Scary New GOP Poll

Great article by John Avlon over at the Daily Beast on how the crazy wingnuts have now become a significant percentage of the Republican party 

On the heels of health care, a new Harris poll reveals Republican attitudes about Obama: Two-thirds think he's a socialist, 57 percent a Muslim—and 24 percent say "he may be the Antichrist."
By John Avalon

To anyone who thinks the end of the health-care vote means a return to civility, wake up.

Obama Derangement Syndrome—pathological hatred of the president posing as patriotism—has infected the Republican Party. Here's new data to prove it:

• 67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist.

The belief that Obama is a “domestic enemy” is widely held—a sign of trouble yet to come.

• 57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim
• 45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was "not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president"
• 38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did"
• Scariest of all, 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama "may be the Antichrist."  the rest at the Daily Beast

Babies Movie

Not political, just wonderful

LGF at the BBC

I don't always agree with Charles Johnson but I have a lot of respect for him. He is that rarity, an honest man. Paul Coletti of the BBC’s Blogworld site interviewed Johnson via webcam a few days ago, and the video is now up: BBC - Blogworld - Best International Blogs: USA: Charles Johnson.


Little Green Footballs

Fellini's Roma - Catholic Church Fashion Show

I found this on Harry's Place, I have no idea how this relates to anything current, except maybe the blossoming of a new sex scandal at the Vatican... but it is just so weird and fascination ...  You can't stop watching it,  and it get's better and better until the climax, THE CLIMAX!, the whole clip feels like some sexual metaphor.
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Christopher Hitchens delivers the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture at UCLA

Hitchens lecture at UCLA on anti-Semitism. Worth the time to watch.

Beijing Police Beat Artists Protesting Evictions

Execution by Minjun

February 24, 2010 NY Times

By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — Nearly two dozen artists protesting the forced demolition of their homes and studios marched through the ceremonial heart of the capital before the police intervened and prevented them from reaching Tiananmen Square, the artists said on Tuesday.

The protesters said they took to the streets on Monday after men swinging iron rods swarmed over a community of artists on the northern edge of the city that has been resisting redevelopment.

Wu Yuren, 39, a photographer and installation artist who was among those beaten early Monday morning, said six artists were sent to the hospital with minor injuries. He said the attackers, about 100 men wearing white face masks, had been dispatched by developers who have been seeking to evict the artists for a large-scale residential project.

“They didn’t say a single word,” Mr. Wu said. “They just started beating us.”

One of those beaten, Satoshi Iwama, said he received five stitches for a blow to the head.

Although protests against forced evictions have become increasingly common in China, the aggrieved rarely succeed in venting their complaints on Chang’an Avenue, the heavily policed artery that passes in front of the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square and Zhongnanhai, the residential compound of China’s top leaders.

Ai Weiwei, an artist and dissident who joined the demonstration, sent out a spate of Twitter messages detailing the march, which he said made it only about 500 meters before the police arrived.

“It was instinctive,” he said of the decision to take to the street. “We made a lot of noise, and I think we had a big impact.”

It is unclear whether the protest will alter the course of development that threatens at least 10 “artist villages,” the name given to clusters of live-work studios on the fringes of the city that house as many as 1,000 painters, sculptors and performance artists.

For Zheng Yang and 008, two adjacent art districts that were the scene of the melee, it may be too late. In November, the developer cut off electricity and water, and most buildings have already been destroyed.

Xiao Ge, a curator who helped organize a roving performance last month to draw attention to the evictions, said the developers gave most tenants a week to move out.

Many artists are furious because they were lured there with long-term leases — some upward of 20 years — and encouraged to invest their life savings in renovations. Gao Qiang, a furniture designer who moved to Zheng Yang last August, said he spent $11,764 fixing up his studio after he was given a three-year lease. Although he is angry that he will lose most of his investment, he and other artists say they are most concerned about bullying from developers and, at best, the apathy from the authorities.

“It is not an issue of money, it is an issue of dignity,” said Mr. Gao, 38, who said that the police did not arrive until more than an hour after the attack began. He added that the police told the artists they would provide better security and try to reconnect severed utilities.

