Divide the nation, Nixon’s adviser Pat Buchanan told him, and we’ll have the bigger half.  Several decades of culture war later, the right has simply led a fairly sizable slice of America into a kind of mental prison more lock tight then anything old Joe Stalin, Mao or Goebbels could have wished for in their wildest dreams.  Here’s one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers explaining something I’ve seen with my own eyes in my own family, and among folks who once upon a time were friends of mine…

I celebrated Easter yesterday with my ultra conservative family. I love my family but they have gone so far to the right over the past 8 years that it is difficult to have any sort of discussion with them. I think they are typical of conservatives born in the baby boom. They are scarred by the culture wars and the hatred they have for the left is so strong that it becomes disturbing.

That hatred, let it be said, didn’t start with Reagan.  It started with Nixon.  These are the folks of my own generation and earlier, who cheered on the hard hats as they bashed the hippies protesting racism, the Vietnam war, and fought for women’s rights and sexual liberty.  You need to remember about this crowd that they thought that the twin beds in Lucy and Ricky’s television apartment and the fact that even when Lucy was clearly "with child" nobody was allowed to utter the word "pregnant" on TV was as perfectly appropriate for TV as Fred Flintstone selling cigarettes.  Separate But Equal was working just fine until some communist inspired uppity blacks and a bunch of New York Jews started agitating everyone.  A woman’s place was in the house cooking dinner for her husband not in the workplace unless she was too ugly to find a man and maybe those women could be secretaries or nurses or waitresses or something.  And the more horrifying symbol of social decay, the biggest threat to the sanctity of American family life wasn’t homosexuality or even the Communist Menace, it was males wearing their hair so long it went below the collar. 

These people weren’t scarred by the culture wars.  They were scarred by the shock, shock of seeing that there were other people in the world who didn’t buy into their racist, sexist, war mongering moral values.  Let’s see how well they’ve matured over the years shall we…?

So with this in mind I compiled a few themes from the days discussions that you might find interesting (or horrifying). None of this is ground breaking but it is interesting to see these generalizations about the current conservative movement be personified in ones family.

1. Total insulation from MSM.

Everyone refuses to read the New York Times or Washington Post. Sunday morning while getting ready for Church I put on "Meet the Press" and my father looked on with disgust and changed the channel to Fox News. At dinner I brought up an article in The Economist that was critical of Barack Obama and my uncle said that it was a socialist rag.

2. Distrust of centrists When discussing the future of the Republican party I suggested that we needed to create a bigger tent and avoid social issues that alienated us from younger voters. My GRANDMOTHER responded that we don’t need the back benchers like Christopher Buckley dictating our principles. I think that line was straight from the Mark Levin show.

3. Neoconservative aspirations The most interesting part of the day, was that so much of the discussion focused on the Somali Pirate issue. It was the story of the day, but I didn’t think their was that much to talk about. Surely, not as interesting as talking about Iran, Obama’s budget, the economy etc. However we spent most of the day discussing Obama’s lackluster response to the issue and the weakness he displayed in not acting quicker. My father was incensed that the media kept referring to this as a crime rather then an act of terrorism. His suggestion was to engage in a land war in Somalia…

This tracks pretty well with my own personal experiences, particularly among a few ersatz friends of the Republican Persuasion who kept right on voting for the Shrub even when his party waged one of the most blistering anti-gay election campaigns in American history.  They get their news from FOX.  As terrified of them as the mainstream news media is, the hard core Still avoids it like it was radioactive, and read only their own tribal publications. 

Let me tell you a wee story about that.  After I’d been to Memphis to show my support for an Ex-Gay Survivor’s conference, I noticed that Time Magazine did a story that week on gay teens that touched on how this new generation of gay teens is often pressured by their families into ex-gay camps.  So I figure I’ll pick up a copy on the drive back home.  My drive took me east on I-40 to I-81 and up the backbone of Virginia.  Starting around just north of Galax I began to check the drugstores and WalMarts for copies.  What I found was that nowhere…and I mean nowhere I stopped, and I must have stopped at dozens of places on the way home…had Any mainstream news magazines for sale on their racks anywhere between Hillsville and Winchester Virginia.  Not just no Time, but no Newsweeks, no U.S. News…nada…nothing.  Maybe there were some to be found somewhere in that stretch of countryside…but I never found any near the highway until I got to Winchester and pulled into a shopping mall.  And the young lady behind the counter gave me a dirty look when she saw what I was buying.

