The Poor Man Institute

The following things are your fault, and you should apologize to the person you reverse inverse victimized. Not that your crocodile tears will do anything to assuage the pain and trauma you caused:

1. Getting shot in the face with a shotgun.

2. Being sexually harrassed by your boss.

3. Having your head stomped for carrying a political sign at a political rally.

Only then can the healing process begin and forgiveness be granted, magnanimously, if at all.

Just because the formerly feverish homo hate that swept the nation a few election cycles past has gone flacid in recent years doesn’t mean the GOP can’t find new and creative ways to weave frothy bigotry into electoral gold.

One of 11 ballot initiatives in the state this November, State Question 755, better known as the “Save Our State” constitutional amendment, would prevent courts from using international or Sharia law. The question made it to the ballot by passing the state Senate 41-2 and the House 82-10. In addition to potentially rallying the conservative base to the polls, the initiative, which bans something that is nearly impossible statutorily, is worth watching because the GOP may employ it in swing states two years down the line.

The Ideas Man is, naturally, out in front of this one:

At the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. in September, Newt Gingrich positioned himself perhaps to the right of Sarah Palin in a potential bid for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination by saying, “I am opposed to any efforts to impose Sharia in the United States, and we should have a federal law that says under no circumstances in any jurisdiction in the United States will Sharia [law] be used in any court to apply to any judgment made about American law.”

Marc Ambinder’s slavish devotion to the he said/she said paradign is on full display, but even Ambinder seems to at least provide his readers with a clue:

Those opposed to the ballot initiative believe it is a preemptive strike against a non-threat. They call the law xenophobic. They even cite the fact that even the amendment’s sponsors and strongest supporters cannot statutorily cite a case in which Oklahoma courts have applied Sharia law in any ruling. Yet supporters of the amendment, borrowing George W. Bush’s “with us or against us” formulation, speciously claim that those who don’t support the amendment are actually for Sharia law.

I understand that Pam Geller is becoming an increasingly popular media personality – and not just on the right (with 60 Minutes and the NY Times giving her valuable real estate).  This will surely redound to the benefit of all.

First Meg Whitman, now Lou Dobbs.

Why, I’m beginning to entertain a slightly cynical thought, and I need someone to talk me off this ledge: I think it might be the case that the GOP stokes anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican fear/anger for pure political purposes, while its leaders and the business interests they represent want to keep the flow of cheap labor in the pipeline for easy exploitation. 

I know, I know, crazy, right? 

Bonus GOP Hate-Mongering: We can call this the Guillermo Horton ad, used by not one, but two GOP candidates.  Looking on the bright side, at least they’re recycling, albeit in the present instance, that would be hate they’re re-using.  But you gotta start somewhere, and this is the GOP after all.

Whoddathunk a subscription based fire department would turn out badly?

Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won’t respond, then watches it burn. That’s exactly what happened to a local family tonight. A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.

The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn’t do anything to stop his house from burning. Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay. The mayor said if homeowners don’t pay, they’re out of luck. [...]

We asked the mayor of South Fulton if the chief could have made an exception. “Anybody that’s not in the city of South Fulton, it’s a service we offer, either they accept it or they don’t,” Mayor David Crocker said.

Kicker: A neighbor who paid for the firfighting service himself saw his house damaged by fire due to the untreated fire at the Cranicks.  It’s almost as if the free market* isn’t always more efficient than government.  Probably would be better just to tax everyone and provide the firefighting protection without checking individual receipts and invoices.

Just sayin.

(In this instance, some hybrid “market-based solution” that are all the rage)

Here is a recently updated top 10 14 list of infamous anti-gay crusaders that turned out to be gay themselves.

Allow me to repeat my suggestion that things would be better for everyone if human beings could just get a little less afraid of the notion that sexuality is not a neat and tidy, well-defined phenomenon.

Free your gonads and the rest will follow.  Or something.

I believe Dave Chappelle has already broached this difficult and challenging subject matter.

Mind you, Glenn Beck is not shunned and sent off to live the life of a hermit in the hills, or even given the rough treatment of, say, Helen Thomas:

The most incriminating book in my personal library is the only authorized biography of the poet Ezra Pound, inscribed to “my friend Graeme Wood” by its author, Eustace Mullins, whose work Glenn Beck cited yesterday on his show. Mullins was an open purveyor of blood libel: he claimed that Jews kidnap Christian children, ritually puncture their veins, and drink their blood as a restorative for their own degenerate bodies. During Pound’s involuntary commitment in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington in the Fifties, Mullins visited him frequently, and under his direction, Mullins authored foundational texts in Federal Reserve conspiracy theory. Those theories have proved impressively durable. In addition to Glenn Beck’s citation yesterday, Pat Robertson’s books peddled variations on them in the 1980s, and elements of the Tea Party echo them now. (Short version: the Federal Reserve controls the world, and the UN is taking over the US via the New World Order.)