The police declined to comment on Tuesday.

The fight over the future of Beijing’s artist villages come at a time of soaring real estate values and a spate of ugly scuffles over instances of land expropriation, several of which have led to the suicides of those facing eviction. Widely publicized in the media, the suicides have helped prompt the government to consider modifying the nation’s urban redevelopment regulations.

Even if the proposed reforms, which would provide market-rate compensation for property owners and outlaw coercive evictions, are adopted, it is unlikely they will help Beijing’s artists. Most of the artists live in officially designated rural areas, which are not covered by the measures.

Berenice Angremy, who has been a curator and art consultant in Beijing for the past eight years, said the repeated dislocations have been devastating to artists, both financially and psychologically.

“The government is trying to make Beijing a great cultural city, but without artists, it’s not going to happen,” she said.

Zhang Jing contributed research.

Politicians Who Suck for Signing up to Speak at a Bircher Sponsored Convention

Posted by Thanos February 16, 2010

Here’s the list from CPAC, where the John Birch Society and Oathkeepers are Cosponsors. All of the people below are listed as confirmed speakers at the CPAC website.  I’m a lifelong Republican, and I will not donate a dime to any of these people or their causes in the future. I will actively campaign against them and for their political opponents even though I will have to hold my nose in a few cases while doing so.

Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney – you suck. Mitt won’t be receiving any money from me in 2012 like he did last round if he speaks at a Bircher sponsored convention.

Hon. Dick Armey, Hon. John Ashcroft, Rep. Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Amb. John Bolton, Andrew Breitbart, Herman Cain, Tucker Carlson, Liz Cheney, Ann Coulter, Sen. Jim DeMint, Hon. Newt Gingrich, David Keene, Wayne LaPierre, Rep. Ron Paul, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Rep. Mike Pence, Rep. Tom Price, Hon. Mitt Romney, Hon. Marco Rubio, Hon. Rick Santorum, Hon. J.C. Watts, George F. Will

Ron Paul and More

Woke up today and it was 45 degrees in South Florida. We're worried about the economy, Iran, China and various other problems when in the end it maybe the weather which will have the biggest impact on our lives.

Ron Paul and other people associated with the Tea Party seemed to have an ever increasing alliance with people who not only don't like Jews but see them as central conspirators in their world view. Huey Long once said that "if fascism comes to America we'll call it anti-fascism and wrap it in a flag'"  Of course the Tea Party could just be a set up to attract and identify wing nuts..... who said I was paranoid?

From  Little Green Footballs

Ron Paul Fans Post Tributes to Rabid Antisemite

US NEWS | Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 12:36:58 pm PST

This month, the two main Ron Paul-related websites (“Campaign for Liberty” and “The Daily Paul”) both published eulogies for author Eustace Mullins, who recently died at the age of 86. The Daily Paul’s version: Eustace Mullins Passes On.

Legendary author of scores of books and pamphlets demolishing the lies of warmaking mainstream media, historian Eustace Mullins died Tuesday, Feb. 2, at the home of his caretaker in a small town in Texas.

“He was absolutely BRILLIANT in his research, writing and verbal presentations, and as honest a man and scholar as our country has ever produced. In all the interviews I had the great honor of doing with Eustace, he never ceased to amaze me…and to teach all of us critically-important truths about our world and the evil, satanic group that is and has been dominating it for far too long. HIs knowledge and wisdom about the controllers was simply astonishing.” said Jeff Rense.

Mullins, who would have been 87 in March, suffered a stroke three weeks ago in Columbus, Ohio. He had been on an extended tour of his admirers for much of the past year, visiting and chatting with many of his thousands of fans who jumped at the chance to buy his books from him in person.

The author of such incendiary books as “Secrets of the Federal Reserve, “Murder by Injection, and “The Curse of Canaan, Mullins was harrassed by the FBI for almost a half century, and had one of his books burned in Germany in the 1950s. These stories are recounted in one of his books, “A Writ for Martyrs.

A protege of the imprisoned patriotic poet Ezra Pound, Mullins compiled a well-researched raft of works that detailed the passage down through time of a hereditary group of banker killers who have essentially ruled the world from behind the scenes since ancient times.

“Eustace Mullins was the greatest political historian of the 20th century, and not just because he was not beholden to the power structure that deters candid reports about significant events, but because, guided by the greatest poet of the 20th century who was imprisoned for broadcasting for peace, his meticulous research eventually uncovered virtually every significant political secret of the last 400 years. “It, is a pity so many people are afraid to believe what Mullins told them, because it was much more of the truth than has ever been seen in our schools or our media.

Funeral arrangements and appropriate memorial information have yet to be released.

Eustace Mullins, the man these Ron Paul followers are celebrating, was an associate of Holocaust denier Willis Carto and a notorious antisemite himself, who wrote a book (oddly enough, not mentioned in this tribute) titled “The Biological Jew,” containing statements such as: “Nazism is simply this — a proposal that the German people rid themselves of the parasitic Jews. The gentile host dared to protest against the continued presence of the parasite, and attempted to throw it off.”

Mullins also claimed that Jews “drink the blood of innocent gentile children” in religious ceremonies, and was a guest on the white nationalist radio show “The Political Cesspool.”

Campaign For Liberty, one of the main US sponsors of tea party protests, had a shorter tribute to Mullins posted at their blog: Today we morn [sic] the passage of Eustace Mullins.

Eustace Mullins was a great autor [sic] and told the truth about the Federal Reseve [sic], the Constitution, Liberty and American History. A man who had a book burned in Europe, was fired from the Library fof [sic] Congress for ploitical [sic] reasons had to be on the right track. He will be missed.

This post drew a mild request that the author include a disclaimer distancing the Campaign for Liberty from the antisemitic bad craziness of “The Biological Jew,” because it’s “not a fair assessment.”

MarkinOregon
Medford, OR

Hi Craig,
While he may have done a great job on his work the Secrets of the Federal Reserve, you might want to put a disclaimer against supporting his work TheBiological Jew. Liberty campaigners do not endorse looking at people in general groups as his book on Jews seems to. Remember Austrian economicswas created by Jews and the idea that they are all socialists or biologically controlled towards leftist thought is not a fair assessment at all.

Maybe it’s just me, but when someone says that Jews drink the blood of gentile children, I could not possibly care less about his opinions on the Federal Reserve.

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Everybody Knows/Leonard Cohen.......scenes from "Man from U.N.C.L.E."

The Worst of the Pain

By BOB HERBERT

Published: February 8, 2010
NY Times

There is a great tendency in this country to refuse to see what is right in front of everybody’s eyes.

Readers' Comments
Share your thoughts.
Read All Comments (29) »

While there is now, finally, a great deal of talk among the politicians and in the news media about unemployment, there is still almost a willful refusal to focus on just who is suffering the most from joblessness and underemployment.
When it comes to employment, there are roughly three broad categories in the United States. The folks in the upper-income group are not suffering much, if at all, from the profound reversals in employment brought about by the Great Recession. Those in the middle have been hit hard. The job losses there have been severe and long-lasting. But for those in the lower-income groups, the scale of the employment crisis has been mind-boggling.
What you’re not hearing from the politicians and the talking heads is that the joblessness and underemployment in America’s low-income households rival their heights in the Great Depression of the 1930s — and in some instances are worse. The same holds true for some categories of blue-collar workers. Anyone who thinks this devastating problem is going away soon, or that the economy can be put back on track without addressing it, is deluded.
There has been talk about income inequality over the past several years, but what is happening now is catastrophic. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston divided American households into 10 groups based on annual household income. Then it analyzed labor conditions in each of the groups during the fourth quarter of 2009.
The highest group, with household incomes of $150,000 or more, had an unemployment rate during that quarter of 3.2 percent. The next highest, with incomes of $100,000 to 149,999, had an unemployment rate of 4 percent.
Contrast those figures with the unemployment rate of the lowest group, which had annual household incomes of $12,499 or less. The unemployment rate of that group during the fourth quarter of last year was a staggering 30.8 percent. That’s more than five points higher than the overall jobless rate at the height of the Depression.
The next lowest group, with incomes of $12,500 to $20,000, had an unemployment rate of 19.1 percent.    More at NY Times

Diana Krall - Lost Mind at the JVC Jazz Festival

No explanation needed

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

A remarkable discussion on Hardball with Chris Matthews  asking Peter Sprigg, from the Family Research Council,  if he thinks that homosexuality  should be illegal.  At the end of this interview Spriggs states that he thinks that homosexuality should be illegal... Illegal...  Which means he thinks gay people should be arrested and put in jail.  Wow....   Spriggs position was unambiguous.  Maybe there really is a right wing conspiracy  to take over this country in the guise of a pseudo Christian fundamentalism.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Another xkcd Comic

I have never felt sadder for a machine, poor Rover

Mel Gibson

I believe Mel Gibson doesn't  like Jews, but as a Jew that opinion makes me ..... suspect ?

 Mel just doesn't feel the necessity to hide his feeling, because you know you are talking about Joows, those protocols of Zion, control the world, organ stealing ( we have moved on from stealing christian babies and eating them ) people.

Bookssssss

After spending the last hour pursing Amazon and reading samples of various Sci Fi, I have come to the conclusion that with advent of cheap printing and especially the Kindle, any crock of shit can be published.
I can write shit as well as the next person, perhaps I will spend tomorrow looking for.... novel writing software, I am sure it's out there some where.

South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer Compares His State's Poor Children to 'Stray Animals'

An example of the philosophy of the new Republican party

No longer do they have to whisper behind close doors their true feeling, they are now free to share them with the world, confident they have the full support of their party and their community

• 
• It's a wonder he can feed himself. Photo: andrebauer.com

South Carolina's Lt. Governor Andre Bauer, who is running for Governor of the state on the Republican ticket, said a bunch of monumentally stupid and ignorant things that would shock even the most cynical person at a luncheon the other day, like:

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better."

Let's be absolutely clear, here: Bauer's remarks are not appalling because they're offensive or "un-PC" or a Biden-esque "oops!" They're reprehensible because this man who currently holds office in South Carolina and is making a bid to run the state is demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that he doesn't possess even the very most basic understanding of the biggest problem in his state, which is poverty. Deep, ingrained, historical-legacy style poverty. The kind of poverty where, forget about college, nobody in your family has ever owned a telephone or a car or a TV or known how to read. The kind of rural poverty that at its worst is invisible to most Americans, because the only way to see it is to accidentally get off I-95 at a no-gas-station exit and drive twenty or so miles from the highway. That is what this still, in 2010, very segregated state is dealing with. And then their Lt. Governor said something even worse:

"I can show you a bar graph where free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina. You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I'll show you the worst test scores, folks. It's there, period."

Yeah, no shit. The fact that Bauer is presenting the correlation between poverty and low test scores as his own magical "aha" discovery and not something every high school student who has ever taken a sociology class understands should strike nothing less than mortal fear in the hearts of anyone who lives in or cares about the state of South Carolina. Poverty, especially of the Southern kind, is an extremely complicated and difficult and frustrating issue, and so far nobody, Democrat or Republican, has been able to solve it. But South Carolina deserves a leader who at least knows what it is.


24Comments

Satan's Open Letter to Pat Robertson

• 1/16/10 at 12:45 PMA
•  Minneapolis Star-Tribune reader named Lily Coyle drafted the perfect answer to Pat Robertson's Haiti hate-speech earlier this week. It's almost enough to make the Bad Thoughts of the Bad Things we want to happen to Pat Robertson stop running on a constant Bad Loop in our head. And, as Elizabeth Spiers points out on her blog, it's What Mark Twain Would Do!):

Dear Pat Robertson,
I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished.
Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll.
You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.
Best, Satan
LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS

As the kids would say, Lily Coyle FTW.

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