They don’t want to even hear it now.  And they don’t have to.  They can get their news exclusively from tribal sources.  But those sources are anything but grass roots.  They imagine they are part of a disenfranchised grass roots majority that was…somehow…denied power that is rightfully theirs by a variety of secret liberal-communist-socialist-homosexual cabals.  In fact, they are almost completely owned by right wing billionaires and corporate America.

Case in point…this sad, odd, pathetic tea protest.  I’m going to steal this post from Digby (who you should read more often if you don’t already) because it pretty well sums it all up…

Corporate Grassroots

by digby

Following up on Krugman’s column today and the shrieking and rending of garments by the rightwing, I think it’s it’s probably important to make very clear why the tea-bagger parties are not a grassroots uprising.

The right seems to want us to believe that Fox News is promoting this non-stop as a genuine news event rather than a sponsor — despite the fact that it is an event which hasn’t happened yet. They are, by definition, promoting it.

Local news organizations, which are reporting on the planning for this event either do not realize that they are being spun by a front group pretending to be a grassroots organizing campaign or they don’t care. That front group is called Freedom Works, which presents itself as the conservative answer to Move On.

Here is how Move On was conceived:

The MoveOn.org domain name was registered on September 18, 1998 by computer entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, the married cofounders of Berkeley Systems, an entertainment software company known for the flying toaster screen saver and the online game show "You Don’t Know Jack." After selling the company in 1997, Blades and Boyd became concerned about the level of "partisan warfare in Washington" following revelations of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. The MoveOn website was launched initially to oppose the Republican-led effort to impeach Clinton. Initially called "Censure and Move On," it invited visitors to add their names to an online petition stating that "Congress must Immediately Censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country."

At the time of MoveOn’s public launch on September 24, it appeared likely that its petition would be dwarfed by the effort to oust Clinton. A reporter who interviewed Blades on the day after the launch wrote, "A quick search on Yahoo turns up no sites for ‘censure Clinton’ but 20 sites for ‘impeach Clinton,’" adding that Scott Lauf’s impeachclinton.org website had already delivered 60,000 petitions to Congress. Salon.com reported that Arianna Huffington, then a right-wing commentator, had collected 13,303 names on her website, resignation.com, which called on Clinton to resign.

Within a week, however, support for MoveOn had grown. Blades calls herself an "accidental activist. … We put together a one-sentence petition. … We sent it to under a hundred of our friends and family, and within a week we had a hundred thousand people sign the petition. At that point, we thought it was going to be a flash campaign, that we would help everyone connect with leadership in all the ways we could figure out, and then get back to our regular lives. A half a million people ultimately signed and we somehow never got back to our regular lives." MoveOn also recruited 2,000 volunteers to deliver the petitions in person to members of the House of Representatives in 219 districts across America, and directed 30,000 phone calls to district offices.

Here’s how it does business:

MoveOn uses e-mail as its main conduit for communicating with members, sending action alerts at least once a week.

The MoveOn.org web site also uses multi-media, including videos, audio downloads, and images. In addition to communicating via the Internet, MoveOn advertises using traditional print and broadcast media, as well as billboards, bus signs, and bumper stickers, digital versions of which are downloadable from its web site. It also contains an area called the "Action Forum", which functions much like a traditional electronic discussion group. The Action Forums act as a grassroots organization allowing members to propose priorities and strategies.

Through this grassroots methodology, MoveOn collaborates with groups like Meetup.com in organizing street demonstrations, bake sales, house parties, and other opportunities for people to meet personally and act collectively in their own communities.

Some of its core principles are that it is not dependent on foundation money and that it has the ability to use ‘hard money’ – as opposed to grants and tax-deductible contributions – which enables them to be partisan, contribute to political campaigns, and exercise clout in the political process.

