Thom Hartmann on the Death Penalty

via Fuck Conservatives.

I don't think "murder" is too strong a word.

More on Jesse Ventura

Ok, we get it.  Jesse V. is unhappy because TSA gets to touch him in a manner he considers inappropriate.

Wonkette has it covered.

America’s second-most favorite whackadoodle ex-governor Jesse Ventura (whose crazy gave Minnesota such a hangover it then elected Tim Pawlenty) managed to gather enough bored reporters together to formallyannounce that he tragically lost his important lawsuit trying to get the government to quit letting TSA agents touch his nuts all the time. In revenge, he will now become a Mexican, in order to stick it to the fascist tyranny of Minnesota.

I'm just finding this a bit hard to believe.  After all, Jesse V made a living doing this:

 and this:

while wearing outfits like this:

Sorry, I can't muster much sympathy for ol' Jesse.

Jesse Ventura is Angry

via Democratic Underground

He's angry all right, but is he right?

The Right Wing's Insurrectionist Mindset

Media Matters reports

The federal government has alleged that four Georgia militia members who are accused of plotting to kill federal employees modeled their plan on right-wing blogger Mike Vanderboegh's online novel Absolved, which depicts underground militia fighters who declare war on the federal government over gun control laws and same-sex marriage, leading to a second American revolution. Vanderboegh is not alone in promoting such insurrectionism: several right-wing media figures, including other gun rights bloggers, have suggested the possibility of political violence or revolution as a means of responding to progressive policies.

This was covered adequately by our own intrepid reporters, here and here, but the Media Matters folks went on to cite a few other offenders.

Bob Owens: "Go To Your Congressman's Office... If You're Willing To Do The Time For The Crime, Have A Swing At Him."

Kurt Hoffman Suggested It's A "Good Thing" That Politicians Who Support Gun Control Perceive "A Personal Threat To Their Own Lives."

Dick Morris: "Those Crazies In Montana Who Say, 'We're Going To Kill ATF Agents Because The U.N.'s Going To Take Over' -- Well, They're Beginning To Have A Case."

Beck: "You're Going To Have To Shoot Them In The Head."

Erick Erickson: "At What Point Do The People ... March Down To Their State Legislator's House, Pull Him Outside, And Beat Him To A Bloody Pulp?" 

There's more but you get the idea. Ever since the incredible Mr Adkisson wrote his Manifesto I've been convinced that the blabber-mouth right-wing talkers are partly responsible for what their less-intelligent followers do. These political commenters and righty bloggers are abusing the 1st Amendment. I'm not sure what the answer is, but these people are definitely part of the problem.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Is This Right Wing Racism?

Herman Cain has been promoting lies, including the most convincing kind of lies, the ones that have some grain, some detail, of truth in them.

From the Guttmacher Institute:

Facts on Induced Abortion in the United States

August 2011

INCIDENCE OF ABORTION

• Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and about four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion.[1] Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion.[2]
• Forty percent of pregnancies among white women, 67% among blacks and 53% among Hispanics are unintended.[1] In 2008, 1.21 million abortions were performed, down from 1.31 million in 2000. However, between 2005 and 2008, the long-term decline in abortions stalled. From 1973 through 2008, nearly 50 million legal abortions occurred.[2]
• Each year, two percent of women aged 15–44 have an abortion. Half have had at least one previous abortion.[2,3]
• At least half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45, and, at current rates, one in 10 women will have an abortion by age 20, one in four by age 30 and three in 10 by age 45.[4,5]

However, Cain is not the only prominent figure on the right to repeat these lies.

Only Cain himself can know if he sincerely believes these lies.  Whether he believes them, or as he has demonstrated on a number of occasions --- like his foreign policy statement about China intending to become a nuclear power, which they did decades ago back in 1964,  or his misinformation about homosexuality as a choice - he is simply Michele Bachmann-like sloppy about facts, the result is to create racially based ill will where there is no valid basis to do so.

 We should not be demonizing Planned Parenthood. we should instead be helping to provide women with effective contraception, and the education to use it consistently to find better alternatives to control their reproductive decisions and their reproductive health.

Herman Cain seems to be playing the so-called 'race card' here, and it seems to be the Joker - the trickster, the dishonesty card.

If he gets this kind of thing wrong, and so many other items of information wrong, how can he presume to be qualified to serve as President?  How can any of the candidates currently in contention for the GOP nomination?