Mullins died in February at 86, and when I visited him in Staunton, Virginia, six years ago on assignment for The Jewish Daily Forward, he was already slowed by age, living in a creepy, dark rat-trap filled with religious icons, votive candles, and old newspapers. The wallpaper curled down off the wall in two-foot sections, and the chairs coughed up decades’ worth of dust when we sat down. He surprised me by snatching the Pound biography from my hands and inscribing it. The moment reminded me of the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Doctor Jones accidentally gets Hitler’s autograph in his notebook. [...]

He told me that things were getting worse for the enemies of the Jews, and where once they came at him as single spies, now they attacked in battalions. They had tried to kill him seven times, most recently by cutting his brakelines.

They were everywhere. To find them, he said, watch CNN. David Duke showed up on the news via satellite up-link from the Tehran Holocaust-denial conference, and Mullins identified him immediately as an agent of Zion: no true enemy of the Jews could get airtime on a major network. “He’s a playboy. Some Jew must have taken him to Hollywood and given him a big pompadour. He looks like a homosexual from the most homosexual part of New York.” Duke, he said, was peddling ersatz Jew-hatred at the behest of the Jews themselves, as a way to discredit the anti-Semitic cause. Sharing airtime with Wolf Blitzer, he said, is its own proof of intellectual bankruptcy (admittedly not the craziest thing I ever heard).

I suppose this is yet more evidence of liberal fascism.

Not that it was ever in doubt but the Contract with America 2.0: This Time We Really Mean It is chock full o’ teh stupid.  Adam Serwer examines just a portion (you have to take the thing in small doses lest you gouge both your eyeballs out and eat ‘em out of spite):

• Keep Terrorists Out of America: We will prevent the government from importing terrorists onto American soil. We will hold President Obama and his administration responsible for any Guantanamo Bay detainees they release who return to fight against our troops or who have become involved in any terrorist plots or activities.

Interesting idea. First off, there are already 359 convicted terrorists on American soil, 240 of which the government says have ties to international terrorism. That’s more than the number of accused terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison, which currently number at 174. Are the GOP going to deport all the ones who are currently here? Guantanamo is also a huge money hole. It costs 16 million dollars a year to maintain the detention camp in Cuba, 650,000 dollars a year per prisoner. By contrast, it takes 27,251 dollars a year to house a federal prisoner in the United States. Fiscally responsible!

• Demand an Overarching Detention Policy: Foreign terrorists do not have the same rights as American citizens, nor do they have more rights than U.S. military personnel. We will work to ensure foreign terrorists, such as the 9/11 conspirators, are tried in military, not civilian, court. We will oppose all efforts to force our military, intelligence, and law enforcement personnel operating overseas to extend “Miranda Rights” to foreign terrorists.

The GOP, in their reverence for due process, seems to have forgotten the whole “innocent until proven guilty” part of how trials work. They’re not terrorists unless they are proved to be terrorists in a court of law. There have been hundreds of civilian terrorism convictions in civilian court since 9/11, the vast majority of which were secured by the Bush administration. There have been four military commissions convictions in the past decade, and they are currently facing legal challenges that may put past and future convictions in doubt. What Republicans are promising here isn’t just a departure from the prior administration, it would ensure that fewer terrorists are brought to justice. 

Moreover, this document gives the impression that military personnel are tried in “military commissions.” They’re not, they’re tried in courts-martial. Military commissions were invented out of whole cloth to give the government an edge in terrorism cases. Whomever wrote this document either doesn’t know the difference, or is lying, neither of which should inspire much confidence. 

Finally, law enforcement doesn’t “extend” Miranda rights to foreign terrorists. Anyone, regardless of citizenship, already has Miranda rights if they are apprehended on American soil, unless the public safety exception is invoked. Moreover, when the administration began offering to work with Republicans on legislation to “modify” Miranda, Republicans balked because they know this complaint is nonsense and they just want to be able to attack law enforcement for upholding the law whenever a terrorist suspect is arrested.

No, you see, it’s a return to the principles of our founding fathers, small government, reverence for the Constitution, blargh, blargh, blargh. 

How could it not be?  Tea Partiers wear tri-corner hats.  QED motherfucker.

From Woodward’s new book, Saint Petraeus explaining his foreign policy in Afghanistan (not sure if Obama was consulted, but does it really matter?):

Woodward quotes Petraeus as saying, “You have to recognize also that I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. It’s a little bit like Iraq, actually. . . . Yes, there has been enormous progress in Iraq. But there are still horrific attacks in Iraq, and you have to stay vigilant. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”

Winning is for quitters. 

Real men keep fighting.

Bonus Petraeus:

During a flight in May, after a glass of wine, Petraeus told his own staffers that the administration was “[expletive] with the wrong guy.”

This country is so fucked.

Your modern GOP: