The Modern State of the National Republican Party, See also "fascism, authoritarianism, totalitariansim, dictatorships"

Also, "It's NOT FAIR!" and "Where's the birth certificate?!"



Also, I might add, I'm glad YouTube, and Web 2.0 was in it's infancy during the many turmoils of my own white adolescence.

Fox News' conscience.

Quote of the Day, from Lawyers, Guns, and Money:

If radical Muslims had carried out terrorist attacks in Kansas and Washington DC over the past five days, we might be trying to pass legislation giving the president the legal authority to place people in preventive detention, and Daniel Pipes would be implying that we need to round up Arab-Americans (correction: Muslims) and put them in relocation camps.

But it was only a couple of old white guys, so our civil liberties remain unthreatened.

Anomaly-sniping, Rationality-FAIL edition

Xenophobe Pammy Geller, yesterday:

This is very strange. Events surrounding the Air France plane that crashed and practically disintegrated raise more questions then they answer. An Air France pilot said it was 'highly likely' the jet was blown out of the sky by a bomb.

Now it has come to light that the domain name for flight 447 was registered in September 2007. Coincidence? Maybe. Iranian Kari Bian, who makes movies about Israelis and "Palestinians," registered the domain flight447.com.

That's peculiar.

No, that's really stupid.

It's just one of those inevitable coincidences produced by large groups of people having lots of experiences.

Pammy, today:

Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.

And it only got worse. It was terrible. My heart is heavy for my country and the free world.

The media can spin their subjugation and adulation a million different ways, but America did not vote for a "Muslim presidency," which is what this is. Obama deceitfully hid his Muslim background and schooling and his agenda. Little did America know that Obama's objective would be a conversion of this nation to "the largest Muslim country in the world". From the moment he spoke as President, in the inaugural address, Islam was falsely given a preeminent place in the creation of America. In this speech, he quoted from the Koran three times. Why doesn't anybody comment on this? Why doesn't anyone ever comment on what he projected vs. what he is? Why won't all those talking heads state the obvious?

Obama's speech was a lesson in taqiya (lies to advance Islam). He called Islam a force of religious tolerance and racial equality ..... in the face of all the barbarism. He stated that “Muslims have enriched the U.S. and have won Nobel prizes.” They have, in fact, received less than a handful of the international Nobel prizes. It is an interesting point to make, considering the glaring omission of the Jews contribution to humanity.

On democracy, Obama said:

So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.

Really, that's news to Japan and Germany post WW2. And that's news to all of the previously Christian nations that were barbarically destroyed and taken over by Islam ..... and there are all those cute little Soviet Republics.

And then, this chestnut:

This last point is important because there are some who advocate for democracy only when they are out of power; once in power, they are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others.

It sounds autobiographical ................"

*****

Other reactions from the Pro-Israel crowd:


*****
How 'bout some mainstream Arab commentary (via Sullivan):

[Obama's] reference to the early roots of Islam in America is so disingenuous: he has one bland quote from John Adams and leave out various expressions of bigotry against Muslims by founding fathers. And he then condemns (unspecified) Western stereotypes of Muslims and then matches them with what he calls Muslim stereotypes of America as empire. But those two are not symmetrical: American stereotypes of Muslims are racist and essentialist, and the notion that the US is a war mongering Empire is shared by [non-Muslims] and Muslims alike...

Sigh.
Shorter Obama today in Cairo, addressing the Muslim world directly, but really the whole world:


Shorter Zionist Neo-cons: Awful, way to fuck over the Jews by fellating the Terrorists.

Shorter Muslim Commentariat: America is not an Empire? Put up or Shut Up, because we know Obama is a Puppet for Israeli concerns.

Shorter Christian Right: OMG, seriouly, you guys! Fukkin' told you! He's a sleeper Muslim!

What day is today? It's Nibbler's Birthday, what a day for a birthday! Let's all have some cake! (And you smell like one too)*

via (Think Progress)

The kooks have heard Pat Buchanan sounding the crusty Racist, "She's a racist" horn, and they are intent on not being left behind:

[In the Night Club after Drexel has beaten Clarence]
Drexl Spivey: He must have thought it was white boy day. It ain't white boy day, is it?
Marty: No man, It ain't white boy day.

Ancient Hateful Clowns. Is there anyone under 60 who buys this blatant appeal to bigotry?

UPDATE: Again...STILL not white boy day.

*What. The. Hell. is he talking about?

You can take the boy out of Catholic School, but you can't...

Previously, on The Dish:

They reminded me of the human beings behind these tragedies, and forced me to reassess my own certainties and beliefs. I still cannot in good conscience support these abortions; but I can offer my profound gratitude for the readers who have forced this blogger to see things I had not fully grasped so keenly before; and to return to them respect and empathy in the particulars, even while we may disagree in the abstract.

Former Republican John Cole responds:

Most of you know how much I like Andrew Sullivan, and I’m not a fanatic about abortion either way. I’ll never have one, but I think it is none of my damned business what other people do with their medical decisions. I’m comfortable with our current law, which allows for people who dislike abortion to never have to have one. With that in mind, reading this from Sullivan just really irritated me.
[...]
What this country really needs right now is a serious case of mind your own damned business. We’ve turned into a nation of busybodies and scolds, and people just need to back off. And that goes for the people opposed to and trying to make illegal Andrew’s marriage, for people like Andrew who sound like they want the weight of the law to come down on people making tragic medical decisions that lead to late-term abortions, for the nutjobs who thought they knew better than Michael Schiavo how to handle his horrible situation with his wife, to the lunatics screaming “murder” when we do stem cell research, and so on.

I’m really sick of the crap, and I don’t mean to harsh completely on Andrew, because I sense he does struggle with these matters. But if Andrew’s conscience can’t support a late-term abortion, then right now he is sitting pretty, because under our current system, anyone who doesn’t want an abortion doesn’t have to have one.

And that really should be the end of that.

It was a righteous rant, but commenters de-lurked and came out of the woodwork just to dogpile on Sullivan. My own remarks were somewhat seconded by Cole, but largely went unheeded.

Me:

A lot of hatred and unfounded accusations about Sullivan have popped up randomly a la Sully is gay, rich, and HIV positive, ergo he hates women. I don’t presume to speak for the man, but I know that if I were vilified and my background were used to argue against my political beliefs, I’d feel pretty dismissive.

Another commenter: "Sullivan’s lack of real compassion in that comment was stunning – after all those heart-felt stories, he still sees abortion as an abstract principle, not the life-and-death issue that it is for so many."

I honestly believe this is the case of ‘you can take the boy out of Catholic school, but you can’t take the Catholic school out of the boy’, simply because as a straight white male who was indoctrinated into the Catholic culture for 19 years before bucking it, I share the same ignorance of a pro-choice worldview. No matter how much I agree with the pro-choice position, there’s still a small twinge of pro-life guilt because it was engraved into my head by every adult I knew and trusted growing up that it is taking the life of a child. Ask any developmental biologist or child psychiatrist, what you’re taught as a trusting child is nigh impossible to excise.
I thought his appearance on Countdown last night was admirable, simply because it was good to see a civil opposition on such a partisan show. While I now think a patient’s (Womens’) personal freedom is the fundamental underlying issue, I can understand the ‘abstract’ he’s referring to without making an effort to dehumanize women who seek abortions.

Cole:

You know, if all some of you have to offer is just crapping all over Sullivan, I have to wonder what you think you are accomplishing. It isn’t changing my opinion of his blog, which I think is a great read.

And it certainly isn’t changing Sullivan’s opinion to come in here, read the comments, and see nothing but people being assholes to him. I’m honestly not sure what you think you are doing other than making yourself look bad.

And it continues from there. This is what I find somewhat distasteful, in part about blogging and the national conversation. 'A' will point out the flaw in something that an individual who they respect, 'B' said. Many readers of 'A' will grasp the point of the reasoning, but the rest will be all "B's a witch! Burn B!". The opposite tends to happen when someone 'A' hates, 'C', makes a remark that 'A' happens to agree with. C is showered by A's readers as seeing the light, of being more than worth what he was valued at yesterday.

