Much love for The Far Left Side, a political comic that’s worth reading if you’re of the progressive political persuasion, and much thanks to Papamoka Straight Talk, one of my favorite political blogs with attitude and biting commentary.

It’s sad, but true – expect that the costs of waging political war incurred by corporate America to make sure their friends get elected (and make no mistake, those friends are not friends of the American people, they’re friends of the American CEO) will be passed directly on to the American consumer. When Exxon and Shell need to raise money to fight political candidates who advocate a clean environment and breathable air and drinkable water, they’ll pass that cost right along to you and I to make sure that their dirty air and filthy water friends get into office – their interests will be not only in poisoning the planet to make a buck, but in making sure they make that buck back out of your and my wallets.

Writing for the Buffalo Beast, Michael Roddy and Ian Murphy have an excellent rundown on some of the planet’s worst enemies right now – people who would make excellent villains in an episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers – and while I’m being a little sarcastic, these are folks who not only put their own heads in the sand to the damage they, their businesses, and their interests do to the environment and the health of the planet, they also spend tons of money to make sure that you put your head in the sand and keep it there.

What makes the story even better is that The Beast comes up with some scenarios that would be poetic justice for these folks as well. Here are a few of my favorites:

George Will, Columnist

Misdeeds: The errors Will has committed to print over the years are both more numerous and irresponsible than his bow tie collection, for which he also feels no remorse. He claimed in a February 2009 Washington Post column that “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” The Center responded: “We do not know where George Will is getting his information… global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979.”

Corporate teats: The Republican Party, a catchall for corporate polluters, his wife, rapacious swine in general, and anyone who cites Ronald Reagan to justify his massive carbon footprint.

Most egregious lie: “So the column accurately reported what the Center had reported.” Incredibly, the Post backed him up.

Comeuppance: Locked in a large freezer, strapped to a chair directly under a ten-foot icicle and made to write a column. The room’s climate is controlled by a computer program, which checks his column for scientific veracity. The temperature goes down when Will’s right and up when he’s wrong. He either freezes to death or the icicle falls and splits his head open. It’s up to him.

…

James Inhofe, Senator from Oklahoma

Misdeeds: Inhofe thinks that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind,” yet somehow served as the Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee from ‘03 to ‘07. Once called Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton to testify as a key witness. Believes that “scientific consensus” on climate change is a conspiracy perpetrated by greedy scientists to score grant money. Went to Copenhagen as the leader of the Climate Truth Squad, earning big laughs from overseas reporters. Lifetime recipient of Twelve Dumbest Members of Congress award.

Corporate teats: Seven figures from Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco Phillips and anyone willing to pay for his “campaign expenses.”

Most egregious lie: “You know, God’s still up there. We’re now going through a cooling spell.”

Comeuppance: Locked in an outhouse and set on fire.

…

Fred Singer, University of Virginia

Misdeeds: For the last 60 years, Singer’s pimped his PhD credentials to any and every industry in need of phony science. He’s slithered seamlessly from denying that smoking causes cancer to saying that DDT is harmless to “raising questions about and undercutting the ‘prevailing scientific wisdom’” of climate change. Glacier data he later attributed to his wife was denounced as “complete bullshit” by the Glacier Monitoring Service.

Corporate teats: Exxon Mobil, Shell, Sun Oil, Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Petroleum Institute and the Heartland Institute.

Most egregious lie: “55% of glaciers have gained mass in the last 30 years.”

Comeuppance: While addressing yet another denier conference in 2012, the pressure created by an undetected tumor in Singer’s brain triggers an anomalous episode of schizophasia, causing his entire speech to spew forth as an incoherent word salad. Instead of the audience stopping Singer and urging him to seek the immediate medical attention he so obviously needs, they offer him a thunderous standing ovation and an invitation to speak again next year.

There’s so much more hilarity where that came from, too.

[ THE BEAST 15 Most Heinous Climate Villains ]
Source: The Buffalo Beast

Oh Michael Steele – I can hardly believe you used to be the Lieutenant Governor of my state. Or that your former boss is actually seriously considering another run at the Governorship of my state. All of that aside though, it’s well known that the GOP as a party doesn’t exactly understand or embrace the whole technology thing – these are the folks who don’t understand net neutrality and why it’s important (and just views it as “more regulation,” which they’re unilaterally against) and are quick to bash the “hollywood elite” when it comes to things like climate change or social injustice but ready to take the record industry or the movie industry’s side when it comes to wanting to “remotely disable” people’s computers that may potentially have pirated material on them.

But back to point, good old Michael Steele – now the Chair of the Republican party (who is completely disrespected by his own ranks) has himself a little problem. I’ll let my friend Tana Ganeva, writing for AlterNet, explain what happened:

his week, the RNC tried to make the Internet conservative. It was not a resounding success. Instead, a series of hilarious and fairly predictable misfortunes sent a tiny, animated Michael Steele on a wild ride to a bunch of porn, bondage and Communist websites. Here’s what happened, from Wired:

As part of its new media strategy, the Republican party launched a new site called GOP.am on Monday. It’s a URL shortener designed to make it easy for conservative web surfers to exchange links to web pages.

Pranksters almost immediately began using the service to link to controversial or ironically intended websites, such as the official site of the American Communist Party, a bondage website and a webpage advertising a sex toy in the likeness of Barack Obama. GOP.am apparently started blocking such links at some point Tuesday morning, and the GOP.am homepage was taken offline.

This story was picked up by a number of tech outlets, including some that I’m pretty familiar with, and Wired, whose text is used above. The really entertaining part of this is that it shows that the GOP isn’t just not familiar with basic Web services and technology, but that they don’t think to demo or beta test their own services before they rush to get them out and claim that they’re “all about those interwebs or whatever the young folk call it these days.”

I only wish this had happened during an election cycle, to point out exactly how bad they are, on the whole. There’s a reason why a lot of right-wing news blogs look like they’re straight out of 1994, and there’s a reason Drudge can’t be bothered to make his site look anything like a legitimate news site. (other than the fact that it isn’t)

[ GOP Tech Tragedy Sends Michael Steele on Wild Porn, Bondage, Commie Ride ]
Source: AlterNet

I’m actually pretty tired of the hubub running about over Sarah Palin – like others have said, there’s a lot of focus on the messenger here that’s detracting from the lunacy of the message – we’re all so focused on beating up Sarah Palin for being a nutjob – and don’t get me wrong, she is – that we’re missing the idiocy of the message and the ideology that she represents in the far-right – an ideology that a dangerous number of gun-toting, moose-shooting, global-warming-denying, high-on-revolver-oil people actually represent. It’s terrifying, and we as a progressive community should be leveling our sights (lot of gun puns today, sorry) on the mindset and the masses behind her. The fringe right isn’t like a snake (as much as they might seem to be) – you can’t cut off their head and the rest simply dies.

But to that end, and to prove that point, it’s true that the rest of America simply doesn’t like Sarah Palin – and yet her book is a New York Times bestseller. It’s not that there’s anything good in there – there really isn’t – it’s that the combination of idiocy that she represents and the forces behind her are catapulting her to a kind of moronic success that we’d only seen in the George W Bush political years:

Really, Palin should be celebrating the America-hating, liberal media that keep that stupid thing in the news. Especially since Palin’s love is kind of unrequited. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, a majority of Americans don’t like her that much, and very few would vote for her if she absurdly ran for President.

The poll reveals that 52 percent see the former governor in unfavorable terms. Only 9 percent say they would definitely vote for her if she were a candidate for President in 2012. 53 percent said they would definitely not vote for her. According to the Washington-Post/ABC analysis of the poll, about half as many Americans said they would definitely not vote for John McCain in Spring 2006.

There’s a lesson in this for Palin and the GOP; that lesson is obviously that only 9 percent of Americans really love America.

Thus sayeth Tana Ganeva, AlterNet editor. It’s absolutely true, and while it’s a terrible opportunity to bring up Sarah Palin, it’s a great opportunity to sit with some of the more sensible minds in the progressive community and say “let’s stop attacking her, and let’s move on to what she stands for and the ignorance that is the bedrock of her and her followers’ ideologies.”

[ Guess What? Americans Don't Like Sarah Palin ]
Source: AlterNet

The problem with a figure as moronic, ignoble, illiterate, and self-entitled as Sarah Palin is that as much as you think that in any good meritocracy a person like her would simply fade into the background, ridiculed for their own ignorance and stupidity, they won’t. She’s the cockroach of American politics: she won’t die, and every time you turn the light on her she scurries off under the closest object where she won’t be held accountable for her actions in the dark.

So this week Palin is releasing her memoir – a tome that Rush Limbaugh says is the finest policy book he’s ever read, which I wouldn’t be too surprised to hear from a drug-addled sex offender and stalker – a memoir of what, I’m not sure though; she has no political career to speak of even including her incredibly unremarkable term as Alaska’s governor. Perhaps readers will delight in her horrible metaphors or stories of seeing Russia from her porch or mayhap be treated to explanations of what she really meant every time she opened her mouth in public – that should be enough to fill a couple of books.

But alas, she’s off and running again, speaking out loud and opening her mouth to which a avalanche of falsehoods have emerged:

Sarah Palin’s heavily publicized book tour begins in earnest this Monday, but weeks before, her ghostwritten memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, had already vaulted into the number one position at Amazon. Warming up for a tour that will take her across Middle America in a bus, Palin tested her lines in a November 7th speech before a crowd of 5,000 anti-abortion activists in Wisconsin. She promptly cited an urban legend as a “disturbing trend,” claiming the Treasury Department had moved the phrase “In God We Trust” from presidential dollar coins. (The rumor most likely originated with a 2006 story on the far-right website WorldNetDaily.)

In fact, a suggested alteration in its position on the coin was shot down in 2007 after pressure from Democratic Senator Robert Byrd. Nonetheless, Palin did not hesitate to take up this “controversy,” however false, since it conveniently pits a tyrannical, God-destroying, secular big government against humble God-fearing folk. In doing so, of course, she presented herself as this nation’s leading defender of the faith.

What’s really funny is that Sarah Palin demonstrates more of the biblical characteristics of the anti-christ than the evangelicals would like to pin on any progressive leader, including President Obama. Regardless, all Palin has to do is utter a lie here or there, make up some offensive banter at one time or another, and the frothing-mouth conservative base who would rather pull out their torches and pitchforks and go set up a burning cross on someone’s lawn than pick up a newspaper or a book are ready and waiting at her side, ready to do her bidding.

This is the true danger she represents: not a shift in policy and American politics, not in a change that can sweep all Americans – she represents an emergent thuggish far-right, ready to bend not only their own party but anyone else to their will, to subjugate the rest of America to fit into their own narrowly conceived concepts of what they believe is right and wrong, what they believe is justice, and what they believe is freedom. There will be no room for alternate views or interpretations, and their hypocracies will rule.

Immature collections of cells will be guarded as precious life, but single-mothers with those children will be told there is no room for them at the inn, because no one wanted to pay taxes for a social safety net. Women will be told their place is in the kitchen and not in the workplace, and if they do choose to enter the workplace that 80-cents on the dollar should be enough for them and besides, don’t they have a man to support them anyway? Racism will be labeled freely as a figment of the imaginations of minorities, but if someone dares celebrate Black History month someone will, foolish and unaware of their own privilege, try to strike the cirriculum from the record because there’s no such “white history month.” This is the world that Palin and her vocal evangelical minority would see us live in.

And it’s up to all of us, not just progressives, but those who have any real view of freedom and equal justice in this country, to stand against them – they may be loud, but they have no true power other than the power the rest of us allow them to exert and bully us with.

[ Sarah Palin Rules the GOP -- And She Will Destroy It ]
Source: AlterNet

When the White House claimed that Fox News wasn’t a news organization, and at best was an “arm of the Republican party,” I cheered. Anyone who’s watched Fox News at any time in the past several years knows full well that Fox News is anything but news and is essentially nothing more than a video version of many right-wing talk radio stations that claim to “say what everyone is thinking” and “not be a part of the liberal media” (you know, that liberal media that depends on things like facts and journalistic integrity) so the call won’t come as any surprise.

But some conservatives whined and complained that the White House was unfairly targeting Fox News, and in some cases accused them of trying to gag the news organization for trying to speak truth to power (you know, the same thing that every other news organization was stifled doing during the Bush Presidency). Now those of us in the reality-based community know that’s ludicrous, but Adele Stan, writing for AlterNet, has 8 great reasons why Fox News isn’t News at all:

Even before Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, Rupert Murdoch had declared war on him via the personalities of Fox News Channel, a subsidiary of Murdoch’s media conglomerate, News Corp.

Since Obama’s election, the cable channel’s hosts and paid analysts have launched a full frontal assault on the president, smearing his nominees, calling him a racist and suggesting that his administration was trying to persuade disabled veterans to off themselves.

Now the fearmongers at Fox are crying foul since the president and his aides declared Fox not to be a news organization. Earlier this month, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn called Fox an “arm” of the Republican Party. Obama went even further, suggesting this week that Fox “is operating basically as a talk-radio format,” and we know what that means: A format in which the most provocative opinions dominate the discourse and facts are optional.

Yet that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Setting Fox apart from the two other cable news networks is its ownership by a corporation whose CEO and major shareholder is a mogul with an ideological agenda — who operates his News Channel as a propaganda machine for his anti-government cause.

What follows is a primer on Rupert Murdoch and why you should be very wary when he moves in on your favorite media outlet, but let’s get to the reasons:

1. Glenn Beck, the community organizer
2. Fox’s alliance with the corporate-funded astroturf group Americans for Prosperity
3. On-air fundraising for Republican PACs
4. Bill O’Reilly, stalker of those whose opinions he doesn’t like
5. Sunday talk-show host who promotes Republican falsehoods
6. Fox News anchors, show hosts and pundits parrot GOP press releases, or just make up stuff
7. Fox News hosts urge viewers to join a particular political group
8. Glenn Beck, deranged inventor of paranoid conspiracies

Yes, I know Glenn Beck appears twice, but the full descriptions of each are more than worth reading.

[ 8 Reasons Fox Is Not a News Organization ]
Source: AlterNet

The US Chamber of Commerce – a body so corrupt and out of touch not only with the needs of the communities of whom their member businesses serve but the needs of those businesses themselves – has launched a public relations campaign designed to kill not only upcoming health care legislation but also climate and clean energy legislation that’s pending in the Senate. Some have even gone so far as to describe the campaign as “waging war on the White House.”

Between wanting to kill health care legislation that will reduce employer costs and thus save the businesses that are members of the chamber millions of dollars and result in happier, healthier employees and wanting to put climate change “on trial” a la Scopes in an attempt to disprove climate change with anecdotal evidence and peer pressure (since science isn’t on their side and sorry, but “reasonable doubt” doesn’t fly when you’re talking about scientific evidence), the chamber has seen members leaving its board and its membership lists left and right.

How out of touch is the chamber?

The Chamber’s campaign originally started out as an attack against financial regulation–until the Chamber found out how strongly U.S. taxpayers support reining in Big Banks and the financial industry’s widespread shady practices. So the Chamber conveniently changed the packaging to purportedly focus on jobs, which in fact the American people desperately need.
Look at who accompanied the Chamber suits while they were announcing their Orweillian-named “free enterprise campaign.” As Sam Stein reported here:

Many of the individuals featured on Wednesday are long-standing donors to Republican candidates and groups that have fought efforts to enhance regulation. And, in one case, the business leader appearing alongside [Thomas] Donohue to decry the interference of government in the market place received business through the benefit of government contracts.

Yet, while millions of America’s workers struggle to find jobs in an economy where there are more than six workers searching for every one job, the Chamber repeatedly opposed extending unemployment insurance. Can’t have government interference in the marketplace, after all. Or aid to jobless workers. The same workers the Chamber’s smoke-and-mirrors campaign is supposed to be all about.

The Chamber also is joining with Big Banks and financial giants to try and kill a proposed agency that would protect U.S. consumers from being preyed upon by unscrupulous banks, mortgage lenders and many of the same financial institutions that helped create our nation’s economic disaster. The Obama administration’s pr oposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which this week is being considered in the House Financial Services Committee, would regulate products such as credit cards and home loans, while ensuring the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission oversaw the $450 trillion “derivatives” market that sunk the world economy.

The Chamber is spending $2 million in attack ads, claiming that the new agency would hamstring even your local butcher from extending you credit for a week. It’s the same sorry effort at deception and outright lies that the health insurance industry now is trying to pull in the debate over health care reform. Tell enough lies and hope someone believes you.
As President Obama said in response to the Chamber’s distortion:

“We’ve made clear that only businesses that offer financial services would be affected by this agency. I don’t know how many of your butchers are offering financial services,” Obama said to laughter.

The Chamber is so twisted up in deception it seems unable to even provide accurate membership numbers. Writing in Mother Jones this week, David Corn points to a big discrepancy between the Chamber’s public membership numbers and reality.

In testimony before Congress, statements to the press, and on its website, the Chamber claims to represent “3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions.” In reality, the number is probably closer to 200,000.

Not sure if the 200,000 includes Apple Inc., Pacific Gas & Electric and the other giant corporations that recently have pulled their membership from the Chamber because of its draconian stand on climate change.

Ah, now there’s the rub: the chamber has a vested interest in opposing legislation that’s beneficial to both its members and the nation as a whole that very well may make it more difficult for them to stand in front and represent their members as the only body that can influence positive change in their direction. Add to this the fact that they’ve always been a Republican-friendly organization and you have a body that will oppose even the most business-friendly and beneficial practices and policies if they don’t come from their preferred side of the aisle. Propose a change, and they roll out their usual scare tactic: “that’ll cost jobs,” when in reality it either won’t if they decide it doesn’t have to.

And what happens to the American people in the process? The same thing that always happens when you let boardrooms and CEOs determine public policy: they walk away with the big bucks and the American people are left in the gutter, jobless and living unemployment check to unemployment check until another CEO has a need for someone to make them richer.

[ The Chamber Of Commerce's Jobs Deception Campaign ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future (and The Huffington Post)

Just a short blurb in the way it was presented, from the Media Matters for America blog:

And it’s a big jump, too, according to the AP:

An Associated Press-GfK poll says 56 percent of those surveyed in the past week approve of Obama’s job performance, up from 50 percent in September. It’s the first time since he took office in January that his rating has gone up.

We’ll see how much media play this poll gets, and then try to compare that coverage to how we think an AP poll reporting a sharp drop for Obama would play inside the Beltway right now. (Hint: that coverage would be significant.)

That’s not an insubstantial amount, frankly. Whether it’s because he’s putting feet to pavement to tackle more issues and sell health care legislation, or whether it’s because the American people are ready to place the blame for a number of the Congressional gridlocks squarely where it’s due, that’s a pretty big jump and reflects a collective exhale.

But the bigger question is why, after hearing for months how his approval ratings have slipped (but are still remarkably high for a president in the first year of his first term, historically) are we not hearing about this? Likely because the media doesn’t have a single item they can tie it to: whether it’s new negotiations with Iran, North Korea coming back to the bargaining table, the spectre of H1N1 being tempered with vaccines being made available safley at a historically rapid pace, or what. There is some good news out there, the problem is none of it is big enough to take headlines away from the war in Afghanistan or health care reform or the economy, all of which are in middling territory.

[ Uh-oh, Obama's Approval Rating Jumps; That's Not the Story the Beltway Press Wants to Tell ]
Source: Media Matters for America

The video is long gone now, taken down by the same terrorists who put it up, and likely in a sad attempt to cover their tracks against a federal investigation that I’m sure is now pending, but here’s what Joshua Holland, writing for AlterNet, had to say:

There is no universally agreed-upon definition of the word “terrorism.” As I’ve often said, the reason it’s next to impossible to define the term is that everyone wants it to mean: ‘violent acts in the pursuit of political goals with which I disagree.’

That aside, most agree that attempting to influence public officials through a threat of violence is an act of terrorism.

He goes on to post the video, which is now gone – and in an update lets the SPLC, a group that monitors and tracks hate groups and civil rights across the country, describe the contents of the video:

It advises President Obama and other prominent people (“Our Dear Leader and co.”) to “leave now and give us our country back” and to do so by next week.

“If you stay,” the silent video message continues, “ ‘We, The People’ will systematically dismantle you, destroy you and reclaim what is rightfully ours. …

“We are angry and we are ready to take back the rights of the people. We will fight and We will win. …

“Dead line [sic] for your national response: October 15, 2009

“Thank you to all patriots who support our cause. … Be prepared for when the fateful day of the declaration of war is nationally announced.”

So essentially, a threat against the President of the United States, complete with a due date. If this isn’t some 24 Jack Bauer bullsh*t, I don’t know what is. Seriously America – these folks are in our backyards, and if the justice system wasn’t designed to try and imprison them for terrorism or treason, I don’t know what is. Never would a progressive or a liberal have thought to make a substantive threat against President Bush during his Administration and expect to get away with it – not that they could have what with all of the domestic spying and surveillance going on anyway – but these are the people you would be afraid of, not the ones in Washington voting whether or not your taxes are going up or down.

As much as people like to point at Washington as some kind of cesspool, I think more attention should be turned to our own communities and rooting out weeds like these people, instead of trying to be armchair politicians.

[ Right-Wing American Terrorists Issue YouTube Threat ]
Source: AlterNet

Seriously folks, you can’t make this stuff up – and frankly, why would you even want to?

This is another article that goes in the “proof positive conservatives are crazy” file – ready to pull out the next time someone want to claim that it’s the political left that’s lost their minds:

Number 5: John Derbyshire takes a bold stand against women’s suffrage
…

Number 4: Erick Erickson threatens to dissolve his own town’s police department
…

Number 3: John L. Perry urges a military coup against Obama
…

Number 2: Dan Riehl suggests that dead census worker could have been a “child predator”
…

Number 1: Conservatives everywhere declare that it’s their patriotic duty to stop America from hosting the Olympics

Oh yeah – it’s been a great week. Some of these stories are predictable, and the whole Derbyshire bit I mentioned in another article, but they’re all fantastic. I remmeber hearing the story of the people who wanted to stop Chicago from hosting the Olympics because they “thought Chicago should have other priorities,” which I think is logical, but it’s not like any government can only focus on one thing at a time, and I really did think that there was something more insidious about it – and now we know it’s true.

And suggesting that the census worker that was hanged with “Fed” scrawled across his chest may have been a child predator is not only disgusting and actively desecrating the memory of a murdered man, it still wouldn’t be an excuse for the criminals in Kansas who killed him.

You can be sure that anything – from the smallest, most tangentially related issue to the most absolutely absurd, the conservative right will be there to betray their nutjob roots and make fools of themselves: they don’t need anyone else to do it for them.

Get a rundown of the full stories behind each at the link below:

[ 5 Crazy Right-Wing Freak-Outs in Just One Glorious Week ]
Source: AlterNet