Here’s how Freedom Works came to pass:

Stealing a page from MoveOn.org‘s successful organizing playbook, the leaders of FreedomWorks – a complete merger of the conservative think-tanks Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America – hope to conduct massive get out the vote and political education campaigns in the swing states on behalf of President George W. Bush.

The two groups decided to merge because there was "an overlap in issues between the two organization," Shawn Small, the Director of Policy at Empower America, told me in a telephone interview. It was an opportunity to bring together Empower America, which Small characterized as a "grasstops" organization driven by such inside the beltway "superstars" as William Bennett, Vin Weber and Jean Kirkpatrick and CSE’s "grassroots" following.

Will FreedomWorks be successful? Maybe, maybe not, but it is sure to be controversial with longtime Republican Party operative Matt Kibbe at the helm.

If the agenda of FreedomWorks sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The organization’s new website proclaims that it "will expand and broaden the national fight for lower taxes, less government, and more economic freedom."

The leaders of FreedomWorks have all been around the Beltway a number of times. Former House Majority Leader, Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey, C. Boyden Gray, onetime legal counsel to Bush’s father and chairman of the Committee for Justice, an organization about to launch a campaign on behalf of Bush’s right wing judicial appointees, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary and failed vice-presidential candidate, Jack Kemp, will serve as the Co-Chairmen of the organization.

And here’s how it operates:

FreedomWorks claims a membership of over 360,000 and a multi-tentacled legal structure that includes a 501 c(3), a 501 c(4), a 527, a federal PAC, and various state PACs. John Stauber, co-author of Banana Republicans: How The Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State, recently pointed out that that according to internal documents leaked to the Washington Post in January 2000, the bulk of Citizens for a Sound Economy‘s revenues ($15.5 million in 1998) came not from its members, but from contributions of $250,000 and up from large corporations, including Allied Signal, Archer Daniels Midland, DaimlerChrysler, Emerson Electric Company, Enron, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Philip Morris and U.S. West (now Qwest).

And like their progenitors they get millions from the conservative foundations.

Can we all see the difference between Freedom Works and Move On? I knew that you could.

This is what a grass roots movement looks like in conservative America.  It’s fake.  Just like all the rhetoric about individual freedom, Jesus and family values.  Just as The Washington Times could not survive without the infusions of large piles of cash from messianic crackpot Sun Myung Moon, nearly every so-called conservative grass-roots organization could not exist without the largess of corporate America and the stable of right wing billionaires who have been funding the modern conservative movement since the culture wars began in the 60s.  Scaife.  Ahmanson.  Coors.  Bradley.  Olin.  Koch.  These people, and the rest of what Eisenhower warned as The Military Industrial Complex, are the crack epidemic poisoning the veins of our country.  Without them Americans might actually be getting along with one another reasonably well. 

And families like those of Sullivan’s reader might not be living in a 21st century cave, complete with nice TVs and radios that stroke their bar stool conceits, making goddamned sure they see of the world outside only what the ayatollahs of the hard right want them to see, and think Exactly what they want them to think.  They are tools, useful idiots, disposable human lives in the war a small but very powerful group of billionaires and corporate interests have been waging for decades now on the American Dream.  

What you need to understand: many of them made that of themselves willingly.  Joyfully even.  Better to live in a cave, then to know that the heathens aren’t monsters after all, but other human beings, happy and content with their own lives just as they are.  Anything to not have to know that.

A wee update on This Post, concerning the kid who is suing his college because he couldn’t give an anti same-sex marriage speech in his public speaking class…

Exactly what Lopez said in Matteson’s class is unclear. Lopez turned down an interview request, Matteson did not respond to e-mails, and French said he did not know enough about the speech to detail it.

So we still don’t know what it was he actually said.  And that’s the crux of the entire episode.  But…dig it.  Lopez, the kid who is suing (through the courtesy of the culture warriors at the Alliance Defense Fund), isn’t saying.  Now…why would he not want to tell anyone what it was he actually said?  Better yet…why would couldn’t the reporters covering this story not be bothered to find out?

His Alliance Defense Fund mouthpiece (French) says Lopez spoke two verses from the bible that "had nothing to do with homosexuality."  But…look at this…he’s not saying what they were.  If he knows for a fact that they had nothing to do with homosexuality, then he knows what they were and he can tell the reporters what they were.  If he doesn’t know what Lopez actually said then he can’t say that they had nothing to do with homosexuality.

They’re being very evasive here.  It’s not hard to figure why.

Hilzoy finds that the Men Of The Mind are a puzzling lot…

The unemployment numbers are dreadful. But for once, there’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon: conservatives are going Galt.

"While they take to the streets politically, untold numbers of America’s wealth producers are going on strike financially. Dr. Helen Smith, a Tennessee forensic psychologist and political blogger, dubbed the phenomenon "Going Galt" last fall. It’s a reference to the famed Ayn Rand novel "Atlas Shrugged," in which protagonist John Galt leads the entrepreneurial class to cease productive activities in order to starve the government of revenue. (…)

The perpetual Borrow-Spend-Panic-Repeat machine in Washington depends on the capitulation of the wealth producers. There’s only one monkey wrench that can stop the redistributionist thieves’ engine. It’s engraved with the word: Enough."

As Matt Yglesias says:

"Just think what kind of nightmare scenario we might be inflicted with if the titans of finance who’ve made up such a large proportion of high earners in recent years were to pull back on their efforts! I shudder."

Unfortunately, we don’t know how many of America’s wealth producers are going to go on strike, since their number is "untold".

There’s a wee problem here that I’m sure has been spotted by the gasbags on the right. Vis:

But every one of them will free up work for someone else.  And thanks to eight years of Bush’s economic policies, we are not short of unemployed people to take up the slack.

I am puzzled by one thing, however: the fact that none of the people who advocate "going Galt" seem to have actually done it.

I appreciate your puzzlement Hilzoy.  Keep looking at the sentence you wrote about how every one of them that goes Galt frees up a job for someone else and you get the picture.  They know damn well that quitting isn’t going to prove anything, other then how worthless they actually were in the grand economic scheme of things.  Let’s face it, these are the folks who have been advocating, for decades now, the kinds of deregulation blue sky that got us into this mess in the first place.  Wealth producers?  More like wealth leaches. 

I’m not clear whether the point of "going Galt" is to stop doing creative or productive work, as Rand’s novel would suggest, or trying to lower one’s income, as many of the people quoted in stories about "going Galt" claim.

To stop doing productive work, you’d have had to have been doing productive work to begin with.

But as best I can tell, the people advocating this are doing neither. Consider:

Rep. John Campbell has neither resigned from Congress nor given back any part of his salary.

Michelle Malkin is still blogging, and still seems to be on the PJMedia payroll.

Dr. Helen, who is "still mulling over ways that she can "go Galt,"" has not taken any of the obvious steps: stopping blogging, giving up her career, severing her connection to PJTV, or even not taking BlogAds. Neither has her husband.

Cassy at Wizbang, who says it’s "time to go Galt", doesn’t seem to have stopped blogging either, and Wizbang is still running ads.

It’s almost enough to make me think they’re just posturing.

Like…when they’re going on about homosexuality and sexual morality?  Personal accountability?  Let’s face it, if it weren’t for the right wing billionaire dole most of these deep thinkers wouldn’t have an income, let alone a platform.  They’re gasbags.  And I’ll endure lectures on the evils of government spending and taxation from a lot of people, but not a congressman.  Especially not a republican congressman.

Let’s take a closer look at this ersatz grass roots revolt against President Obama’s economic policies…shall we?

Right-Wing ‘Tea Party’ Movement Was Planned Months Ago by GOP Billionaires

Populist revolt against the U.S. government is all the rage in the Republican Party, these days. As they tell the story, the public is so outraged by the recovery and reinvestment efforts of the Obama administration that Americans everywhere are turning out to overthrow the tyrannical king of the federal government by re-enacting the Boston Tea Party.

Funny thing, though: it turns out this whole "populist" movement was a planned PR stunt funded by big-money right-wing backers of the GOP who specialize in faking grassroots movements to drum up opposition to Barack Obama.