From Factcheck.org:

Cain’s False Attack on Planned Parenthood

Posted on November 1, 2011

Herman Cain has offered an alternate version of history in claiming that Planned Parenthood’s founder wanted to prevent “black babies from being born.” We find no support for that old claim. Cain also states that the organization built 75 percent of its clinics in black communities, but there’s no evidence that was true then. And today, only 9 percent of U.S. abortion clinics are in neighborhoods where half or more of residents are black, according to the most recent statistics.
The GOP presidential candidate made these comments back in March, telling an audience at the conservative Heritage Foundation that “[w]hen Margaret Sanger — check my history — started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world.” He called it “planned genocide.”
In an interview on “Face the Nation” on Oct. 30, Cain did not back down from those allegations. Here’s his exchange with host Bob Schieffer:

Schieffer: … you said that it was not Planned Parenthood, it was really planned genocide because you said Planned Parenthood was trying to put all these centers into the black communities because they wanted to kill black babies –
Herman Cain: Yes.
Scheiffer: — before they were born. Do you still stand by that?
Cain: I still stand by that.
Schieffer: Do you have any proof that that was the objective of Planned Parenthood?
Cain: If people go back and look at the history and look at Margaret Sanger’s own words, that’s exactly where that came from. Look up the history. So if you go back and look up the history — secondly, look at where most of them were built; 75 percent of those facilities were built in the black community — and Margaret Sanger’s own words, she didn’t use the word “genocide,” but she did talk about preventing the increasing number of poor blacks in this country by preventing black babies from being born.

Cain isn’t the first to believe that birth control advocate Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) wanted to stop the birth of black babies. Just do an Internet search and see what happens. Sanger made more than her share of controversial comments. But the quote many point to as evidence that Sanger favored something akin to “genocide” of African Americans has been turned on its head.
Sanger, who was arrested several times in her efforts to bring birth control to women in the United States, set up her first clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. In the late 1930s, she sought to bring clinics to black women in the South, in an effort that was called the “Negro Project.” Sanger wrote in 1939 letters to colleague Clarence James Gamble that she believed the project needed a black physician and black minister to gain the trust of the community:

Sanger, 1939: The minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

Sanger says that a minister could debunk the notion, if it arose, that the clinics aimed to “exterminate the Negro population.” She didn’t say that she wanted to “exterminate” the black population. The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University says that this quote has “gone viral on the Internet,” normally out of context, and it “doesn’t reflect the fact that Sanger recognized elements within the black community might mistakenly associate the Negro Project with racist sterilization campaigns in the Jim Crow south, unless clergy and other community leaders spread the word that the Project had a humanitarian aim.”
It goes on to characterize beliefs such as Cain’s as “extremist.” The project says: “No serious scholar and none of the dozens of black leaders who supported Sanger’s work have ever suggested that she tried to reduce the black population or set up black abortion mills, the implication in much of the extremist anti-choice material.”

Greg, Greetings from Ypres!

Since Greg has this bizarre idea that a gun would stop a well armed foe, here's a picture of Ypres in West Flanders Belgium during one of the Three battles that raged through the Town during the 14-18 War. Not only was heavy artillery used, but so was poison gas. The third Battle is also known as the Battle of Passchendaele.



The airborne attack on Fort Eben-Emael also demonstrates Greg's historical ignorance.

You can correct grammar, Greg, but you know little else.

Parallel Universes.

Part of the right’s dislike of the Elite (wow,if that isn’t a contradiction!) is their distrust of “experts”.

"Those people with all their qualifications who know all that stuff, they must be wrong! I know nothing, I must be right!"

We know about one of these people’s relationship with reality from his "military service". He was found to have not served since the units he claimed to serve in were nowhere near the theatres of combat. That probably explains why he missed the memo on the rest of reality. He’s off in his bizarre parallel universe which somehow intersects ours via the internet.

These people who claim to "love America" advocate policies that have crippled the country through their ignorance (I think this phenomenon is worse in the States). Maybe these policies do work in their universe, but they are detrimental to this one

This goes to my theory of parallel universes, which physicists have begun to suggest is more a likelihood than not. This isn't just a mad theory I have, but may be accepted scientific fact that parallel universes exist. These universes influence each other.

I think we should work on bridging the gap between reality and the better parallel universe where the solutions to these problems exist. We also need to block the influences from the negative parallel universe where these people exist. Let them destroy their world!

It makes my brain hurt to think that these people are out there.

Even worse that they manage to influence our universe from theirs.

There must be some bizarre explanation which could be provided if we had a better understanding of quantum physics as to how this influencing of our universe from a bizarre parallel universe works. I hope that someone will soon claim a Nobel Prize for working out how to block the right wing parallel universe from interfering with reality.