I think we’re all angry, but John Cory, writing for Reader Supported News, is specifically angry at political coverage in the media today, and the way the media’s own language and methodology for reporting the news has changed the way politics in Washington is conducted.

Cory’s essay sparks the same kind of passion and insight that made me found Not So Humble so many years ago now, and keep updating it every time there’s something worth calling out to the masses.

Because I really can’t cut him up, here’s the essay in its entirety, with urging from me to go see the original at Reader Supported News and to support their efforts to bring sanity to political news coverage on the web:

I am angry.

I’m tired of pundits and know-nothing media gasbags. I’m tired of snarky “inside politics” programming. I am sick of the bigotry and hatred of “birthers” and faux patriotic cranks and their GOP puppet masters. And I’m really pissed at the Democratic Party that confuses having a plate of limp noodles with having a spine.

I’m going to vomit if I hear the word “bipartisanship” one more time.

It was “bipartisanship” that gave us this activist conservative Supreme Court. A Supreme Court that says money is free speech and corporations are persons except when real people try to hold them accountable for their greed and poisonous ways.

“Bipartisanship” gave us the Patriot Act and FISA and illegal wiretaps and two wars and “free speech zones” and “no fly” lists. God bless bipartisan America.

I get nauseated every time the Senate explains how it takes a super majority to do anything for the American people. Tell you what Senate Bozos, if it takes 60 votes to pass legislation than it should take 60% of the popular vote to get you elected.

When some Tea Party crank says, “I want my country back,” I respond, “No madam, you want your country backward.”

When a deficit-mongering politician says, “How do we pay for this?” Why not ask, “What did you Republicans do with the surplus we Democrats left you?”

When a compassionate conservative says, “Healthcare reform is socialism,” why not answer, “No, sir it is the moral and American way to care for people.”

Yes, I can hear it now: “You are naïve and simplistic. These are complicated matters and require sophisticated solutions. Democrats are a big tent and strive for balance. But Republicans block our path at every turn. We are thinking and considering new ways to work in harmony with everyone.”

Bite me.

The only thing you get with “harmony” is a Barbershop Quartet.

Democrats stop being Republican Lite. Stop whining about that mean GOP and their nasty messaging. Grow a pair, get a message, get a bumper sticker and hang it out there. Get some strong vivid talking points.

G-O-P = Greed Over People.

Greed Kills – jobs, people and the economy.

Terrorism is Viagra for Republicans: The more fear – the more excited they get.

When a soldier dies for America, who dares ask if they were gay or straight?

Don’t act so shocked, Democratic Party. Have you looked around lately?

You’re losing the young vote that showed up to elect Obama. You’re losing those old enough to remember real Democrats. Why? Because you don’t talk to them any more than you talk to me. You talk at me. You talk around me. You talk down to me. You talk about me. You don’t talk with me. And you don’t inspire and you don’t champion and without that you are nothing more than an arbitrator of compromise and abdication.

You are facing a bully. Deal with it!

Republicans want the country backwards. They champion superstition over science because it entrenches ignorance and bigotry and captures the easily frightened.

Republicans treat the Constitution the way they treat the Bible, with selective interpretation and selective application to others while exempting themselves from judgment and accountability.

Republicans preach the gospel of fear because fear is darkness and darkness covers their theft of civil liberties and Constitutional principles.

For thirty years the Republican Party has claimed the mantel of law and order but now quake in dread of the American judicial system when putting terrorists on trial. How criminal is that?

Torture is illegal. Period. John Wayne and Jack Bauer were not our Founding Fathers – only in the make-believe world of Republican drugstore-patriots.

DADT needs to be repealed. Now. It is unconscionable, immoral, and disgusting.

Empathy, compassion and equality are not pejoratives. They are American values proven again and again throughout our history.

Republicans believe that bake-sales and cookies for chemotherapy best determine the value of life and healthcare because life is a pre-existing condition and the “free market” should not have to take on such a high risk – after all, no one gets out alive, so why should the corporation be left holding the bag? Unless of course the price is right.

Republicans believe that government should keep its hands off healthcare but should put its hands inside a woman’s body.

Republicans believe in small government – small enough to hold the “right” people and small enough to be owned and operated by the “right” people. And who are the “right” people? Them. Not you.

Democratic Party, DNC, DLCC, DSCC or whatever your acronym – I have only one question for you: Really?

You can’t win against these guys? You can’t get your message out against these guys? You can’t give America leadership against these guys?

Really?

[ I Am Angry ]
Source: Reader Supported News

Ah Texas. I’ve said it before, with the exception of Austin and a few other alcoves of sanity in the state, we may as well hand Texas back over to Mexico; they seem to want it more than we do. Kidding aside though, Texas manages to ram some really incredibly stupid and mind-boggling laws down the throats of its citizens, most of whom are so conservative or libertarian enough that they don’t really care because the rules will never apply to those with privilege – the moment they do, however, you can expect them to rally with their guns in the air outside of the state capital.

In this case, Texas’ new drinking laws give police the discretion to cuff you and lock you up regardless of where or how you’re drinking. This is how it works:

Late on a balmy Saturday night last June, six Fort Worth cops and two officers from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission went looking for trouble. They had just raided two Hispanic bars in an industrial stretch of town and nine detainees now sat in the paddy wagon (pdf), hands bound with plastic ties. The rest of the city’s bars would soon shut down. It seemed like the night was over, except for the paperwork. Then Sergeant Richard Morris had an idea. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s go to the Rainbow Lounge.”

A half-dozen police cruisers, an unmarked sedan, and the prisoner van slid to a stop in front of the Rainbow Lounge, Fort Worth’s newest gay club, at about 1:30 a.m. on June 28, 2009 — 40 years, almost down to the minute, after New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn with billy clubs and bullhorns. Inside the bar, the officers fanned out, grabbing and arresting six patrons for public intoxication. Benjamin Guttery, a 24-year-old Army vet, says an officer told him to put down his drink, then “bulldozed” him through the crowd to the paddy wagon but then let him go. “I’m 6′8″, 250 pounds, and I had just finished my second drink,” Guttery told a local reporter. “I might have had enough to have a loose tongue, but not a loose walk or anything like that.” Another man alleges that he was slammed against a wall, elbowed, and fell on the ground, landing him in intensive care for a week with bleeding in his brain. He was charged with public intoxication and assault.

That’s right – arrested for “public intoxication” inside of a bar. Only in Texas.

But here’s the clincher – these guys aren’t going to rootin’ tootin’ cowboy bars with blasting country music and confederate flags on the walls; they’re headed to gay bars and latino night spots, so they can make sure they round up, harass, and arrest the people they dislike the most: minorities and gays. It’s racial profiling at its finest, and the law enables them to do it.

The finest quote on the matter comes from a defense attourney in Dallas:

The public intoxication standard, backed by the Texas-based Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is so broad that you can be arrested on just a police officer’s hunch, without being given a Breathalyzer or field sobriety test. State courts have not only upheld the practice but expanded the definition of public intoxication to cover pretty much any situation, says Robert Guest, a criminal defense attorney in Dallas. “Having no standard allows the police to arrest whoever pisses them off and call it PI,” he says, adding, “If you have a violent, homophobic, or just an asshole of a cop and you give him the arbitrary power to arrest anyone for PI, you can expect violent, homophobic, and asshole-ic behavior.”

Yup – that sounds about right.

The point of these laws, and the intention I’m sure that Texas’ MADD arm had, was to keep drunken people off of the roads and streets where they can cause harm to themselves or others. But good intentions paving the road to hell and all that, the statute doesn’t include the appropriate checks and balances against the inevitable abuse of police power, especially in a state like Texas; deep in the heart of Red America.

There is hope though – as with any group of cockroaches (I love this metaphor, which is why I use it so often) as soon as you shine the light on them, they scatter and try to get away:

After community activists took to the streets and airwaves, Irving’s arrest rate for Hispanics plummeted. (Dallas and Irving are no longer part of the federal program.) In Fort Worth, protests over the Rainbow Lounge raid elicited a quick apology from the police chief and promises to review the PI policy. But the arrests have continued elsewhere, and no one is targeting the public intoxication law itself. Many people don’t care, Novello says, “because they can’t vicariously experience this injustice.” The Houston attorney puts it more bluntly. “As long as police are going out there fucking with the blacks and the Mexicans, until it hits the people with the power, they won’t care.”

And that brings me back to the original point. Until the white, privileged majorities are affected, there likely won’t be any real change here – and if there is real change because of the outcry, it’ll be a step-by-step struggle against that privileged majority who doesn’t see anything wrong with the rules only because they’re not the target of their enforcement.

[ Drinking While Brown (or Gay) in Texas Will Get You Arrested ]
Source: AlterNet

I’m with Marc Ash here – I still like President Obama, for a number of reasons, not just the ones he outlines here – personally, I think the President is doing an amazing job, especially against a disjointed Republican party that’s intent on just stopping any positive improvements he can make because they know the whole “saddle him with the problems and then blame him for all of it when he fails to fix it” isn’t going to work. He can fix it, he has the agenda, and he has the people behind him – they have to stop his activity and slow him down at all costs so they can continue to blame him for any negativity in the state of affairs.

President Obama also has to deal with a fractured Democratic party, a good portion of which is too conservative for its own good and unwilling to get in line behind some of America’s most needed priorities, like health care, jobs, and climate change. He’s got a lot of gridlock to deal with, and yet he manages to spend time pushing his agenda – and all without the help of his party, which is so busy defending itself.

Anyone who enrages Republican wing-nuts as effectively as Barack Obama can’t be all bad. In fairness, he does it without trying. In fact, just the opposite, he reaches out to them, which infuriates them all the more.

…

All of which can be argued to be “business as usual” for the American President. I guess what I like about Obama is that I get the sense that he would like to, for lack of a better word, change things. The missing link here is what kind of pressure is Obama facing behind closed doors? Even in the public realm we’re seeing unprecedented resistance to Obama’s attempts at reform, from conservative Republicans and Democrats alike.

I like the things Obama has tried to do: Health care reform, foreclosure mitigation, his comments on the outrageous decision by the Supreme Court’s five corporate lawyers to essentially duct-tape a for-sale sign to America’s electoral system. All of these things are a departure for an American President. He is indeed trying.

What concerns me are the things Obama has agreed to: An extension of the US Campaign in Afghanistan, an acceptance of the Bernanke-Geithner “Wall Street must be saved,” mantra, a don’t-ask don’t-tell policy on torture past and present.

I guess what redeems Obama for me is that he agrees to these things without losing his disdain for them. I wanted change, and in fairness change really hasn’t come yet. The intriguing thing is that Obama may actually want these changes too, and seems to. My impression is that he is meeting resistance in a number of significant forms.

Ash dives into the nature of the presidency and of how Obama may not have completely met up to the sweeping progressiveness that brought him into office (part of which I think is somewhat imagined frankly – I think a lot of progressives and liberals – myself included – made him into a super-liberal that he really never was, and never sold himself to be) but he’s pushing as hard or harder than anyone else could in this situation.

Ash also calls out a group that I’ve mentioned before too – fellow progressives.

The tea party crowd is merciless and relentless in their condemnation of Obama, but there is another group that stands just as ready to indict and convict Barack Obama: Progressives. Progressives are just as unyielding in their judgment of Obama, just as determined to derail, to thwart, to oppose, what they see as unacceptable governance. Progressive social objectives may be better reasoned and better argued, however, at the end of the day we may be seeing a Faustian synergy developing between two groups with diametrically opposed social agendas. Progressives and tea-baggers working on separate but parallel tracks to discredit the same president. Strange bedfellows indeed.

We now have a bona fide intellectual in the Oval Office – such things are rare. This is a man of understanding and insight, but his power to achieve change for good is not greater than the dedication of his supporters. Obama has to rally his supporters through a visible commitment to action, and his supporters must be willing to stand tall beside him.

[ I Still Like Obama ]
Source: Reader Supported News

And by “shocking” we mean “not shocking at all.”

Tana Ganeva, a fantastic writer at AlterNet and an enlightening follow on Twitter, has an interesting tidbit about the so-called “Tea Party” in the wake of their convention and their rabid display of force over the the CPAC event earlier this week. While the media loved all over CPAC and gave top billing to the radical right and its growing cancerous effect within the Republican Party, they were very busy in the halls of their convention proving exactly how unfit they are to lead anyone, much less their own movement, much less the national government as a whole.

Aside from some topics that I’ve mentioned already, specifically the fact that a lot of the Tea Party rage is your standard white male privilege protection, Ganeva points out that – predictably – the people who are so angry about the state of the government are the people benefiting from the old-boy, privileged system the most:

According to a new CNN poll (via TPM), a majority of respondents who had donated to a Tea Party group or participated in a Tea Party event were male, white, and identified as Protestant/Other Christian groups.

…So real, genuine Americans seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.

None of this should be especially surprising. Most poor people scraping by in terrible, low-paying jobs — or with no jobs — probably don’t have the time to don three-cornered hats and scream about communism.

But there has been an MSM tendency to trumpet the movement as an eruption of populist rage by those crushed in the financial crisis. “Populism” liberals just don’t grasp, of course, because they’re all elitist and stuff. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to reconsider our use of the word “elite” so it at least slightly correlates with things like money and privilege.

Yeah, that’s pretty sad, but again, entirely predictable. The media has been using the word “populist” in so many different ways that it’s difficult to really understand what the word means. When it was about enforcing new rules on Wall Street, the media termed it “populist rage.” Now again, when dealing with an extremely vocal but very certainly a minority group of rich white men trying to change their image to be “one of the people,” they’re using the term again when their agenda is anything but populist.

[ Shocking: Tea Partiers Mostly Rich, White, Christian Guys ]
Source: AlterNet

This article was originally posted at the Not So Humble AlterNet blog! Head over there for more political commentary and stories to compliment your reading here!

I caught wind of this article over at TruthDig and was immediately drawn to it – partially because I’ve been seeing yet another spate lately (and this happens from time to time) of people who sincerely believe that having the human decency to respect the wishes of others with regard to the labels and terms you apply to them is “political correctness,” a term that’s essentially spat out by folks who believe they should be allowed to say whatever they want about whomever they choose without having to face the consequences of their actions.

Mind you, these people tend to be largely white, middle-class, Christian males (although they’re not exclusively) who have a horrible case of exposed privilege – their privilege shows in spades, and it’s very clear that as soon as you hear someone dare say something like “you shouldn’t put so much power in words,” or “words have the meaning we give them,” and so on (statements which are philosophically true, but…) that they’re of the crowd who believes their personal speech and ignorance should never be impeded by the impact that those words have on others.

Holding this privileged mindset generally requires the kind of “willful ignorance” that Martin Luther King Jr thought was one of humanity’s most dangerous characteristics – the ability to ignore decades; in some cases centuries; of connotation, history, slander, and slur-use of words in order to “ironically” use them whenever they see fit and then place the responsibility of being offended or concerned at the use of the word on the person or group that’s been victimized by its use.

Essentially the silent follow up to “you shouldn’t put so much power in words” is “I can say whatever I want – the fact that you’re offended or it’s hate speech to you is your problem.” Again, this is a tactic from the privileged in order to continually – without blatantly – subjugate anyone different from them. As there usually isn’t a similar dagger-term for the privileged group, they can sit in a place of privilege and “reclaim” a word (see Sarah Silverman’s horrific – but honorable – attempt to reclaim the word “retard” at the TED conference that’s subsequently been defended by the haughty progressive white male who isn’t progressive because they believe in social justice, but because they believe in their own superiority and ability to resolve the world’s problems in their own image) because they – again from a place of superiority and privilege – feel like they’re doing the minority group a favor by liberating a slur-word from it’s negative connotations.

In the wise words of JSmooth, who does amazing pop-culture, music, and politics videos for IllDoctrine.com, “If you’re not the original target of an insult, you can’t reclaim it.”

That brings us to the Tea Party Convention – which as any of you who read Not So Humble know I loathe to call a “convention,” since it’s more a gaggle of political thuggery and name-calling more than it is an actual convention with sessions, working groups, ideas, and solutions to real-world problems – where good old boy himself Tom Tancredo decided to take pot-shots at the so called “cult of multiculturalism” by suggesting that the only reason the President got elected in his landslide win was because there’s no “test” or “gate” to keep people out of the polls.

That’s right – he’s advocating the return of Jim Crow-style poll tests and taxes. Now of course, he’s missing the point – that highly educated people tend to vote overwhelmingly progressive – but as much as “education” and “ignorance” is his guise, what he really wants to do is keep the poor, disinfranchised, and the minorities from the polls because they tend to vote against him and his interests. And people wonder why the Justice Department still monitors elections closely in southern states (those with histories of this kind of poll-gating) to this day.

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, writing for TruthDig, has some excellent points:

Tancredo is wrong. United States political history reveals our long-standing tradition in this area. In “Before the Mayflower,” Lerone Bennett Jr. recounts how literacy tests were first employed at the federal level as part of the immigration process in 1917. Southern state legislatures adopted literacy tests once African-Americans were granted citizenship rights under the 15th Amendment, as part of the voter registration process. As practiced, the literacy test became notorious for denying suffrage to African-Americans. Adopted by a number of Southern states, the tests were applied in a patently unfair manner and were used, along with the poll tax, to disfranchise many literate Southern blacks while allowing many illiterate Southern whites to vote.

The literacy test—combined with other discriminatory practices that kept African-Americans from attending schools, from particular modes of transportation, from attaining mortgages and from careers in public service—effectively disfranchised the vast majority of people of color in the South from the 1890s until after the middle of the 20th century. Southern states abandoned the literacy test only when forced to by federal legislation in the 1960s. This legalized discrimination caused suffering and turmoil for all parties involved, especially during the slavery period and the Jim and Jane Crow segregation era. Tancredo’s call for the return of literacy and civics tests suggests that those (black and brown) who voted for Obama are incapable of making informed political decisions and are influenced primarily by identity politics. Moreover, it denies the fact that the majority of voters who elected Obama were white.

Then there’s the issue of affirmative action. Like many other reactionary politicians, Tancredo has fallen victim to the misperception that affirmative action policies have done away with institutional racism and moved society beyond equal access to opportunity and into an era of “reverse racism” and discrimination. This has resulted in anti-affirmative action legislation such as California’s Proposition 209, Washington’s Initiative 200 and Ward Connerly’s various racial privacy initiatives.

During the presidential campaign, Obama responded to this issue in his “A More Perfect Union” speech when he stated: “… we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.” This misperception that Obama is an unqualified leader who benefited unreasonably from such legislation allows many to assert that a heightened focus on diversity is tantamount to a case of the emperor’s new clothes. Also wrong. Statistics on affirmative action show that white women, such as Tea Party Convention keynote speaker Sarah Palin, have been its greatest beneficiaries, while unemployment rates for African-Americans and Latinos, 15.7 percent and 13.1 percent respectively, rival those experienced by these groups during the Great Depression.

As usual, the conservative right and the psuedo-center libertarians are more than ready to shoot themselves in the foot and bury everyone else because of a misguided interpretation of a few pieces of fiction by Ayn Rand about some kind of inherent social equality that exists when you oh-so-conveniently ignore the fact that it simple doesn’t.

I’ll let Marcia sum it up, since she brings it back around to the issue of privilege, which is near and dear to my heart:

Beneath this fiery rhetoric, Tancredo is calling for tea partiers to retain the twin social privileges of being in the company of people like themselves while avoiding spending time with people they’ve been trained to mistrust. These social privileges are, of course, only corollaries to the tea party’s more blatant call to retain economic interests that, according to UCLA law professor Cheryl I. Harris, the law has established and protected through its construction of white identity. In her article “Whiteness as Property,” Harris explains that the legal construction of whiteness defined and affirmed who is white, what benefits and privileges whites enjoy and what entitlements to property arise from their status. Harris’ work reminds us that we must pay attention to claims like Tancredo’s because they show how whiteness can be used strategically as identity, status and property depending on situation and goal. Here’s a quick translation of Tancredo’s message: Privilege needs protecting.

They’re very interested in protecting their privilege, in keeping the veil right over their eyes. How interested are we in removing it?

Now if this can form into anything like a cohesive movement, I’ll be a very very happy man. It’s no surprise that there’s some progressive rage to match. Personally, my progressive rage manifests because I see the success that the teabaggers are having derailing politics and turning it into an angry, frothing shouting match where the loudest (but most uneducated and ignorant) wind up winning because no one takes them seriously. I was worried about that trend when these folks started burning effigies of politicians and other people outside of their offices, and when I see cameras trolling their crowds for opinions and coming away with blatantly false, ignorant, racist, hate-filled rhetoric.

Remember, these are the forces that are sending these people to the polls – racism, hatred, ignorance. When I use my metaphor of shining a light on the cockroaches in order to make them scurry, I mean it – that’s the only way to deal with groups and people like this – expose them for what they are. And sometimes, if that means you have to meet them with some of their own guerilla, crowd-sourcing tactics, that’s what you have to do. And I’m not alone in that perspective:

n the heels of the lightly attended over-hyped “Tea Party Convention” in Nashville, progressives are preparing to respond with a movement of their own. The “Brownbaggers” will be showing up in front of Congressional offices to demand “healthcare not warfare.”

According to a press release from AfterDowningStreet.org: “On February 17th, Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) will be joined by CODEPINK, AfterDowningStreet, Democrats.com, the California Nurses Assn./National Nurses United, and United for Peace and Justice in holding brownbag vigils outside (or inside) at least 36 Congress members’ offices.

Brownbaggers are demanding commitments to vote against more money for war. Slogans on their posters include: “Healthcare NOT Warfare,” “Corporations out of Politics,” “Bailout Main Street not Wall Street” and “Brownbaggers not Teabaggers.”

PDA Executive Director Tim Carpenter said, “We have to choose between jobs and wars. The American people are on one side, but our so-called representatives in Congress are on the other. The Supreme Court is busy increasing corporate control of our elected officials. We need to be busy enforcing the people’s control before it is too late.”

Amen, brother.

[ Teabaggers Meet the Brownbaggers ]
Source: Reader Supported News

Good old white privilege – it rears its head in so many ways. This time, at the so-called Tea Party Convention (hardly a convention, more like a Klan rally or a gathering of thugs with political ideologies – and I say that clearly; the Tea Party can pretend they’re a real party or a real option as much as they like, but they are nothing more than a group of political thugs masquerading as a group with an agenda – their “agenda” is really “burn it all down.” They are not a political party, they have no platform, they have no plans for America.) Tom Tancredo, mister “proud to be a racist,” makes the claim that the only reason Barack Obama was elected was because, “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country,” as he put it.

Funny, that’s a lot like what progressives said when George W. Bush got elected the second time, but the difference here is that it’s not just dismissable rage, this is actually white supremacist, racist rage bubbling furiously. The Teabaggers honestly believe that Black people, Latinos, and everyone else who doesn’t believe and think the way that they do is somehow idiotic and should be stripped of the right to vote so they’re able to take the reins of power.

…and they call Democrats socialist? They try to tie President Obama with Nazis? Oh to look into the abyss and see yourself staring back in the darkness, eh Teabaggers?

Seriously – these folks are claiming that America needs poll taxes and poll tests like the kind that were used in the pre-Civil Rights years to keep Black Americans – who had the right to vote – away from the polls, intimidate them so they wouldn’t vote, or somehow find a way to disqualify their vote so Republicans managed to hold their majorities in the South.

The simmering movement is the whitest phenomenon on the national scene, evident not just in the millions of Caucasians committed to its cause, but in the bedrock beliefs stirring its anti-government contempt.

How fitting, therefore, that Sarah Palin keynote the movement’s first organized confab. Neglected in all the fevered conversation around the movement’s meteoric rise, and Palin’s selection, is any useful reflection on what the cause and this figurehead stand for: white racial resentment. Packed beneath her beehive is a spitfire brew of optimistic, yet aggrieved, whiteness. Palin embodies a bizarre, sometimes alluring, combination of triumph and complaint that many Caucasian Tea Partiers identify with through and through.

Deciphering the racial codes on the movement’s ubiquitous placards does not require a doctorate in semiotics. One popular sign shows the president’s face and a caption: “Undocumented worker.” Another combines Obama’s image with this caption: “The Zoo Has an African Lion and the White House Has a Lyin’ African!”

Oh yes – if you had any doubt that these folks are racist, and that these folks are the cancer that desperately needs to be excised from the Republican Party, read on:

Denouncing government assistance and free school lunches at a town hall meeting in late January, South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer, a Tea Party supporter, said: “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.”

At a Tea Party rally in Boone County, Kentucky (roughly 92 percent non-Hispanic white), Congressman Geoff Davis called cap-and-trade legislation “economic colonization of the hardworking states that produce the energy, the food, and the manufactured goods of the heartland, to take that and pay for social programs in the large coastal states.” In Tea Party-speak, “heartland” often means “white” — what Palin calls “the real America” — while “coastal state” means the urbanized communities that teem with racial minorities, doubling as “gateway states” for Latino immigrants.

“Immigrants are 21 percent of the uninsured, but only 7 percent of the population. This means white folks on Medicare or headed there will see benefits curtailed, while new arrivals from the Third World, whence almost all immigrants come, get taxpayer-subsidized health insurance,” gripes Patrick Buchanan on his blog. “Any wonder why all those Tea Party and town-hall protests seem to be made up of angry white folks?”

How about a dose of truth to round us out, eh?

