The big rumor of the day is that Evil Mexicans have invaded our valuable Texan ranches as their first step towards feeding America an eightball of Reconquista. 

The bloodbath continues along our southern border and now word is coming in that Los Zetas, the highly trained killers formerly with the Gulf Cartel, have crossed into the United States and taken over at least two ranches in the Laredo, Texas area. I am receiving word that the owners of the ranches have evacuated without being harmed. The source is law enforcement in the area.

To be fair, in large areas of Texas, “law enforcement” is “anyone with guns”, so this sort of makes sense.  In another and more accurate way, however, it does not. 

You see, the story is complete bullshit.  First, from actual law enforcement officials:

“We didn’t have any incidents on the American side. It’s hard for people to understand who don’t live here,” he added. “They’re not Vikings, they’re not going to invade us, it doesn’t work that way.”

Then, again, from actual law enforcement officials:

Local law enforcement was bombarded with calls from across the country Saturday asking about a report that the Zetas had taken over two ranches off Mines Road.

But officials with the Laredo Police Department, Webb County Sheriff’s Department and Border Patrol said they knew nothing about such an incident, while Erik Vasys, an FBI spokesman in San Antonio, said the agency does not comment on rumors.

The report, which spread like wildfire among blogs Saturday afternoon, appears to have initially been posted on a blog called Diggers Realm.

The blogger wrote that he got a tip from a San Diego, Calif., minuteman named Jeff Schwilk, who said that the Zetas, former enforcers of the Gulf Cartel, had crossed into the United States and taken over two ranches off Mines Road, about 10 miles northwest of Interstate 35.

To summarize: an idiot called up another idiot and told them that now was the time for Total Ultimate Warfare against the Messicans.  But how far could such a rumor go in the discerning realm of conservative blogging?  Surely, nobody would pick up a story that was the equivalent of your cousin calling you at 2:30 in the morning to tell you that he thinks he’s going home with Katy Perry after doing a round of Jaegerbombs at a TGI Friday’s.  Surely.

Sigh.

Kimberly Dvorak: 

In what could be deemed an act of war against the sovereign borders of the United States, Mexican drug cartels have seized control of at least two American ranches inside the U.S. territory near Laredo, Texas.

Two sources inside the Laredo Police Department confirmed the incident is unfolding and they would continue to coordinate with U.S. Border Patrol today. “We consider this an act of war,” said one police officer on the ground near the scene. There is a news blackout of this incident at this time and the sources inside Laredo PD spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In case you were wondering, any state west of the Mississippi has the right to declare what is or isn’t an act of war.  Particularly when they’ve employed super-awesome Laredo Police Officer Buff Killington, MBA/Krav Maga Expert. 

The Cypress Times has 100% confirmed this report with a second law enforcement official, presumably Lt. Cinnamon Sweetbottom-Grant, who took up protecting the people of Laredo after her husband was brutally murdered in the parking lot of an H-E-B during a shootout between rival Mexican gangs Las Bibliotecas and Los Fuentes de Agua. 

Dan Riehl, even though he admits that it’s false, still can’t help fantasizing over Team America: Texas Edition going all Special Forces on the invisible Mexican Menace.

This can’t actually be happening, can it? What, do they figure the numb-nuts in the WH is so weak they can get away with a move like this? Okay, on second thought, maybe they have a point. But still. Hell, the right configuration of Texans could end this nonsense. Retired special forces, anyone?

From all of this, I predict the following.  One: within a year, a group of Brazilian tourists in Orlando will be attacked as a roving Mexican street gang.  Two: we will see a roughly 600,000% rise in in the number of Tea Party YouTube videos using clips from The Expendables to simulate an elite commando group killing half of Mexico.  None of them will be racist, and the ones that are will secretly be made by MoveOn.org.

I’m still at Netroots Nation (you can follow updates at my Twitter feed or at hashtag #nn10), so I don’t have a lot of time to write.  But if you’re interested, I was recently on the skepticism-oriented podcast the Big Cigarette.  You can listen here.  They got me to talk about the oh so fun pleasure of being targeted by a right wing smear campaign years ago, and about my new book.  Check it out!

After a long, hard summer of legal work, today is my last day, which means I’ll be back to full-time posting. 

Also, Amanda and I and sundry other funny fuckers have a panel tomorrow at Netroots Nation on being snarky after winning elections, which is the most useful thing you will ever encounter.  In life.  Sorry, CPR classes.

Just over the weekend, I noted that wingnuts love getting their political enemies fired because it’s still illegal to have them executed.  And sure enough, this week Andrew Breitbart---who we all know has zero compunction about lying when it comes to singling out random people for flying monkey attacks---zeroed in on his next innocent victim, Shirley Sherrod, and got her fired.  Using heavy editing, Breitbart turned a video about Sherrod’s encounter with some white farmers in trouble after struggling to look past some racial tensions that initially inclined her to not help them as much as she should.  The conclusion was that she wanted to help poor people, regardless of race. 

Breitbart edited this to make it sound like she was bragging about how she didn’t help white people because they were white.  In reality, the opposite is true. It’s shameful that anyone treats Andrew Breitbart as anything but a known liar, and progressives are trying to shame the mainstream media and the Obama administration for reacting to Breibart’s accusations with any more seriousness than if it was Alex Jones ranting about black helicopters and the One World Government. 

I’m traveling all day to Netroots, but I’ll have my Twitter available some times, and I’m trying to start a meme.  I’d love to have your help.  The hash tag is #ifandrewbreitbarteditedit, and the idea is to drive home that you can’t believe everything you hear in heavily edited videos.  Here are some of my entries, and I tend to update when I can:

“Apocalypse Now” is about how war is a morally uplifting adventure.

“In The Heat Of The Night” is about the dangers of affirmative action.

“Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” is about what’s wrong with interracial marriage.

“It’s A Wonderful Life” is about why big bankers are great, and why suicide is painless.

“Citizen Kane” is about the spiritual fulfillment one gets from capitalism.

If you don’t have Twitter, leave yours in comments, and I’ll try to tweet them, with full credit. 

The issue of “Why not censorship?” came up in the thread below making fun of the Buttman videos and the rationalizations you hear for misogynist, racist pornography.  I denounced censorship as firmly as I could to quell the “FEMINISTS ARE ALL PRUDES AND CENSORS” nonsense, but then of course I didn’t adequately prepare for people saying, in essence, if you think that a lot of porn is racist, misogynist hate speech, why not ban it?

I thought I’d distill my reasons for this free speech absolutism.  This post will assume, for the sake of argument, that it’s possible to create a fair government definition of “hate speech” that could be enforced.  I don’t believe that’s true, and that any such standard would immediately be mostly used to oppress feminist and pro-gay speech, but let’s just assume for the sake of argument that it’s possible.  Censoring hateful pornography would still be wrong, for a few major reasons.

Censorship is a distraction from constructive progressive work.

The thread below is a classic example of this.  I called out for creative ideas on how to subvert hateful pornography by using its existence for feminist ends---to illustrate what we mean by “misogyny”, to open up a discussion about ways to celebrate sexuality without hating women, to talk about the ways that racism and sexism work together, to work as a warning signal to women about who not to date.  The idea of censorship was floated, and all other potential responses were thrown out the window while everyone obsessed over how to censor, whether to censor, how to define what is and isn’t eligible for censorship.  That’s a huge waste of energy and time.

Censorship cannot kill ideas, particularly widespread ones.

So, let’s say we come up with a regime that is able to wipe out all hardcore pornography organized around the idea, “Women, especially sexually active women, suck and need to be treated like the dirty cunts they are.” That’s probably not going to do a damn thing to wipe out that widespread and super-popular message.  It will still be out there in forms like Maxim magazine, beer commercials, the pulpits of anti-choicers, and the party platform of the Republican party.  Trying to censor all that basically would mean a complete end to all forms of freedom of speech.  And even after all, I’ll bet that misogynists will still be misogynists.

Tyrants suppress what they cannot argue with.

People tend to get this intuitively, and would assume that the only reason that the government is out to suppress the message, “Women, especially sexually active women, suck and need to be treated like the dirty cunts they are,” is that it’s the truth and they can’t handle the truth.  By suppressing people who want to express their hatred of women out loud, or in commercial forms like porn, we would allow them to paint themselves as bold rebels speaking truths the rest of us are afraid to confront.  When, in fact, they are assholes promoting easily debunked, hateful arguments.

But Amanda, don’t you ban disruptive trolls?!

This is why there’s got to be critical distinctions between actually suppressing speech and creating spaces for certain discussions.  I’ve heard the argument, “Women (or fill in whatever group) suck and deserve to be treated like they’re subhuman.” It’s been debunked.  If I wanted to write a blog that was just about debunking that argument over and over and over again without saying anything new or interesting, then that’s what I’d write.  This is a different blog.  That someone has a right to say whatever they want doesn’t mean they’re entitled to an audience.  No one has a right to commandeer this audience that Jesse, Pam, and I (and our gracious commenting community) built up to have certain discussions.  We’re no more obligated to print some troll’s nonsense than Random House is obliged to publish it. 

Indeed, I would say disruptive trolling is essentially anti-freedom of speech, in that the troll wants to shut down certain conversations that he thinks shouldn’t exist here or anywhere.  He’s denying the right of us to run a blog that communicates what we want to communicate.  We have a right here to conduct conversations on our grounds, not just hand it over to some guy who has managed to hone his skills at shouting others down and making intelligent discussion impossible. 

The best reaction to offensive speech is more speech.

I’d like to think my post below is an example of the best way to resist hate speech, by exposing it for what it is.  Instead of driving curiosity about what’s being censored or making the targets of criticism seem like freedom fighters, I just pointed out that it’s a rather tedious and frankly juvenile form of misogyny, consumed mainly by life’s losers who spend their energies hating on women instead of working on not being losers. 

I’ve been following this “Buttman” trial with some interest, though I rightly suspected that it wouldn’t get far.  I was glad when the case was dismissed. I dislike vicious, mean-spirited pornography as much as the next person who loves humanity, but I also tend to be a fan of free speech and don’t think it’s helpful for the government to censor anyone under the guise of “obscenity”.  I’m not a fan of suggesting some things have no political or artistic value.  John “Buttman” Stagliano is making a political statement, one that amounts to a pile of hateful crap, but is nonetheless an opinion and he has a right to express it. 

With that out of the way, I have to reaffirm that one of my least favorite aspects over the debates about porn is the shocking amount of bullshit that flies around.  Salon interviewed the actress in the movie in question, whose stage name is Lorelei Lee.* And let’s just say it was thick in there.

What would you say to folks who are offended by the content in “Milk Nymphos” — or any of your other work?

Well, first I would say: Don’t watch it.

So far, so good.  It’s a cliche, but it’s fair enough.

I don’t make these films in order to be shocking or confrontational.

Let’s be clear: the film was called “Milk Nymphos” because it involved a lot of giving women milk enemas.

I make them for the audience that seeks them out.

True enough.

There is a community of people who find these films hot, erotic, joyful and even beautiful.

The follow-up question put this claim into the shooting milk out of your nose (or your ass, if that’s your thing) territory:

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Amanda Hess and Marisa Meltzer went on Soundcheck to debate the merits of the Lilith Fair, with there being a rough divide between pro-Lilith Marisa and anti-Lilith Amanda.  Which is oversimplifying things a bit---Marisa conceded that the line-up in many places was boring and Amanda certainly didn’t have a problem with a female-oriented music festival to bring more attention to female musicians---but that was the general divide.  It should surprise no one that I fall on the anti-Lilith side of the fence.  I heard somewhat interesting things about how they were getting away from the broomskirts and tambourines orientation of the previous Lilith Fair, but I didn’t find the New York line-up to be exciting enough to spend the money.  This was basically Amanda’s argument, too---that it’s not about it being all female or somehow segregated that’s the issue.  It’s that the content itself is the problem; even in places with more exciting line-ups, there’s such a hodge-podge of acts that it’s a problem from a marketing perspective.  Concert festivals usually have an image and a set demographic they sell to, and “women” isn’t well-defined enough.  As Amanda noted, the old Lilith Fair’s strength was that it had this wussy folk music image.  Not something that I’d want to listen to, but at least it was something substantial you could market to fans of that music, and they did turn out.  The “festival for every kind of woman” thing comes across to actual flesh-and-blood female music fans as “a festival where you have to sit through a lot of shit you don’t like to hear something you do like”, whatever that something is.

It doesn’t help that Sarah MacLachlan is at the center of all this.  She could get away with it in the 90s, when she was a legitimate pop star churning out hits.  The narcissism of closing the festival every night was less obnoxious when she could point to her big hits and say she was the sort of person who closes shows.  But now?  She has a lot of musicians who are way bigger or more important than her by any measure, and they’re opening for her.  It’s distasteful, and makes it seem like the Lilith Fair is less about being pro-woman than being about making Sarah MacLachlan relevant again.  To make the whole MacLachlan situation even uglier, she’s been running around trying to conceal the feminist origins of Lilith Fair and repudiating the feminist label.  Soundcheck had examples of MacLachlan getting pissed at the idea of “politicizing” a festival of female musicians that was created in direct response to discrimination and prejudice aimed at women.  What’s not political about discrimination and prejudice?  She makes no sense, and playing the “I’m not a feminist, but” game is particularly ugly on a woman her age.

It’s also dishonest.  I remember the Lilith Fair the first time around, and it was about as political as it gets.  In fact, it was hard not to sympathize with the need for it.  The late 90s were a time of vicious anti-feminist backlash in rock music, which culminated in the violence and rapes during the Limp Bizkit set at Woodstock ‘99.  Women on the radio were relegated to earnest folk-tinged music that maximized non-threateningness.  A lot of the reason for this is pretty simple, which is that the early 90s flowering of alternative rock had finally been successfully co-opted by the corporate music industry, and most of the relatively independent radio stations had been bought up so that folks like Creed and Kid Rock could be passed off as “alt rock”.  It was a dark time.  Showcasing female musicians and pushing back against the dude-centrism of the radio was a good idea, but MacLachlan’s only response was basically to double down on the “women will stick to this corner fiddling on our acoustic guitars and leave the real rock music to the guys” mentality of the time.  Still, the notion that MacLachlan wasn’t trying to make a feminist statement is pure bullshit.  Much was made at the time of the name of the festival, named after a goddess figure who supposedly predated Eve and had to be rejected because she wanted equality with Adam.  Claiming this historical villain as a hero is absolutely a feminist statement, and to suggest otherwise confirms every negative suspicion that some of us have always had about MacLachlan.

Hats off to Marisa and Amanda for not getting trapped by the most irritating aspect of any discourse around Lilith, which is the question of whether we “need” it or if there’s something good or not about a women’s music festival.  The answer, if you’re pragmatic and understand history at all, is yes, and it will stay yes until women stop being marginalized in the larger music world.  Highlighting a marginalized group’s talents and diversity is the best way to get them mainstreamed, and often the only way to do this is through having these events that set out specifically to perform that task.  The question isn’t “Are women’s festivals a good idea?”, especially since they historically help instead of hinder mainstreaming women.  The question is whether or not Lilith Fair is any good at what it sets out to do.  The first incarnation failed in some major ways because it wasn’t threatening enough.  Some men were saying women can’t rock and their answer was to showcase a bunch of women who don’t rock (or fill in your term for kicking ass---the most ass-kicking musicians I remember from the late 90s were Eryka Badu and the Dixie Chicks, who legitimately do challenge male dominance in the ways of rocking, even though they don’t play rock).  This incarnation has a lot more women doing interesting things, and some more diversity both in terms of what kind of music is being played and who is playing it, but by running away from feminism, they yet again avoid offering a direct challenge.  The task, in other words, is a legitimate one.  Sarah MacLachlan just isn’t the person to pull it off. 

The Patriarchy is back!  (Not that he ever really went anywhere, I suppose, except to the bank a few times.)

In this episode, The Patriarchy gets his mansplain on to discuss the most important issue in America today: LeBron James. This isn’t about a basketball player switching teams, this is about the most browerful bromance of of our modern brage.

Transcript after the break. BRO HUG!

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Peter Daou tweeted this Frank Rich op-ed yesterday, and expressed suspicions that Rich is reading way too much into the fact that the right cut Mel Gibson loose when it became apparent that his private willingness to spew all sorts of anti-Semitic, racist, misogynist crap made him less an asset and more of an albatross.  From this, Rich concludes that the scary evangelicals have had their day and it’s over:

Conservative America’s new signature movement, the Tea Party, has its own extremes, but it shuns culture-war battles. It even remained mum when a federal judge in Massachusetts struck down the anti-same-sex marriage Defense of Marriage Act this month. As the conservative commentator Kyle Smith recently wrote in The New York Post, the “demise of Reagan-era groups like the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority is just as important” as the rise of the Tea Party. “The morality armies have failed to inspire their children to join the crusade,” he concluded, and not unhappily. The right, too, is subject to generational turnover.

Except that the Tea Partiers are also willing to cut someone loose if they commit the ultimate sin of making explicit what conservatives are only supposed to argue through implication.  It’s simply understood in right wing circles that you have to couch your reactionary arguments in liberal-sounding language, and that you never just come right out with what you’re really thinking.  Doing so is bad P.R., and yes, will get you cut loose.  Gibson and his marketing campaign for “The Passion of the Christ” were a classic example of standard issue wingnut argumentation---he rather masterfully smuggled anti-Semitic arguments into the public discourse by recasting them as simply pro-Christian (and therefore anyone who argued with them was deemed anti-Christian, and you could fake umbrage at their “bigotry").  What happened with Gibson isn’t all that uncommon with wingnuts.  One of them starts to get too big for his britches, and starts to think he doesn’t have to argue his prejudice through the pre-approved euphemisms.  Once they go there, they become a burden and are in grave danger of getting cut loose.