Sullivan may label his position as a conflict between principle and reality, but I wouldn't count him out just yet. In the battle between his a priori "principled" pro-life stance, and the facts on the ground concerning the realities of pregnancy and the near-infinitely sprawling landscape of frightening possibilities and complications, Andrew Sullivan, so far today, is letting his readers have the last word, or at least more "column inches" than his principle (Post completely reproduced here, my emphasis added):

"My third pregnancy resulted in the birth of twin girls - one with horribly deformed internal organs and the other normal. I had chosen not to have testing done, because although I believed in the right to choose, I did not think I would ever choose abortion for myself. The doctors wanted to do surgery on our daughter that held a 10% chance of survival and promised another decade of surgeries for a child whose disability would leave her blind, mute and severely mentally retarded. We had to make the excruciating decision of whether to allow that course of events. We chose to baptise and let her return to God. We held her as she died three hours later. Her sister, blessedly, survived after a 2 month stay in neo-natal intensive care.

The struggle and torment of burying and grieving for a child, and explaining to the three older siblings why we only brought home one baby, was an ongoing horror that lasted years. It took a huge toll on our marriage for a long time. The next time I got pregnant, I was terrified. Your odds of having a child with birth defects goes up with age and previously affected children. I did not want to be blindsided by another child dying in my arms. I did not think my family would survive another experience like that intact.

I decided to have every test they offer this time.

I found out that I would get the amniocentisis results with only six days to decide and procure termination should I have another child with a life ending abnormality. Six days. If I struggled with indecision too long I would have to travel to Kansas. Being unwilling to put my family through that situation again, I had the number of the clinic ready to make the appointment immediately if my amnio revealed another child doomed to suffer or die. This time, thankfully, I had one healthy baby girl.

What happened to Tiller is a crime. What is also a criminal is that we already have a nation where women are forced into scenarios where all the choices are bad and made worse by the lack of freedom handed unequally to our gender in being able to access a doctor and determine what is right for our children and our families. This is Terry Schaivo territory. If the Christianists ever succeed in completely outlawing abortion, women in my situation will be forced to watch our newborns gasp their last breath and grow cold in our arms."

UPDATE: The Royal 'We'.

"We also published more abortion testimonials here, here, and here."

The man might have moral qualms arguing against what he's been taught his whole life, but given his pedestal, and his influence, at the end of the day, this is how he wraps it up. This is how he lets his audience mull.

UPDATE II: More letters and his response:

I have to say I am beginning to believe that these abortions, given their excruciating moral and personal choices, may be the most defensible in context of all abortions. And yet they seem to be taking life in a more viscerally distressing way. I need time to think and rethink these things. I would not have without reading these extraordinary accounts.

and he concurs with this reader:

The posts from real women who have had to ponder and in some cases have late-term abortions has really changed my thinking. It may be the early term abortions that are most morally problematic, not the late term ones that arise under the most excruciating of circumstances. My own feeling is that our moral duty is to agonize and struggle over the serious choices we make, not always to make the usually unknowable "right" choice. By this standard, the women you have posted have more than done their duty. I would not want to second guess them.

Thank you for posting these messages, and especially thanks to the people who wrote them and were willing to have them posted. Just as gays coming out and being known destigmatizes you and them, getting these abortion stories out takes away the cartoon quality of the whole abortion debate. There just is very little black and white in the world and loads of gray.

The same effect happens with Atheism, but that's a post for another day, until then:

Case Closed.

But it's not terrorism when Americans kill people for religious reasons

via The Witchita Eagle:

WICHITA - George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning inside the lobby of his Wichita church.

Tiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. at Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation. Witnesses and a police source confirmed Tiller was the victim.

Police said they are looking for white male who was driving a 1990s powder blue Ford Taurus with Kansas license plate 225 BAB. The vehicle is registered to an owner in Merriam, which is in the Kansas City area.

Wikipedia:

On Friday, November 3, 2006, Bill O'Reilly featured an exclusive segment on his show, The O'Reilly Factor, saying that he has an "inside source" with official clinic documentation indicating that George Tiller performs late-term abortions to alleviate "temporary depression" in the pregnant woman. According to reporting data provided to the Kansas Board of Healing Arts for the year 1998, all of the post-viable partial-birth (dilation and extraction) abortion procedures performed in Kansas during that year were performed because "the attending physician believe[d] that continuing the pregnancy [would] constitute a substantial and irreversible impairment of the patient's mental function." Tiller responded to O'Reilly's statements by demanding an investigation into the "inside source" through which the information was leaked, suggesting that Phill Kline, then the Kansas Attorney General, was responsible. Kline denied the charge.

What do I think? I don't care, keep it legal. There are plenty of horrid things happening in the world that are less abstract and that present themselves to us with a larger moral imperative to address.


Tiller was murdered in church.

I don't mean to go all Giuliani, but do you remember, late afternoon on 9/11, when the news posted video recorded in the Gaza Strip? There were gatherings of Palestinian Arabs dancing in the streets with raucous fervor:

Like everyone who saw that footage, I wanted to jump through my TV screen, pummel those people, drag them to ground zero, and rub their faces in the smoldering wreckage.

I bring this up, because of the reaction amongst the majority of commenters at FreeRepublic, a popular right-wing website. (pdf here and here, in case they wipe the thread.)

To: upchuck

Tiller has committed outrage after outrage and not only gotten away with it, he has made a fortune! Sooner or later this had to happen.

2 posted on Sunday, May 31, 2009 12:11:32 PM by Anti-Bubba182
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]
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To: upchuck

What goes around comes around...
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To: Gay State Conservative

One less nazi as far as I am concerned.

8 posted on Sunday, May 31, 2009 12:15:21 PM by imahawk (Life is tough.It's even tougher when you're stupid.)
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To: Anti-Bubba182

Hope the guy gets away.

10 posted on Sunday, May 31, 2009 12:15:31 PM by Turret Gunner A20
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To: SnakeDoctor
Thou Shalt Not Murder.

But, wasn't this just another late term abortion(?)
32 posted on Sunday, May 31, 2009 12:23:58 PM by The Duke (I have met the enemy, and he is named 'Apathy'!)
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To: ansel12

You, also, are entitled to your opinion. Equivocators and appeasers have something to say, too....Pardon me if it falls on deaf ears.
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To: Gay State Conservative

To: PapaBear3625
Take a look at how Daily Kos is covering reactions of FR.

I would worry about what those boneheads are saying as I would worry about what a monkey was thinking watching a chess match.
(Hi, Kostards!)

162 posted on Sunday, May 31, 2009 2:06:17 PM by Carl LaFong (Experts say experts should be ignored.)
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To: calico_thompson
Well, at least the perp didn’t rip his arms and legs off and then suck his brains out.

The best pot so far in this thread!!!
101 posted on Sunday, May 31, 2009 12:59:27 PM by Turret Gunner A20

Some of the commenters were advocating that murder is murder, and taking the general position that nothing justifies it, to their credit. The despicable thing to me is the smugness with which some people celebrate human suffering. It is not okay when it is an Arab jumping up and down on 9/12, and it is just as wrong when it is a Christian expressing glee over the murder of a doctor.

UPDATE:

"Sometimes, when the stubborn wickedness of a people offends God, the Almighty witholds His divine protection, permitting those sinners to have their own way, following the road to destruction so that they are subjected to evil rulers and unjust laws. Never, however, does the wise and faithful Christian resort to the kind of lawlessness practiced with such cruelty today in Kansas."
- Conservative Pundit, American Taliban Spokesman Robert Stacy McCain.

Kathryn Jean Lopez at the World's Shittiest Website:

The National Right to Life Committee does the right thing:

NATIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE CONDEMNS THE KILLING

OF DR. GEORGE TILLER

Mike Hendricks: Columnist for the Kansas City Star (Read the whole thing):

However, the motive for the crime we can all surmise in light of the vitriolic campaign that has been waged against Tiller for more than two decades by anti-abortion groups.

And if we're right about that, then we already know the identities of his accomplices.

They include every one who has ever called Tiller's late term abortion clinic a murder mill.

Who ever called Tiller "Tiller the Killer."

The groups who spent decades fomenting hate toward a man who simply believed that he was serving a purpose by being one of the few doctors in the country performing late-term abortions.

Hate. Not heated opposition. Not strong disagreement.

But blind hatred.

The kind of hate that would prompt some maniac to take a gun into a church and shoot a man to death in front of friends and family.

His accomplices know they have blood on their hands, which might explain why they were quick to issue statements today expressing disapproval of Tiller's murder.

Moderates need to police their fringe elements, not the other way around.

Anarchy in the UK, oops; I mean US GOP (aka How is 19% working out for y'all? [electorally speaking])

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Via The Dish (Andrew on vacation), we're getting early results thanks to Democracy in America and The Economist online:

Public Policy Polling, a firm that does work for Democrats but is typically on the money, tests four possible presidential candidates against Barack Obama. The poll doesn't assume that Mr Obama is incredibly popular—it gives him a 55/38 approval/disapproval rating, worse than the average calculated at Pollster.com. Still, all of the possible Republicans trail the president. Mike Huckabee fares best, only losing by 13 points in a hypothetical match-up.

These polls aren't meaningless. Newt Gingrich's popularity, according to PPP, is about as low as Dick Cheney's. Coincidentally, the White House has no problem elevating Mr Gingrich by inviting him to meetings. A lot of the White House's boldness can be traced back to its fearlessness. There's really no Republican on the horizon popular enough to challenge Mr Obama in 2012, unless the president slips badly.

As far as getting the under 65 vote, y'know, the majority of the country, what's your overall strategy for the future? How are you going to attract the youth; the generation that really doesn't give a fuck if you or your neighbors are black, white, hispanic, gay, lesbian, christian, jew, muslim, atheist, hindi, sikh, whatever; as long as at the end of the day you're able to get the motherfuckin' job done and govern effectively? What are your priorities? (via Think Progress)

STEELE: The problem that we have with this president is that we don’t know [Obama]. He was not vetted, folks. … He was not vetted, because the press fell in love with the black man running for the office. “Oh gee, wouldn’t it be neat to do that? Gee, wouldn’t it make all of our liberal guilt just go away? We can continue to ride around in our limousines and feel so lucky to live in an America with a black president.” Okay that’s wonderful, great scenario, nice backdrop. But what does he stand for? What does he believe? … So we don’t know. We just don’t know.

WHIMMY WHAM-WAM WOZZLE!

Okay...well, good luck with the in-group/out-group xenophobic argument. It's working now and has done wonders for you in the past. Make sure to pack it away after this, too, because it's sure to be even more persuasive when the immigration issue comes up again:


Also, DURKEE DURRR!!!!

Ahem, please keep Gitmo open, or David Bowie will materialize and kill you in your sleep, backwards.

Thanks to Cole for the metaphor.


To quote Eddie Izzard, "Uhm...QUOI?"
aka non sequitur much?


Vote Republican. That is all.
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UPDATE: That is not all.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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UPDATE II: It would be my fervent wish to cuddle with Rachel Maddow as we drifted off to sleep in a hammock in the middle of a Nebraska August's eve, if I felt for a moment she might enjoy it for a second. This is one of the many reasons why:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

"Today's Republican Party, brought to you by fear. Scaring people into getting in line since the first time God ever smoked something."

Oh. And. There. Is. Just. One. More. Thing.

The caption reads, "This is not a pipe".

"...A little splash on the face" - Rep. Pete King (NY)

lasted 7 seconds, "Absolutely Torture".



lasted 10 seconds, "Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture,[..]"

Pete King:

"King, who is the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, concluded his tirade to Politico with: “If we have another 2,000 people killed, I want Nancy Pelosi and [liberal philanthropist] George Soros, John Conyers and Pat Leahy to go to the funeral and say, ‘Your son was vaporized because we didn’t want to dump some guy's head under water for 30 seconds.’”

Stage IV Douche Rocket.

Cole's retort to the argument that "we used it on our troops in SERE school so it's not torture":

Not to diminish Mancow’s experience, but if he thought that was torture, think what the real deal must be like. You are snatched out of nowhere, flown across the world, kept awake for days on end in a freezing room with little food, woken every time you fall asleep on your metal bed, thrown against the wall with that lovely procedure known as collaring, slapped, had dogs threatening you, yelled at and beaten, and so on and so forth. That goes on for a couple weeks to soften you up, then you are dragged by multiple burly men and waterboarded repeatedly. You have no dead man’s switch like Hitchens did, you have no “safe” word to stop the process, there are no cameras and friends there to make sure you are alright. These people have been abusing you non-stop for days or weeks, for all you know this is when they finally kill you.

Of course it is torture. I’m sick and tired of having this stupid damned debate.

Jesse Ventura, John McCain, The historical record of the Spanish Inquisition, SERE school, Chris Hitchens, the special forces dude who went on CurrentTV in 2005,

VS.

the modern day conservative movement.

Chest-thumping Bedwetters.

We now learn after the fact that in reality, the parties in this argument were Conservatives and...

Conservatives. And Cheney lost that too in 2005.

...this is a completely bogus distortion of history.

The reality is that after Sept. 11, we entered a two- or three-year period of what you might call Bush-Cheney policy. The country was blindsided. Intelligence officials knew next to nothing about the threats arrayed against them. The Bush administration tried just about everything to discover and prevent threats. The Bush people believed they were operating within the law but they did things most of us now find morally offensive and counterproductive.

The Bush-Cheney period lasted maybe three years. For Dick Cheney those might be the golden years. For Democrats, it is surely the period they want to forever hang around the necks of the Republican Party. But that period ended long ago.

By 2005, what you might call the Bush-Rice-Hadley era had begun. Gradually, in fits and starts, a series of Bush administration officials — including Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Jack Goldsmith and John Bellinger — tried to rein in the excesses of the Bush-Cheney period. They didn’t win every fight, and they were prodded by court decisions and public outrage, but the gradual evolution of policy was clear.

Don't Let Oklahoma Hit You On the Ass...

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For eight solid years, the rhetoric from those in power on the right, and the morans who voted them in was if you don't like it, LEAVE! This is the greatest country in the world, aren't you Patriotic? If you're against the war, that's akin to Treason.

Now then, it hasn't even been 4 months, but the right is amping up the chest-thumping, but as far as love of country, they are whizzing it right down their legs. The last hundred days has seen Gun Sales go up 35%, calls for Obama's impeachment, throwing every name at him from Socialist, to Dictator; Totalitarian, to Fascist.

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Baracknophobia - Obey
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And they haven't heard that, even though they need to. The right-wing fringe used to be the Patriot Movement, Militia-men/survivalist gun-nut Anarchy cookbook, and they were ignored or snubbed by the media. The bretheren of Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols are now having their views embraced by "true conservatism" and broadcast nightly on Fox News.

In the movie the hero is offered two pills: red to learn the truth about the Matrix; blue to go on living blissfully ignorant to what is really going on.

The way to take our country back will short-circuit the Matrix we are living in. And it has to do with gun rights, state's rights and what I call the civilest war.

Along with the gun bill, Montana legislators are considering a resolution that affirms the 10th Amendment principle that the federal government only has those powers that are specifically given to it by the U.S. Constitution.

“The whole goal is to awaken the people so that we can return to a properly grounded republic,” Rep. Michael More, R-Gallatin Gateway and the Montana resolution’s sponsor, said at a House committee hearing Wednesday.

As many as fifteen other Legislatures have also been mulling resolutions that buck federal control in states such as New Hampshire, South Carolina, Missouri and Oklahoma.

Okay, you won't secede, but you're going to have your state governments declare by fiat that Federal Laws now no longer apply?

"The government is afraid of the guns people have because they have to have control of the people at all times. Once you take away the guns, you can do anything to the people. You give them an inch and they take a mile. I believe we are slowly turning into a socialist government. The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful, and the people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control"
-Tim McVeigh, interviewed by a student reporter at the Waco Siege of the Branch Davidian compound, 1993.

David Neiwert, an expert in the Patriot movement, had this to say about Glen Beck and the similarities between his paranoia and the militia's.

The hyper-normality is a kind of intentional camouflage. The Patriot movement, and militias in particular, were a very specific and intentional strategy adopted in the 1990s by the white supremacists and radical tax protesters of the American far right -- and the whole purpose of the strategy was to mainstream their belief systems and their agendas. The tactic was to adopt the appearance of normal, "red-blooded" Americanism as a way of pushing out the idea that their radical beliefs are "normal" too.

In the process, they often adopted time-worn "patriotic" sayings and symbols, such as the "Don't Tread On Me" flag Beck wears, as their own -- though with a much more menacing meaning. If you've seen that flag at an Aryan Nations compound, as I have, you never quite look at it the same.

This is why the meaning of Thomas Jefferson's quote above ["The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."] is quite different for them than it is for you and me. To all outward appearances, it is just an expression of avid patriotism. But to a Patriot movement follower, it means something potentially deadly.

These people have the paranoia of New World Order Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones, they have the gun lust of Ted Nugent, the global voice of Rupert Murdoch, the pride, irresponsibility, and stupidity of Jenny McCarthy, coupled with the eliminationist vitriol of David Duke and Fred Phelps. There may have enough chest-thumping bedwetters in their audience to keep a show on the air and make it a ratings hit, but they will never get back to 51% with shit like this.

Suck on it, wingnuts.


Erm, case in point, from today.