The bar-stool version of the Tea Party canard goes like this: Why should we, self-sufficient small-town whites, pay taxes to support all those welfare queens, food stamp cheats and Medicaid layabouts in the big cities and coastal states? The media’s version, parroted by Palin and other Fox talking heads, commiserates with Americans in the heartland, christened “the average taxpayer,” for unjustly having to subsidize ethnic enclaves that mooch off the national treasury.

Well, not so fast. A disproportionately high share of our federal government’s tax income comes from racially diverse, immigrant-rich, urbanized states, including California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts; not from extremely homogeneous, conservative, anti-tax strongholds like Idaho, Montana, Utah, the Dakotas and Wyoming.

All of this is not to say that any given rank-and-file member of the movement personally despises racial minorities. Rather, the Tea Party ethos is a direct descendant of the anti-tax segregationist politics that swept the South in the 1950s and ’60s.

There we go. As if anyone with half a mind really needed any additional proof that the Teabaggers are not just maliciously misinformed, they’re actually taking great lengths to perpetuate and maintain their stupidity in the face of overwhelming evidence. They are, quite simply, proof of how far hatred can take you.

[ White Racial Resentment Bubbles Under the Surface of the Tea Party Movement ]
Source: AlterNet

I’ve mentioned before that Glenn Beck is a dangerous man (I’ve been talking about him since he got his CNN post, the one that he thankfully no longer has), and not for the reasons that you might think – not because he’s factually incorrect and manages to spew forth the kind of fecal works of fiction that are dangerous to anyone who might happen to be paying attention (seriously, the IQ of people must go down when listening to his ranting, hyperbolistic, hysterial monologues, like the crazy guy in the street who starts shouting and everyone just looks at quietly hoping he’ll just go away) but because he’s funded and heeled by a political organization that’s posing as a media outlet and news organization.

Most recent on the ridiculous list? Glenn Beck’s pompous, self-important “documentary:”

When Glenn Beck aired an hour-long documentary titled “Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free or Die” last Friday, it marked a major turning point in the annals of television.

The film, narrated by Beck himself, purported to reveal “really disturbing and shocking stuff,” specifically the “dirty little secret” that progressive political beliefs led inexorably to “some of the most horrifying outcomes in history.” With help from interview subjects like Jonah Goldberg, author of the book Liberal Fascism, Beck linked the progressive political movement to such nightmares as China’s Cultural Revolution and Hitler’s gas chambers. Beck alternated images of the emaciated, tortured bodies of the victims he blamed on progressivism with archival footage of Goebbels, Stalin and Mao.

Behold, America, the future of conservative media.

There was a time when such stunningly irresponsible and historically dubious assertions were the province of isolated individuals holding homemade signs at rallies — but no longer. “The Revolutionary Holocaust” was watched by nearly four million Americans. And it was broadcast by one of the world’s largest media conglomerates, News Corporation, which made no effort to disassociate itself from the program’s content.

You hear that? Normally that last bit is where the media company says something like “the opinions expressed here are solely those of XXXXX person and not representative of YYYYY company or its partners,” etc, etc. News Corp decided “you know what? that’s not necessary – they’re pretty much our opinions too.”

This is where the FCC needs to step in. There are regulations for this type of media abuse, and they need to be levvied against News Corp. For a group of people who like to whinge and whine so much about Nazi-ism and rewrite history so their own ills and sins are washed away and anyone they disagree with is somehow painted as “the bad guy,” they have no idea how quickly they walk down the same path as those they’re claiming to protect the American people against.

“Even if you think I’m wildly irresponsible,” Beck said a few weeks ago, “you have to know that News Corp. is not stupid. It’s a company worth billions of dollars. Do you really think this corporation would risk everything on an irresponsible crazy guy?”

Oh yes. Yes they would. Without hesitation, and that’s why they pay you so much, Beck.

[ Glenn Beck Assails Obama and Progressives with Holocaust Imagery ]
Source: AlterNet

Why is it that when the Republicans want to take someone on, they can never manage to do it cleanly and in front of the American people over the issues they care about, and instead resort to things like breaking in to someone’s office or dressing up like a pimp to try and deceive someone gullible enough to believe they’re honest? I mean really.

No, seriously – the guy who dressed up like a pimp and went around from ACORN office to ACORN office in an attempt to get someone gullible or silly enough to take them seriously enough to offer them tax advice that naturally would be illegal because of their illegal profession, and then subsequently somehow managed to light a firestorm over it (for some reason this is like a late night infomercial salesman managing to find someone stupid enough to fall for their prank and then everyone gets up in arms about the person who fell for it and not the prank) got himself busted trying to play secret agent and breaking into Loiusiana Senator Mary Landrieu’s office.

James O’Keefe, the snot-nosed thug in question (who likely wouldn’t last an hour in jail if it weren’t for his well heeled and well-connected friends/parents who likely bailed him out immediately) and a couple of his buddies trying to pose as telephone repairmen – without proper ID or clearance of course – apparently tried to break into the office and tap Senator Landrieu’s phone. For what? Who knows, but, as the media is missing, that’s not the important question. The important question here is why the conservative right is acting like this, and why they’re fostering this kind of scorched earth “ends justify the means” politicking by breaking the law – instead of simply coming to the table?

You can do inflammatory documentaries without circus acts and scare tactics and pseudo-secret agent antics. The trick is to use this little thing called evidence and investigation: two things O’Keefe has clearly never heard of.

[ ACORN Smear Journalist Arrested for Alleged Attempt to Bug Sen. Mary Landrieu’s Office ]
Source: AlterNet

[ Fake ACORN Pimp Arrested in Attempt to Bug Senate Office ]
Source: NewsWeek

Joshua Holland, writing for AlterNet, strikes gold again with another dissection of how the right-wing has gone from devouring itself to devouring everyone around it. Back in early 2008 and 2009 we were collectively appalled at the way the right-wing was destroying itself, and the battle that was raging within – the fiscal conservatives and the social conservatives and the wingnuts on the fringe, and how they were all competing for control over the direction of the party. Well guess who won: the wing-nuts on the fringe – mostly by allying themselves with the social conservatives. Fiscal conservatives, who allow themselves to be blinded by any mention of “smaller government,” follow right along in the scorched-earth policies of the far-right, and help get them elected.

But that battle is over – it’s clear that the wingnuts and the teabaggers are in control of the GOP, and they won’t stop until they’re back on top and ready to shove another mouthful of neocon-style political soup right down our throats along with the water they’ll board us with. Now it’s time to turn our attention to the Democrats who are letting this happen, and get them back in line, and that’s what Holland does.

I always say that generalized griping about “the Democrats” is a waste of time. It seems to me that there are around 10 Democratic senators and maybe 50 members of the House who are far to the right of “moderate” by any stretch of the imagination. They are conservatives, and they’ve obstructed their own party’s moderately progressive proposals — the very same proposals they ran and won on — at every turn, right from the beginning.

Let me be clear before continuing: there’s buckets of blame to go around, and it would be oversimplifying to suggest that it’s all on the conservadems. But I think they deserve the most responsibility for the Democrats’ inability to pass the key pieces of “change” they promised.

Holland is doing the right thing here – it’s one thing to whine and complain about “Democrats” and claim they’re “just like the other folks,” and so on – that’s too easy, and doesn’t address the real obstacles to change. Holland calls them out by name:

The Nelson Twins, Evan Bayh, Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu, Kent Conrad, Claire McCaskill, Jim Webb and Blanche Lincoln in the Senate, and all but 4 or 5 of the Blue Dogs in the House have been horror shows, and the entire party has had to appease them by watering down its proposals at every turn, demoralizing the Democratic base in the process and leading of course to Scott Brown and the possible — perhaps probable — end of the road for health-care reform.

Max Baucus dragged out the process for months in his committee while entertaining all kinds of Republican amendments and flirting with pathetic futility with Olympia Snowe’s vote. Reps like Joe Baca and Jim Marshall held pressers to spew forth Fox News-worthy talking points against “socialized medicine.” Joe Lieberman not only went on Fox news to oppose anything even vaguely progressive, he also repeatedly, almost comically pulled the ball out from under Harry Reid’s foot every time Reid thought he was going to finally kick that field-goal.

And they are wholly responsible for the Dems’ almost unbelievable inability to overn with huge majorities in both chambers of Congress — they are why real Democrats (actual moderates included) remain in the minority. Do the math — 59 minus 10 equals 49, a Senate minority.

Their opposition would be wise to start raising money now – there’s no way these folks will get re-elected. The real hope for America rests with populist, progressive candidates who can intelligently sell their message to the American people, without waffling over whether they’re conservative enough to keep their jobs or progressive enough to keep their titles.

[ Conservatives Made the GOP Toxic and Now They're Killing the Democratic Party ]
Source: AlterNet