Politics and Poker - Wingers Go 'All In' With Right Network

I didn't think people were clamoring to see the chaps from the Blue Collar Comedy Tour sitting around a felt-covered table, dispensing their folksy brand of low-brow wisdom as they cheat at cards and ogle breasts while dimwits watched from the comfort of their own homes, but I was wrong.



Oops, my mistake! It's not the Blue Collar Comedy Tour at all. It's a program on the Right Network, coming soon. Because there's just not enough discussion about tickle fights, the tea party crowd, and that communist/socialist/Marxist/terrorist President Obama.

Nice to see Kelsey Grammer has found a home, since he can't seem to stay on my TV box for very long. Everyone knows the Goddamn left wingers own Hollywood!



I have a title suggestion for their next offering - Sit Around And Bitch: We Have Sand In Our Vaginas.

Via Hullabaloo

It's White Fright, Stupid

In his weekly New York Times column, Frank Rich peels the lily-white onion and discovers what we've known all along: The apoplectic response to the passage of health care reform has little to do with the proximate cause. And it didn't start with this bill.

Says Rich:

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance. 

Hmm. Civil rights. Perceived loss by certain groups as the playing field was slowly being leveled.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

So what is the genesis of this angst, the volatile fuel that's causing tea bagger rockets to whiz past monuments in the night, Sarah Palin's Facebook page during the day, and empowering angry simpletons to hurl bricks through glass windows at targeted members of Congress, obviously taking their revolutionary training by watch Palestinians throw rocks at Israeli tanks seconds before being cut down in a fusillade of bullets. 

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

You spine-chilling conglomeration of gays and chicks, blacks and browns, all coming together to push through significant changes in a political landscape dominated by the stall and the sound-byte. Have you no idea what you've started?

Momentum. And it's frightening the white guys with lace on their panties and guns in their trucks who see this as rapidly escalating into the Ardennes forest in the winter of '44 as they hunker down while shells rain down upon them. Like Patton, who shall come to reinforce the surrounded tea party lads before food and water run out, ammunition runs low, and the are forced to fight to the last man?

I don't see any groups stepping up, do you?

Tea Bag Crowd Afraid of Education

With elements on the right going spastic over each and every idea that the Obama administration puts forth, the tea baggers are earning their protesting chops, regardless of how silly and non-productive their events end up being.

With that sort of experience, one might begin to believe that the TBs would get better over time with the whole protest infrastructure. They should be able to do it in their sleep.

Perhaps they are - doing it in their sleep.

That would explain the sheer number of misspelled signs noted at their rallies. Cardboard boxes don't have spell-checkers, but I know for a fact that Walmart sells dictionaries. And the baggers could always sit down and use the Google.

No wonder they were so afraid of Obama's education speech.

Link via Daily Kos

Big Boobed Anti-Gay Marriage Beauty Queen Gets Book Deal

Mark Sanford has flamed out South America style. John Ensign boinked one of his staff. Sarah Palin quit. Newt Gingrich is nuts.

Who is able to carry forward the conservative message? What figure has a solid background of deep study, accumulating years and years of experience and reams of data with which to intelligently frame logical, well-reasoned right-wing principles?

How about the beauty queen who had fake boobs installed and co-hosted Fox & Friends?

No kidding.

Wonkette has the details on Carrie Prejean, the former pageant loser who made the mistake of answering a Perez Hilton question on the gays, which became a rallying cry among the conservative base but caused howls of outrage among the other 90% of people in this country who are...well...humans who believe in fairness.

So cram some silicone sacks in your chest, pose for some soft-core porn photos early in your modeling career, be all fake and superficial while holding unpopular beliefs, and spend some mornings repeatedly touching the male hosts of Fox & Friends like you have a case of wingnut TV obsessive-compulsive disorder, and perhaps you too can get a book deal.

Do you know how to read and write? Oh, never mind - doesn't really matter.

Imabe by cattias. photos via flickr

Guns: What Are They Good For?

There's an unsettling trend developing that needs some thoughtful and reasoned analysis. Guns sales, and gun violence, are on the rise.

Before you click off of this post or launch into an NRA-inspired "From my cold, dead hands!" oration using your best Charlton Heston voice, allow me to point out a couple of things.

I grew up in the mountains of central Pennsylvania as both a hunter and competition shooter. I'm a military veteran and former military police officer. I've owned rifles, shotguns, and handguns for most of my life, and even though I don't hunt anymore, I still possess firearms.

I voted for Obama.

The folks who did not vote for Obama spent a lot of time before the election whipping up fear and hatred, painting candidate-Obama as a terrorist Muslim who wasn't born in this country.

Hours and hours of video were shot and posted of McCain / Palin rallies where this behavior and ignorance were shown. This was not liberal media bias, commie-pinko New York Times slanted reporting. This was a recorded portrayal of actual events, hate and racism and intolerance in the words of anti-Obama supporters.

Post-election, mainstream media ran story after story about the rise in gun sales, born out of baseless fear among the losers that Obama was going to "take their guns away" and therefore they would load up and hunker down, prepared to defend their homestead as they munched on canned peaches. Firearms sales have skyrocketed.

So has gun violence. Are they related?

The graph pictured here (click it to make it larger) is from the New York Times, and it's a stunning visual reminder of how certain groups respond when they perceive a loss in power or status. Violence is the most basic response mechanism. Fight, or flight.

And we've also read and seen terrible stories of mass shootings. Thirteen dead in an immigration center in Binghamton, NY. Three Pittsburgh police officers gunned down responding to a domestic dispute. Bullet proof vests being worn by the assailants.

This comes on the heels of increasing vitriolic posturing by the Glenn Becks and Michele Bachmanns of the world, calling for revolution and resistance to the policies and priorities of the Obama administration, a government currently enjoying approval ratings north of 60%.

This fear-mongering and instigating is meant to do one thing, and one thing only - incite antisocial behavior and increase ratings.

As we witnessed during the Bush administration, with Dick Cheney and the merchants of fear, the illusion of protecting the American people was used to justify all kinds of illegal and inappropriate activity that typically involved the use of military might to force our views on the world. You're either with us, or against us, so toe the line or we'll shoot a Paveway bomb up your ass.

Someone needs to look at the root cause, not the symptom. Gun sales are the result of something, not the starting point. We can start with the right-wing talk show hosts and wack-a-doodle politicians, requiring them to tone down their rhetoric and preach calm and restraint during this difficult time.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself. And bullets.