In other words, it’s not a matter of what’s trendy or not, it’s just a matter of skills and patience.  If you don’t have the basic skills to feign concern over women’s well-being while attacking women’s rights, to argue that you’re not against gay marriage so much as supporting “traditional marriage”, or to drop racial slurs you might use amongst friends for euphemisms involving welfare, rappers, or the word “thug” in public, you’re too stupid to be a spokesperson for them.  It’s not like there’s a shortage of wannabes who have perfected the disingenuous smile and the mouthful of nonsense-language designed to give you plausible deniability.  Mel Gibson isn’t out of style; he just broke the rules.  Let’s face it; Mel Gibson’s over-the-top racism would make the Tea Party just as much his natural home as his seething hatred of women and his crazy religious beliefs makes the Jesus-and-fetus people his friends.  This is a matter of tactics, not beliefs.

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Wingnuts have a lot of tactics: lying, screeching, saying racist things and then taking umbrage when you point out that they’re racist, fantasizing out loud about “second amendment remedies”.  But getting someone fired is by far their favorite tactic, bar none.  It accomplishes so much, if you’re successful!  It reinforces the idea that you’re above criticism (gearing you up for the next time someone is targeted for harassment for having the nerve to criticize you), is scares would-be critics into silence, and above all, it fucks someone’s life up tremendously.  Actual “second amendment remedies” are dangerous and get you thrown in jail.  Getting someone fired, however, is something you can do without any repercussions for yourself.  It’s the perfect strategy for the cowardly sadist, and therefore the favorite of wingnuts. 

The latest example (though, to be fair, there’s always half a dozen in process with the wingnutteria) is this harassment campaign against John Abraham, Associate Professor at the University of St. Thomas.  Abraham’s Crime Against Wingnuttery is being right about global warming, and as we all know, being right is one of the major ways you can bring down the army of flying wingnut monkeys onto your head.  Specifically, Abraham thoroughly and devastatingly debunked the ravings of global warming denialist Christopher Monckton.  He discovered that Monckton’s impressive-sounding “evidence” is, as you can imagine, a pile of lies and misrepresentations. 

So naturally, someone who approaches science with such passion and accuracy cannot actually hold a job as a scientist.  Or, that’s the position of the flying monkeys, who have decided to start a harassment campaign against Abraham’s employer, the University of St. Thomas.  They’ve been flooding the president’s email box.  They do like the logic of torture, those wingnuts!  “Give us what we want and the pain will go away.  You do want the pain to go away, don’t you?  Here’s another round of emails making it impossible for you to go about your daily business.  Just hand us the professor, and the pain will stop.” (There was also an attempt at extorting money!)

Of course, targeting academia is a much different game than targeting politicians and mainstream media outlets, who love giving in to bullies like it was ice cream that gives you orgasms.  The University’s response to a bunch of charlatans calling for the head of a professor because he had the nerve to be right was exactly what it should be:

We received your email response to our June 25, 2010 letter. The University of St Thomas respects your right to disagree with Professor Abraham, just as the University respects Professor Abraham’s right to disagree with you. What we object to are your personal attacks against Father Dease, and Professor Abraham, your inflammatory language, and your decision to disparage Professor Abraham, Father Dease and The University of St Thomas.

Please be advised that neither we nor the University of St Thomas will communicate with you any further about your decision to sully the University of St. Thomas, Professor Abraham, and others rather than to focus on the scholarly differences between you and Professor Abraham.

Signed: Phyllis Karasov, Moore Costellow and Hart, P.L.L.P.

I wish that the politicians who caved on the ACORN thing or the Washington Post that caved on the Dave Weigel thing would take notes---when you’re being inundated with bullshit, remember that it’s bullshit.  Bullshit doesn’t stop being bullshit because it’s loud bullshit.  Bullshit doesn’t stop being bullshit because a lot of people want to believe it.  Bullshit certainly doesn’t stop being bullshit because bullshit supporters, realizing they’re full of shit, revert to bullying to get their way because they can’t win on the facts.  And every time you give in to bullshit, you embolden the purveyors of bullshit.  You may think you’re getting the flying monkeys off you by giving in, but all you’ve done is show them that their tactics work, and next time they want something from you, they’re going to come about you with twice the number of flying monkeys.  That’s how it works.  Look what happened with James O’Keefe.  Did he take his bullshit victory over ACORN and go home satisfied?  Hell no!  Being able to get Congress and the mainstream media to play along with his bullshit made him think he was The Man, and the result was that he started picking bigger fish to fry with his usual tactics of lying and being smug.  You don’t get rid of them by giving them what they want.

Of course, my main concern now is that I’m seeing climate scientists starting to get the kind of targeting that you see against abortion providers.  As much as I’d like to believe that standing firm against bullies is enough to scare them off, I know that’s not true.  The level of obsession that global warming denialists have is downright scary, and I hope that the FBI and other law enforcement are at least monitoring the situation, because I really do fear it’s in line after abortion and general anti-federal government sentiment in terms of attracting the unhinged right wing elements.

CSA Week #4

Callaloo
Corn
Parsley
Green beans
Cucumber
Zucchini
Red potatoes
Tomatoes
Onion
Eggplant
And our fruit share started:
Peaches
Pluots
Cantaloupe

Let’s talk briefly about how to make cooking fun instead of mindless drudgery.  Cooking is a lot more creative and usually less stressful than doing other kinds of housework, like scrubbing stuff on your hands and knees.  Still it means a lot of doing stuff like chopping and mixing that can be, on their own, kind of boring.  No wonder it sometimes feels easier to skip it and go to a takeout place instead.  And of course, the whole point of this CSA project isn’t to make anyone feel guilty about getting takeout!  I do that a lot myself.  But the point of the project is to use the community to share ways to achieve the goal a lot of us have of cooking more, healthier, and, if you can, using more sustainable produce. 

Folks---okay, female folks---have been finding ways to make cooking more relaxing and entertaining since roughly forever.  There’s a reason that kitchens are the places many people gravitate to at social events, because many of us are conditioned to hanging out and having fun chatting while preparing food.  But if you don’t have a bunch of people around to entertain you, there’s other things you can do.  I use cooking as my time to really listen to music, which is great, because it’s so easy to get caught up in your life and forget to take the time to enjoy music.  Or listen to new stuff.  A lot of people, myself included, have taken advantage of laptop computers and will do things like catch up on blogs or Twitter feeds while cooking. 

Share your strategies in comments!  Sadly, I have no way to make cleaning up the kitchen fun, but I still see it as an opportunity to listen to music or catch up on podcasts.

Dinner #1

1) Still had cucumbers and beets left, so started by making a quick tomato cucumber salad, with some basil from my fire escape herb garden.  Basil (cut up with herb scissors), cucumber, tomato, a little olive oil, vinegar, a little dried oregano, salt, pepper, shake it up.

2) Sliced up roasted beets, nuked ‘em.  Served them with the yogurt sauce that I made with the purslane.

3) Took some onion rolls, toasted them, and made sandwiches with the last bit of cucumber, more tomatoes, and delicious horseradish cheddar. 

Time: 30 minutes, but I was moving real slow, because I was feeling lazy.

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As you no doubt are aware, there’s been a dust-up as of late due to the NAACP rearing up and saying what’s obvious, which is there are whole buncha racists in the Tea Party movement.  In perhaps the weakest effort in the entire history of efforts to disprove a claim, spokesperson for the Tea Party Express Mark Williams put up a “satirical” letter in response.  He took it down after it was revealed that this was some racist shit, but Ta-Nehisi has reprinted the whole thing for our collective edification. Here are some samples:

We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!....

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Many of us have been saying for a long time that the screeching about taxes and big government from teabaggers is, in many cases, racist to the bone. The reason Republicans argue that we can cut taxes on the rich while reducing the deficit is because they expect their followers to fill in the rest with, “By stopping welfare payments to those (fill in racist stereotype of the day).” The base chooses to believe that the federal government spends most of their money on social spending for people who could have jobs but choose not to, and Republicans let them believe that because it means they can continue to push fiscally irresponsible policies and leave Democrats to clean up the mess.  And those of us who make this argument are often met with skepticism from people who believe that it would be hard for teabaggers to be that stupid and racist and short-sighted.  But Williams makes it clear that all the coded language about overspending is meant to convey exactly that stupid message.

The racist tea parties also demand that the government “stop the out of control spending.” Again, they directly target coloreds. That means we Coloreds would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right.

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we coloreds ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?

So, why did the NAACP go ahead and call out the racism in the Tea Party, knowing full well how much pearl-clutching and nay-saying it would cause?  Ta-Nehisi has a great point about it:

It’s been asked in comments, a few times, what good has come of the NAACP’s resolution. I would not endeavor to speak for anyone but myself when I say that I owe the NAACP a debt of gratitude. I have, in my writing, a tendency to become theoretically cute, and overly enamored with my own fair-mindedness. Such vanity has lately been manifested in the form of phrases like “it’s worth saying” and “it strikes me that...” or “respectfully...”

When engaging your adversaries, that approach has its place. But it’s worth saying that there are other approaches and other places. Among them--respectfully administering the occasional reminder as to the precise nature of the motherfuckers you are dealing with. It strikes me that this is a most appropriate role for the nation’s oldest civil rights organization.

