Sullivan: Tea tantrums, not tea parties

Conservative Andrew Sullivan writes on his Atlantic Monthly blog of the utter ridiculousness of the Wingnut Tea Party:

...What it looks like to me is some kind of amorphous, generalized rage on the part of those who were used to running the country and now don't feel part of the culture at all. But the only word for that is: tantrum.

These are not tea-parties. They are tea-tantrums. And the adolescent, unserious hysteria is a function not of a movement regrouping and refinding itself. It's a function of a movement's intellectual collapse and a party's fast-accelerating nervous breakdown.

Look on the bright side of life

McCarthy-ite douchebaggery

Rep. Spencer Bachus, the top Republican on the Financial Services Committee, told a hometown crowd in Alabama today he believes there are several socialists in the House. Actually, he says there are exactly 17 socialists in the House of Representatives.
- Politico

This shouldn't require much commentary.

Ol' Spece Bachus is an asshole. Perhaps next he'd like to lynch himself some ni**ers and put some Ch*nks in internment camps.

2000 - zero - zero - (Republican) Party's over, out of time.
So tonight let's party like it's 1699.

Teleprompter douchebaggery

Glenn Beck on March 25th:

So I mean, it really bothers me, this teleprompter. … It bothers me that this man doesn’t — this man is always on prompter. You want to talk about a Manchurian candidate — that’s it! Who’s writing every word for this man? […] Is it bothering anyone else but me? We have a fraud in office, at least that’s the way it feels to me.

Glenn Beck on April 9th:

Christopher Hitchens debates religious influence in America

Christopher Hitchens was a guest on Hardball tonight along with Kenneth Blackwell, from the Family Research Council, to discuss Newsweek's recent cover story titled "The End of Christian America."

As usual with Hitchens, the debate was heated and interesting. Perhaps the most interesting part was the debate over our founding documents. Blackwell posited that the Founding Fathers were Judeo-Christians (and then confused them with the Pilgrims - blending together 150 years of history).

Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, points out that our founding documents are secular, that Ben Franklin, an athiest, inserted "self-evident" into the Declaration. That Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the document, created his own Bible which eliminated any references to Christ's divinity and that George Washington refused to take Communion.

Blackwell smiled a lot, like he had gastrointestinal discomfort.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

WFC. Oh yes they are.

The Front Fell Off

This guy could easily be a high-ranking GOP house member

Baracknophobia: wingnuts terrified of Obama

(Huff Post)
Jon Stewart took on people "speaking crazy to power last night." Rep. Michele Bachmann recently said that President Obama is going to put our children in reeducation camps, and Sean Hannity congratulated her for her crusade against tyranny. Stewart followed this clip up with a litany of moves the Bush administration made to reduce American freedom, transparency, and state's rights, and said the pair were confusing "tyranny" and "losing."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Baracknophobia - Obey
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Music under the radar

My Morning Jacket - I'm Amazed


Coheed and Cambria - Welcome Home
(this is the album version of the song. Their record label has disabled embedding. To see the real video, click here)


TV on the Radio - Wolf Like Me

More on Pittsburgh shooters and wingnut irresponsibility

Oliver Willis reports:

Poplawski bought into the ["shit hits the fan" and "the end of the world as we know it"] conspiracy theories hook, line and sinker, even posting a link to Stormfront of a YouTube video featuring talk show host Glenn Beck talking about FEMA camps with Congressman Ron Paul.

Now, that doesn't mean Beck pulled the trigger and it doesn't mean Beck was the tipping point. What it does mean is that when one steps in front of a TV camera, one has a responsibility not to appeal to low, base instincts. One has a responsibility not to appeal to the marginal elements of our society. One has a responsibility not to discuss outrageous conspiracy theories as if they're legitimate news.

As Bob Cesca points out:

Put another way, imagine if CNN aired a serious discussion about how the moon landing was faked, without any caveats that the topic is largely seen as preposterous. A lot of people will believe it. Likewise, the establishment press was responsible for helping to spread the Muslim rumors about then-Senator Obama during the campaign -- not to mention legitimizing the Swift Boat veterans during the 2004 campaign.

Or, last month, George Will published a totally erroneous "debunking" of the climate crisis in the Washington Post. The Post had a responsibility to police the accuracy of Will's claims -- or to account for his inaccuracies after the fact. They did neither. Who knows how much damage that column has done in terms of impacting the public legitimacy of the climate crisis. The larger the audience, the more influential the voice -- thus, the more accountable the source has to be.

You don't just step in front of one of the largest news cameras in the world and blurt out any pile of bullshit. Especially tearful motivational speeches about stockpiling guns or ginning up militaristic tendencies. Opinion show or not. Again, if O'Reilly is calling bullshit then perhaps Beck has blown the crazy curve.

Now, let's go back to Obama's "biggest gaffe" and see if it's not really true.

"So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns" - Barack Obama 4/6/08

Was he really wrong? Read up on Poplawski. Look at what the Binghamton killer wrote. Read this.

We have a gun problem.

Instant Geek Classic

Beer, babes in underwear and lightsabers

The "Daily Show"'s Guide To Fixing The Auto Industry

The Daily Show's John Hodgman knows exactly what to do to save the American auto industry and kindly laid out his five-step plan last night for the world to see. The highlights include rekindling the American love affair with the car by capturing the tender beauty of autoerotic asphyxiation. (We're pretty sure that doesn't mean what he thinks it means.)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
You're Welcome - Auto Industry
comedycentral.com

Washington Post reporter calls out George Will for lying in... Washington Post

(David Roberts)

Today, Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan have a piece on the alarming decline of Arctic sea ice. In and of itself the story isn’t that surprising: scientists have known for a while that the ice is declining;  new data just confirms that it’s happening faster than originally estimated. That’s consistent with all sorts of new observational data on the effects of climate change, which across the board seem to be exceeding scientists’ most pessimistic predictions.

What jumped out at me is this bit, toward the bottom of the piece:

The new evidence—including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s—contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979. [my emphasis]

I can’t think of another instance when a news story at a newspaper explicitly called out an op-ed writer in the same paper for lying, by name. It’s pretty extraordinary. I can only imagine that something like this got passed up the editorial food chain, from science editor Nils Bruzelius to national news editor Kevin Merida, and perhaps beyond. (The Post will not talk on record about their editorial process; they “stand behind their reporting” and so forth.)

Hard to read it as anything but a rebuke from the news team to Post editor Fred Hiatt and his editorial page’s “multi-layer editing process,” which allowed Will to lie and mislead on climate change three times just in the last few months, even after being corrected, publicly, by multiple sources.

Along the same lines, see this new piece on the Post’s weather blog, by Andrew Freeman: “Will Misleads Readers on Climate Science - Again.”

George Will’s recent columns demonstrate a very troubling pattern of misrepresentation of climate science. They raise some interesting questions about journalism, specifically concerning the editing process. Editors and fact checkers are there to ensure that publications like the Washington Post don’t print factually incorrect information.

In response to the Will controversy, numerous people have made the point that people who work for thePost—the ones who aren’t full of shit—have a responsibility to speak out about their employer’s willingness to mislead readers.

It appears some of them are trying.

So we'll ban peanuts when one kid's allergy flares, but 20 people dead in gun violence this week....

...means nothing. 20 people dead, including 7 cops, in the last week and no outrage. If a series of child molestations harming 20 children had happened, it would be the fault of the left for being soft on crime and we'd be calling to execute the perpetrators.

If 20 kids died last week of peanut allergies, we'd ban peanuts from the public arena.

So what does it take to admit we have a fucking gun problem?

13 in Binghamton

4 police in Oakland

3 more cops in Pittsburgh

When?

The events behind the shootings are as different as can be. The thread that connects them is easy access to firearms.

When will we place blame where it belongs? On their own, the guns themselves didn't massacre these people. But the easy access to them put deadly weapons into the hands of unhinged people and turned these incidents from possible assaults into mass murders.

32 people a day die because of guns. If it were peanuts, they'd be off the shelves.

Discuss.

Please. As a nation can we rationally discuss this? If the subject were anything but guns, we could have a rational discussion. So lets pick a code word to use. How about "death sticks"?

Can we talk about restricting access to death sticks?

Wingnut theatrics are going too far; shootings in Pittsburgh

What's intriguing about this whole mess being ginned up is that the RightWingnuts are accusing the left of trying to stamp on their First Amendment rights by calling out their craziness.

When Dick (heh) Morris advocates killing federal agents on Fox last week, they've officially gone too far.

Those crazies in Montana who say, ‘we’re going to kill ATF agents because the UN’s going to take over’ -- well, they’re beginning to have a case. - Dick Morris

It's not trampling anyone's right to speak to point out that people like Morris and Hannity and Beck are indeed inflammatory and dangerous. and it's not trampling to point out that Richard Poplawski, the 23-year-old who killed three police officers yesterday in Pittsburgh, apparently acted out of fear that his guns were going to be taken away.

It's not trampling to say that, while Beck and Hannity didn't cause Poplawski to ask, their dangerous rhetoric helps to provide a climate conductive to these actions.

Quoth Cesca:

The far-right "they're coming for my guns" poseur militaristic set aren't lone nuts. They're not impressionable kids acting out. They are, in fact, believers in an ideology. An ideology that ordains guns as the only means by which to solve problems or to level the socio-political playing field. It's a kind of religion -- with the obvious players serving as ministers and purveyors of the ideological dogma.

What we're hearing on talk radio and on FOX News is gun porn, far beyond the realms of responsible political chatter. And it's up to Beck and the others to take a hard look at the content of their sermons and to understand that there are too many adults with firearms who are just one segment or NRA interview away from taking the Beck's theatrics too seriously.

As Neiwert at Crooks and Liars points out:

The point is not to silence the people saying these things, but to point out how grotesquely irresponsible they are -- in the hopes that they will cease doing so, and start acting responsibly. It's their choice to use irresponsible rhetoric. It's not just our choice but our duty, as responsible citizens, to stand up and speak out about it.

Then there's just garden-variety crazy with some Classic Hannity, by Steve Benen @ Washington Monthly

Late last week, President Obama spoke in Strasbourg, France, and talked about his commitment to renewing our partnership with America's European allies. He conceded that "we've allowed our alliance to drift" in recent years, and went out of his way to be even-handed about it. The president, for example, acknowledged that the U.S. has, at times, "shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive" of the European Union.

But in the next breath, Obama added that Europe has "an anti-Americanism that is at once casual but can also be insidious," adding that too often, Europeans have been too quick to blame America, while neglecting to recognize "the good that America so often does in the world."

Urging both sides of the Atlantic to begin anew, Obama said, "[T]hese attitudes have become all too common. They are not wise. They do not represent the truth.... So I've come to Europe this week to renew our partnership, one in which America listens and learns from our friends and allies, but where our friends and allies bear their share of the burden. Together, we must forge common solutions to our common problems."

On Fox News, Sean Hannity aired the first part -- the part in which the president conceded recent U.S. shortcomings -- and pretended the other parts didn't happen. (In an understatement, Howard Kurtz called Hannity's creative editing "not quite fair.") The ensuing tirade was Hannity at his most Hannity-tastic.

"America is arrogant. That's what Mr. Obama said today, doing his best Dixie Chicks impression.... [T]he liberal tradition of blame America first, well, that's still alive. But should we really be surprised from a man who sat in Reverend Wright's church, from a man who launched his political career in the home of a man who bombed the Pentagon and is unrepentant. Mrs. Obama may not be proud of her country, but I bet she's proud of her husband tonight. [...]

Norm MacDonald's Legendary ESPY Appearance

Norm turned the entire set of the 1998 ESPY's into a roast, and probably pissed a lot of these sports figures off. ESPN won't do this again.