colmes Show this week.

Colmes gave him every opportunity to back away from this crazy idea, but Bright would not take the bait.


This is madness, clear and simple.

10. Victoria Jackson: Change First Amendment to ban Islam.

By now it’s become abundantly clear that Victoria Jackson’s whole dingbat act on "Saturday Night Live" years ago was no make-believe. Actually, Victoria Jackson gives dingbats a bad name. This week the idiotic right-winger proposed amending the First Amendment to ban Islam, because mosques are actually terrorist training camps.

Here is her “reasoning,” and we use the term loosely: “I believe in freedom of religion except for those religions that want to kill other religions.”

On the subject of the First Amendment, she said “I’d like to make an amendment to the First Amendment.”

Oh, that’s funny. See how she repeated the word amendment to make her racist, Islamophobia sound kind of ditzy at the same time? Read more here, if you care to.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/10-most-absurd-right-wing-lunacies-week-pity-1-edition?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark