Andrew Sullivan on McGinness' Palin book

Andrew Sullivan, who for the past three years has been denouncing the sustained lies and bizarre cult of Caribou Barbie has a few key words about Sarah Palin in regards to Joe McGinness' new book on her titled "The Rogue".

it remains, in my view, deeply relevant to this country's institutions that we fully investigate and understand how a delusional, unstable, ignorant, vicious unknown came to be selected by a tiny group of people with no serious vetting to be potentially one heart beat away from the presidency of the US. The magnitude of that error should make anyone who cares about this democracy worry. Palin is different - less qualified than anyone in history, shielded from press scrutiny, able to get away with constant lies and absurd stories because of a cowed press, terrified of being called "liberal."

- The Daily Dish, "Unattributed Crap"

Personal Accountability, the American right wing edition.

So this is what's left of the American political landscape?

Six dead, including a federal judge, a Pastor, three senior citizens, and a nine year old child.  A member of congress in critical condition, recovering from an attack that sent a bullet through her head and across her brain.  And another fourteen wounded.

Unlike those members of the mainstream media (MSM), who profit from the endless vitriol of the Republican party and unbalanced right-wing demagoguery as illustrated above in Caribou Barbie (aka Sarah Palin), reasonable and educated people are aware of the diminution of decency in the theater of American politics and the impact of that endless stream of vituperative speech on the nation as a whole.  Consider what Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, had to say on this matter.

When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government... The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on this country is getting to be outrageous and unfortunately Arizona has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.

He did not say that this was the act of one deranged lunatic.  Rather, he cast a wide net on the media, the vast array of bigoted and self-serving members of the political establishment, and those who support these debased opportunists in the general public.

The vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business ... This has not become the nice United States that most of us grew up in.

As others have pointed out, this is the standard model for conservatives when they are not in power.  Kevin Drum of MotherJones magazine describes the counter-cyclical response of the conservative electoral base during these periods:

If you elect a liberal Democratic president, you get this kind of reaction from middle class conservatives. In FDR's day you got the Liberty League. JFK inspired the growth of the John Birch Society. Clinton got the conspiracy-minded talk radio crowd. And Obama has the tea parties...

In the 30s it was opposition to the New Deal. For the Birchers it was communism. For the Clinton-haters it was the culture wars... while today's is the deficits/socialism message.

While it is true that in each period there was a distinct reaction to the policies of liberals and the Democratic party, the current regularity and pervasiveness of these attacks, which do not emanate from fringe groups, but from mainstream corporate sponsors, Republican party members across the nation, and prominent media personalities, indicates that the nation has moved into a political atmosphere that so toxic with rancor and lies, that it cannot be dismissed or quelled.

Let's review a few of those hyper-patriots who are so fond of  invoking Jefferson's "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" quote.

• Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano (D), recently was the recipient of an incendiary package
• Governor Martin O'Malley (D) of Maryland, was also the intended recipient of two packages that detonated at a federal postal center injuring some workers.
• Nevada Senatorial candidate and Tea Party favorite, Sharron Angle, stated that the public had the option of dealing with an out-of-control Congress through "Second Amendment remedies."  The terminology is right-wing code for the assassination and murder of federal officials.
• Several other Republican candidates declared that the "violent overthrow" of the US government may be necessary in the event that they did not win the 2010 midterm elections.
• Byron Williams, a former felon, planned "to target individuals at liberal nonprofit the Tides Foundation and the ACLU."    He injured two police officers in a highway shoot-out, when police attempted to apprehend him for erratic driving.  In interviews after his arrest, Williams claims that he was directly inspired by Glenn Beck, Fox news celebrity, to seek retribution.
• Gregory Giusti pleaded guilty to repeatedly threatening House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- including threatening to destroy her California home -- because he was "upset with her passing the health care law."  The perpetrator's mother indicates that he was motivated by friends and Fox News.
• President Obama has seen a 400% increase in death threats from the public compared to George W. Bush. According to reports, America's first black President "is the target of more than 30 potential death threats a day and is being protected by an increasingly over-stretched and under-resourced Secret Service"
• July 2009, Neo-Nazi James von Brunn, launched an attack on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum that killed security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns
• May 2009, Minuteman off-shoot group leader, Shawna Forde, murdered a 9-year old girl and her father in Arizona, in an attempt to finance their militia operations.
• May 2009, Abortion provider, Dr. George Tiller was murdered at his Church by an anti-abortion activist, who had belonged to an anti-government militia group that believed that virtually all existing modalities of government in the USA were illegitimate.  Dr. Tiller was shot point-blank in the head.  He had been a subject of violent militant and religious fanaticism since 1998.
• April 2009, a local Florida man killed and wounded several Chilean students involved in a foreign exchange program.  The killer was an active member of the Republican party who had espoused murdering immigrants to his neighbours.
• February 2009, in a suicide attack aimed directly against the IRS, a Texan man flew a single engine plane into the side of an Austin, Texas IRS building.  The incident led to the killing a of a single IRS employee and injury of several others.
• Tennessee white supremacists planned to murder then Presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 and engage in the mass murder of black people.
• July 2008, a lone gunman attacked Knoxville Unitarian Universalist Church in Tennessee, killing two patrons and injuring another seven.  The gunman, Jim David Adkisson, stated: "he had targeted the church because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of major media outlets."
• Eric Robert Rudolph, a right-wing Christian militant was responsible for the 1996 Atlantic Olympic bombings, the bombing of a Georgia abortion clinic, the bombing of lesbian nightclub in Atlanta, and a second abortion clinic bombing in Alabama, which killed a policeman working as a security guard and seriously injured nurse Emily Lyons.  Rudolph was assisted by like-minded sympathizers, who facilitated his evasion of police for more than five years.
• April 1995, the Oklahoma city bombing was conducted by right-wing militants Timoty McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier, who were seeking retribution against the federal government for their involvement in the 1990's FBI sieges of Ruby Ridge and Waco, Texas. According to Wikipedia, the blast claimed 168 lives and injured more than 680 people. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings. The bomb was estimated to have caused at least $652 million worth of damage.

When it comes to the demented actions and words of right-wingers, they can never be held responsible, because in their mind they are the victims.  Like Palin and the propagandists at Fox news, they are never to blame for the climate of fear, hate, and ignorance that has arisen.  It's those dirty, hippie liberals, who are out to undermine the "real Americans," which are to blame.

***

UPDATE: Conservatives have already criticized and asked for the resignation of Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for his castigation of conservative rhetoric and theatrics.  As usual, the right-wing is ramping up the propaganda by saying that it is the amoral liberal press that is painting them - the same people who have been marching around the country attending presidential speeches, congressional rallies, and health care debates with handguns and publicly attacking anyone who may disagree with them for the past two years- as the bad guys!

March of the Palin Clones, or is Clowns?

Be afraid, be very afraid!

(h/t Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish)

The Lunacy of the Tea-Baggers!

Lindsey Beyerstein, a prominent left-wing blogger, excoriates the mind-numbing idiocy of newly minted GOP Senate candidate for Delaware in her posting "Anti-Masturbation Crusader Christine O'Donnell is Master of Her Domain in Delaware."

In it she outlines Ms. O'Donnell's predilection with sexuality and her bizarre notions that persons who have AIDS deserve no sympathy, because they've brought that ailment upon themselves by not adhering to strict Biblical tenants.

Good Laugh here:

Anti-masturbation crusader Christine O'Donnell beat establishment favorite Rep. Mike Castle last night in Deleware's GOP senate primary, with a helping hand from the Tea Party Express.

O'Donnell first rose to national prominence as the founder and president of the SALT, an anti-masturbation youth ministry. In 1996, she and her fellow salteens appeared on MTV's series "Sex in the Nineties" to explain why masturbation is a form of adultery that will render your future married sex life irrelevant. "[I]f he already knows what pleases him and he can please himself, then why am I in the picture?” O'Donnell asked earnestly.

The following year, while representing SALT on C-SPAN, O'Donnell argued that people with AIDS didn't deserve to be called "victims." A guy called in to say that he had a hard time feeling sorry for people with AIDS because their disease was their own fault. In his opinion, feeling sorry people with AIDS was like feeling sorry for "bank robbers who get shot in the head" while they're robbing banks. "He makes an excellent point," O'Donnell replied.

Lest you think SALT was just some youthful indiscretion, O'Donnell is still listed as the contact for the group in this internet directory, which was last updated in 2009.

I hope Democratic senate candidate candidate Chris Coons cracked open a bottle of Astroglide to celebrate O'Donnell's victory. With any luck, the wankers of the great State of Delaware will grease his path to Washington.

The Huffington Post also posts a segment Ms. O'Donnell did on Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect" in the 1990's, where she is posed with a hypothetical situation if she would lie to Nazi soldiers seeking whether she was hiding any Jews.  Using the false consistency argument, she states that it would be wrong to lie and that she implicitly would side with the Nazi's seeking to exterminate Jews!  I suppose she never realized that by hiding the Jews in the first place she would be lying to the Nazi's to begin with, and secondly her admission to those roving death squads would certainly have lead to her and her family's death.

Welcome to Fascist America!  Please check your frontal cortex at the gates, if you intend to visit.

***

Update: MSNBC's Rachel Maddow highlights O'Donnell's youthful "don't touch myself" campaign from the 1990's (h/t Crooks and Liars).  Ugh!

Although I don't take this seriously, there has been studies done that indicate a correlation between increased access to pornography through the internet, and a decrease in sex crimes. If this is the case, Ms. O'Donnell's earlier campaign would if given national scope, in fact increase violent crime and decrease public safety.

US Troops Harvesting Afghan Body Parts for Souvenirs

According to international newspapers US Army soldiers have been charged in the premeditated murder of Afghan civilians, the beating of one or more fellow soldiers, wrongfully taking and/or possessing photographs of dead bodies, and "keeping trophy body parts from Afghan corpses, including a skull and fingers!"

The soldiers, all from the same company in the 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, are charged with a total of 76 crimes.

McClatchy Press elaborates on what they describe as "one of the most serious war crimes cases to emerge from the nine-year war in Afghanistan."

The accused soldiers are with the 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma, Wash., Some 3,700 soldiers in the brigade were deployed throughout southern Afghanistan, involved both in combat and in wide-ranging efforts to open schools, train Afghan forces, improve agriculture and take other measures to win the support of civilians.

Vietnam Redux?

This behaviour was also found in the Vietnam war.  The Toledo Blade, in 2003, ran a comprehensive series of reports about Tiger Force, a task force of the United States Army, 1st Battalion (Airborne), 327th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade (Separate), 101st Airborne Division.  Investigations conducted by journalist Michael Sallah into the actions of this group during 1967, resulted in the disclosure that members of the task force had engaged in "the routine practice of intentionally killing unarmed Vietnamese villagers including men, women, children, and elderly people" and collecting body parts, which they used in necklaces and personal talismans.  The Blade journalists won the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting.

***

Is this what happens when soldiers know that torture and the liquidation of whole swaths of brown skinned people is acceptable?  Where is the outrage from the American population?  Where are the so-called moral leaders of America in proclaiming that this type of activity is not acceptable anywhere, anytime, period? From the very beginnings of the Afghan-Iraqi conflicts, more than just bad-apples have been observed.  Constant, predictable, and enduring levels of violence perpetrated by US forces on foreign populations has occurred: CIA contractors murdering detainees; torture at Guantanamo and black sites across the planet; the shocking and disturbing events at Abu Ghraib; the rape and murder of Iraqi women and children by US troops; helicopter gunships and automated drones liquidating unarmed civilians at weddings and villages in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

What type of victory can be salvaged in this moral wasteland?

UK Conservative Party Candidate Believes Gays are Possessed!

Today's Guardian newspaper has a story that speaks about the bizarre socio-political beliefs of Mrs. Philippa Stroud, who is "a high-flying prospective Conservative MP, credited with shaping many of the [Conservative] party's social policies, [and] founded a church that tried to 'cure' homosexuals by driving out their 'demons' through prayer."

As ridiculous as the claims appear, Ms. Stroud is not being misrepresented by the center-left newspaper.  In her book, God's Heart for the Poor, she discusses how to deal with people showing signs of "demonic activity". For example, an excerpt below should provide any rational person evidence of her enlightened state of mind:

One girl lived in the hostel for some time, became a Christian, then choked to death on her own vomit after a drinking bout. Her life had changed to some extent, but we wondered whether God knew that she hadn't the will to stick with it and was calling her home.

They wondered if an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent deity, who supposedly created this woman and for whatever reasons allowed her to become possessed, knew the girl was a "loser" to which they could not cure.

I realize that this is election season in the UK and these outcropping of absurdity are bound to avail themselves.  However, these religious fanatics, election time or not, aren't doing anyone a favor by proselytizing this rubbish and engaging in what is clearly psychological abuse. 

The fact that this woman is not your average nutter, but a prominent member of the Conservative Party and a close confident of David Cameron, the Conservative party's leader, should convince everyone that these jackasses will never change and need to be permanently exiled to some Scottish island in the North Sea, where they can believe all the dogmatic malarkey they wish and practice their bizarro-land witchcraft preferably on their own rancid offspring or a stray local goat.

Religious frauds are a danger to us all.  And if 9-11 has taught anyone anything, it is the portentous evil that can be caused by zealots of all stripes advancing their religious objectives upon civilized people.

Psychopaths' brains wired to seek rewards

According to an article published in Nature Neuroscience (14 March, 2010) and described in Eurekalert!:

The brains of psychopaths appear to be wired to keep seeking a reward at any cost, new research from Vanderbilt University finds. The research uncovers the role of the brain's reward system in psychopathy and opens a new area of study for understanding what drives these individuals.

"This study underscores the importance of neurological research as it relates to behavior," Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said. "The findings may help us find new ways to intervene before a personality trait becomes antisocial behavior."

"Psychopaths are often thought of as cold-blooded criminals who take what they want without thinking about consequences," Joshua Buckholtz, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology and lead author of the new study, said. "We found that a hyper-reactive dopamine reward system may be the foundation for some of the most problematic behaviors associated with psychopathy, such as violent crime, recidivism and substance abuse."

Previous research on psychopathy has focused on what these individuals lack, fear, empathy and interpersonal skills. The new research, however, examines what they have in abundance impulsivity, heightened attraction to rewards and risk taking. Importantly, it is these latter traits that are most closely linked with the violent and criminal aspects of psychopathy.

Palin versus Gore on Climate Change

I have made no attempt to deny over the past year my utter contempt for Sarah Palin, otherwise to be spoken of as Caribou Barbie, the Wasilla Whack-Job, or the grand priestess of American theo-fascist buffoonery. Until now, I had decided to ignore writing about her and the zombie masses that have flocked to her media-manufactured book tour out of sheer disdain. However, the Washington Post, in an attempt to completely repudiate itself as a newspaper, has decided to publish today (9 Dec. 2009) an op-ed written (or purportedly so) by Caribou Barbie, which lambastes scientists as opportunists and frauds, scientific debate as politicized drivel, and climate change mitigation as a massive exercise in liberal taxation and socialism.

I want to remind people, exactly what Sarah Palin believes in. First, she is a bigot who stated to her father, upon returning from a brief stint at Hawaii Pacific University, that she was "uncomfortable" around Asians and Pacific Islanders. “They were a minority type thing,” her father says, “and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” She makes the claim in her pseudo-biography/ manifesto that she had a great deal of "affection" for her gay roommate from college (which no one can find), but opposes all rights for gay couples, opposes allowing gays to serve openly in the military, opposes gay-inclusive hate crimes legislation, and opposes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

Second, she has no background and zero credentials to discuss any subject on science. Her entire history is one that dismisses empirical fact and core scientific knowledge for superstition, innuendo, and demonstrably false lies whenever it serves her personal or political needs. Palin is an evangelical Christian that believes in creationism, thinks that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and proposes that fundamentalist dogma should be taught in every public school; she is an adherent of end-of-times theology, which involves the conversion of the believers of Judaism to Christianity and the rapture; she has made proclamations for the removal of the constitutional separation of church-and-state; and she is against cell stem research or any scientific research that she arbitrarily dislikes. With respect to climate change, she has repeatedly clung to the odious supposition, without providing any corroborating evidence, that there is no man-made (i.e. anthropogenic) element to current atmospheric or climate changes.

In the WaPo op-ed, she specifically calls the stolen emails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia, proof that, "Leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." Unwilling to address the science itself or the overwhelming consensus generated by scientists and climate researchers across the planet for more than 20-years, she states that, "while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes."

This woman is an absolute ignoramus and demagogue, who will lie and distort any fact to empower herself and the theo-fascists in the Republican Party that have surrounded her.

In response to this exhibition of white-trash duncery and recycled claptrap, Al Gore has been asked on repeated occasions to address her complaints about the entire Climate change debate and the current United Nations Climate Change conference in Copenhagen (COP15). He states the obvious:

The global warming deniers persist in this air of unreality. After all, the entire north polar icecap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this?
The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies -- drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths [sic] in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.

These effects are taking place all over the world exactly as predicted by the scientists, who have warned for years that, if we continue putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every day, the accumulation -- that's going to trap lots more heat, raise temperatures, and cause all of these consequences that are already beginning.

Reasonable people can argue and dispute matters of opinion, but facts as to whether humans have injected extraordinary levels of greenhouse-effect producing gases into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution is not subject to debate; it is a fact. There is no dispute that ocean levels are rising, whether the oceans are becoming acidified due to excess C02 in the atmosphere placed there by man, or even if this past decade and the decade of the 1990's have been the warmest in recorded human history. All these statements are facts that anyone can independently verify.

The twin forces of globalization and human tribalism have locked us all into a fearful downward spiral and there appears little hope that the majority of the human species is equipped to adjust to a low carbon economy, much less understand the dire situation we have created.

Save Me… from organized Charlatans!

This week’s examination of faith-based lunacy comes in a family-friendly ‘value’ package of three.

A) National Baptist Convention USA, the oldest and largest African American religious convention in America, with an estimated membership of 7.5 million, is holding its convention in Detroit this weekend. What is unique about this particular gathering is that the former leader of this group, Rev. Henry Lyons, who was convicted of, “Racketeering and grand theft and sentenced to prison for bilking nearly $4 million from corporations seeking business with the convention and stealing nearly $250,000 donated by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith for burned Black churches in the South” has returned and is once again seeking the organization’s leadership.

Maybe its just Detroit, which persistently fields politicians like former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was found guilty of obstruction of justice, or Councilwoman Monica Conyers, wife of Congressmen John Conyers Jr. (D-MI), who recently pled guilty to bribery and conspiracy charges. Regardless, what I find so luminating is how so many conservative black Americans are willing to endorse and accommodate the rise of these predators in both their spiritual and political lives. Apparently God does work in mysterious ways…

B) Turning from crooked black theologians to crazy-train riding black parishioners is the following case of a Gay-Exorcism in Connecticut. Having enjoyed the cinematic release of ”A Haunting in Connecticut” the locals went looking for and found some juicy gay-demon ass to kick (albeit in the form of a sixteen year old boy). The accompaning youtube video shows the child to be writhing in pain on the floor and vomiting. A church elder shouts, “Right now in the name of Jesus, I call the homosexuality, right now in the name of Jesus.”

C) The final story shows that religious quackery knows no racial barrier is of a Louisville, Kentucky pastor who is encouraging his flock to come lock n’ loaded to his holy house of worship. Obviously, he has been in touch with the folks in Connecticut, who know them Damn’ Gay Demons could be lurking everywhere, even under a church pew. Chris W. Cox, legislative director of the NRA proudly states, “We have right-to-carry laws in over 40 states; 20 years ago, it was in just six.”

These right-wing half-wits, have been responsible over the years for fire-bombing black attended churches, shooting “liberal” congregationists, and most recently murdering an abortion doctor, while he was in his own church. So it makes complete sense, why these people need guns at their churches. Obviously they have to defend themselves against the black-helicopter owning liberal swine that are relentlessly hunting them down to eliminate their cherished gun-totting liberties. What else could it be?

God bless America.