Agreed.  A lot of very public teabaggers are always on the verge of dropping terms like “welfare thugs” that somehow manage to escape being called out as straight out racist and giving in to their deep desire to just let loose in public with the language they cheerfully share in private.  I’m sure the folks at the NAACP realized that a little shove might actually make that happen, and if that was their intention, then the plan worked probably better than they even expected.  It’s sort of peculiar to want someone to just come out with such a putrid pile of racist nonsense, but if your options are limited to hearing this shit and hearing this shit through coded language that everyone politely pretends isn’t the steaming crap that it is, well, I know I prefer the former.  Because, like Ta-Nehisi said, sometimes you have to remind everyone exactly who you’re dealing with. 

And because it will invariably come up in comments, no, I’m not saying 100% of teabaggers are racist, though I have to point out that the racism-friendly ones have to outnumber the others by far for people to walk around with some of the signs they carry at protests without any fear of social shaming.  I grasp that a small percentage of them may be so stupid or so sheltered that they don’t grasp the racist underpinnings of the non-arguments and insinuations about who gets welfare, who defaulted on their mortgages, whether or not Obama has a right to be President.  But I don’t think the too-sheltered-to-get-it people are the majority, not by a long shot. 

When I got up this morning and thought about “mama grizzlies”, suddenly something occurred to me that explains the whole thing: As usual, Republicans are just trying to grab onto something in pop culture in a pathetic bid for relevance.  Just like Michael Steele grabbed for hip hop, John McCain is tweeting at the cast members of “Jersey Shore”, and this atrocity happened, well perhaps Sarah Palin is trying to pick up on the “bear” trend.  What bear trend?  Well, a couple of years ago there was a sudden trend of band names featuring the word “bear”: Panda Bear, Minus the Bear, Angry vs. the Bear.  Perhaps Sarah Palin heard about this trend from Meghan McCain, and in classic GOP fashion, decided to poach it without understanding it in the slightest. 

Hey, it’s a theory.  Also an excuse to use on of my favorite “bear” songs for the Genius Ten today.  Leave yours in comments, or consider the comments and open thread to talk about whatever you like.  Happy Friday!

Original song: “While You Wait For The Others” by Grizzly Bear (See?  Grizzlies.  Though I don’t imagine that Sarah Palin would approve of how they got the name, which is from Edward Droste’s old boyfriend’s nickname.)

1) “Stillness Is The Move” by the Dirty Projectors
2) “Golden Age” by TV on the Radio
3) “Crystalised” by XX
4) “Postcards From Italy” by Beirut
5) “To Kingdom Come” by Passion Pit
6) “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem
7) “Neighborhood #1” by Arcade Fire
8) “Dull Life” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs
9) “Never Had Nobody Like You” by M. Ward
10) “Hearts On Fire” by Cut Copy

Videos below the fold.

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“Huffington Post has created a computer that generates stories based on click-happy tags.” That was my first thought upon reading this alarmist article about how teenage kids are getting high off the internet.  No, I’m not kidding.  The headline actually reads: “DIGITAL DRUGS: How Teens Are Using The Internet To Get High”.  Clearly, this is a computer-generated headline, I thought.  They don’t even care anymore; whatever it takes to get clicks.

But I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and actually dig in and read a little more of the story.  Unfortunately, I have to report that what I learned wasn’t enough to relieve my concerns.  Indeed, the article seemed to be reporting on something that’s actually happening, but their take on it is some of the saddest shit I’ve seen from adults since I saw that evangelical program on an access channel back in college about how Satan reaches kids through not just heavy metal, but backmasking records and even through Whitney Houston. 

The trend, called i-Dosing, is a supposedly “legal” and “safe” way to alter one’s consciousness.

According to Kansas News 9, these “digital drugs” use “binaural, or two-toned, technology to alter your brain waves and mental state,” producing a “state of ecstasy” for the user. i-Dosers listen to these atonal tracks while sitting motionless with headphones on.

It may sound benign, but parents, educators and law officials are worried that i-Dosing could be addictive, harmful, and a gateway “drug” to other illegal substances. The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has taken an interest in the phenomenon. “Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about,” the Bureau’s spokesperson Mark Woodward told Kansas News 9, “and it can lead them to other places.”

As someone who spent her teen years in a boring ass small town, I had a strong suspicion that whatever the specifics, that this was almost surely a parlor trick that, because it’s in the hands of teenagers, is being blown up as something it’s not for maximum effect.  There wasn’t a parlor trick that we didn’t indulge as kids, and many of them, such as “light as a feather, stiff as a board”, had a pseudo-occult feel to them that gave us all a good scare before we forgot about it a couple hours later.  Hey, you got to get your thrills where you can.  Eventually most of us discovered sex and left the world of adolescent parlor tricks behind.  That this is framed by kids who pass it along as being like drugs should be a relief to parents, because it means said kids have no experience with actual drugs. 

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An interesting discussion broke out in the comments of this post about whether or not Sarah Palin means something concrete when she says “mama grizzlies”.  Renmiri suggested that, since the phrase came up in an anti-choice context, it has an anti-choice meaning:

o me it sounds pretty obvious they feel they are defending “unborn babies” which to us sounds meaningless as we see those as just embryos. To them they are actually defending little angels, “snowflakes”, pure untainted souls.

There’s definitely something to that, but the phrase flattened out and became generic right away, and probably in no small part because using it as an anti-choice slogan is incoherent metaphorically.  “Mama grizzlies” is meant to invoke a very specific image---that of a bear who will do anything to protect her young.  But a woman who makes the private choice to abort isn’t, even if you accept the anti-choice official belief that fetuses are the same thing as 5-year-olds,* attacking your child.  Mama grizzlies don’t put their lives on the line to protect other bears’ cubs.  Only their own.  The metaphor falls apart. 

However, it’s an ideal metaphor, as I noted in the interview, for conveying the message “I got mine, so fuck all y’all, but I’m still a proper lady.” And this is Sarah Palin’s peculiar genius, finding a way to combine the twin demands on modern female movement conservatives to be traditionally feminine and to be Tea Party assholes. 

The conflict is simple for conservative women:

1) On one hand, being a traditional woman is about being nurturing, giving, warm, good-hearted, etc.
2) But being a Tea Partier is about embracing extreme selfishness as a virtue, on the grounds that being an asshole is both fun and patriotic.  Teabaggers don’t have a coherent ideology, but they do know that if they have a choice between an inefficient, expensive system where the “wrong” people (easily identifiable by their class markers and/or skin color) get nothing or an efficient system that saves everyone money while treating all citizens equally, they’re picking the first.  And jacking off while they think about how many liberals it pisses off. 

Male conservatives can go whole hog into #2 without any real concerns, but women, as I noted, feel yet again stuck in the kitchen while the guys have all the fun of being full-blown assholes. “Mama grizzlies” gives them a way to get in on the action without risking their status as good women.  Sarah Palin tells them that they can be an asshole in the public square, a lady in the kitchen, and a whore in the bedroom, and men will eat it up and their reward is they can feel superior to those stupid feminists who think they’re so smart.

A lot of people, including myself, complain about how the Tea Partiers get way more media attention that their numbers and power probably deserve.  But you have to admit, it’s fascinating, because what’s happened here is that movement conservatives are doubling down the tribal warfare and insisting on a politics that has no relationship to policy.  Outside of screeching about blocking Democratic initiatives, there’s not a lot of policy talk.  And even then, being angry about health care reform or economic stimulus is more about pissing off the liberals and feeling victimized because of taxes than it is about real policy.  Tea Partiers have managed to create a political discourse that is wholly about resentment and tribal warfare. 

When I said in the interview that it’s hard to know exactly what they’re riled up about, this is what I mean.  This is why Republican politicians denounce the stimulus and then take credit when the money is spent in their own districts---they’ve completely uncoupled policy and politics.  And yes, as I noted at Double X, this is yet another situation where you can thank the anti-choice movement for its innovations in batshit politics.  They’ve managed to create a bunch of momentum for a ban on abortion by getting people to say they’re “against” abortion without feeling like they have to consider the consequences of that.  For a long time now, antis have been able to rally in anger about abortion and even pass laws without actually bothering to think about what the effects are, or if there’s any real dent to be made in the abortion rate.  Or even if they’re willing to throw women in jail for getting abortions should they get it criminalized again.  It’s a knee-jerk “against abortion is good, for choice is bad” mentality, with absolutely no follow-up in terms of real world effects.  Real policy is and should be the opposite of how they approach it.  And now we’re just seeing that mentality spreading out to all corners and all issues.  Teabaggers want to Do Something about immigration and the economy and terrorism, but their ability to follow through or consider things like how to measure success---or even what success looks like---has shriveled up and died. 

Which isn’t to say their actual politicians don’t have policy ideas.  They do---the same ones they always have, which are basically to shore up corporate power and increase the gap between the rich and everyone else.  But that stuff isn’t part of their politics at this point.

*This is the official belief, but as anti-choicers still aren’t holding funerals for miscarriages or baptizing tampons, I remain skeptical that they really think this, and instead believe they want to restrict abortion for the same reason it’s always been restricted---controlling female sexuality.