Everything about this so called "Tea Party" movement was pre-planned–from the supposedly "spontaneous rant" of CNBC stock market reporter, Rick Santelli, to the presumed ground-level organizing of protests all over the country. Fake, fake, fake–like a product launch staged covertly to look like a spontaneous trend.

Playboy bloggers Mark Ames and Yasha Levine pulled together all the pieces of this puzzle in an incredible expose (Exposing The Rightwing PR Machine):

What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that’s because it was.

What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.

As you read this, Big Business is pouring tens of millions of dollars into their media machines in order to destroy just about every economic campaign promise Obama has made, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. At stake isn’t the little guy’s fight against big government, as Santelli and his bot-supporters claim, but rather the “upper 2 percent”’s war to protect their wealth from the Obama Adminstration’s economic plans. When this Santelli “grassroots” campaign is peeled open, what’s revealed is a glimpse of what is ahead and what is bound to be a hallmark of his presidency.

Go read the whole thing.  It’s the right-wing billionaire club we’ve all come to know and love, screwing the political process so they can keep screwing the middle-class.  If you thought the fight was over when Obama won, you are sadly mistaken.

If we could just get rid of these drooling morons we might have a rational discussion in this country about the economy and how to clean up the mess the billionaire teat sucking jackasses have brought down on all of us.  Going Galt would be a blessing for this country…the best thing they’ve ever done for it.  So, fat chance of that happening. 

You know…the mainstream news media really needs to start paying more attention to this crap.  Just letting it fester isn’t a plan…

It’s beyond irresponsible that major U.S. corporations are sponsoring this crap, let alone pushing it out onto the airwaves.

Jim Burroway makes a good catch I’d missed when looking at the new anti-gay ad campaign created by Campaign Secrets…the one that shows an unseen gay sniper putting a family and more specifically their little children in the crosshairs.  This one is good…it really says it all…

By the way, we also learn that public schools no longer celebrate Father’s Day. Wait a minute. That couldn’t be because it’s celebrated on the third Sunday in June while school’s out, could it? Naah, it’s a much better story when it’s all the gays’ fault.

Dig it.  Never mind that Father’s Day happens after the school year ends…just remember that the homosexuals have forced schools to stop celebrating Father’s Day.

Now…this kind of crap may actually fool a lot of people, not all of whom necessarily want someone to feed them pre-fabricated lies about gays they can pass around without taking responsibility for it.  Some people will actually hear this and think…Wow…the gays took Father’s Day out of the schools…  But you know goddamned well the people who made that ad knew that it was horseshit, and almost certainly so did the folks who bought it.  And it’s a safe bet that its target audience doesn’t care if it’s truthful or not.

There’s your moral crusade right there.  There’s your righteousness. 

Via Pam’s House Blend…and as of now racing across the net like a fire.  West Virginia Christianists are gearing up for a push to enact an anti same-sex marriage amendment in their state.  As always, it isn’t enough to simply make a case for heterosexual supremacy.  They have to demonize gay people too.  Their latest ad starts out with the image of a gay sniper putting a heterosexual family, and more specifically their little children, in the cross hairs.  They are being targeted, to be gunned down, by some the homosexuals.  Here’s a screen shot:

Bear in mind that this ad is running in a state that’s maybe only a tad less armed to the teeth then Texas.  And the message of this particular sequence is crystal clear: The homosexuals are going to kill your family, starting with your children.  Of course they’ll insist its only a metaphor.  They don’t mean that homosexuals are Literally going to kill your family.  Naturally all the West Virginians who see this ad will understand that.

This is what gets gay people killed in this country every year.  And make no mistake, the people creating and the people running these ads are well aware of that fact.  But we are not so much human beings as cockroaches to them.  They want us gone.  They want us eliminated.  If the state won’t do what Leviticus commands, then maybe Bubba will…

The video is below. The sniper shot comes in at about .53 seconds. Then it’s another four minutes plus warning everyone about the threat the homosexuals pose to families and children. In 1977 Jerry Falwell stood beside Anita Bryant, who was then fighting to have Dade County’s anti-discrimination ordinance repealed by popular vote, and told a room full of reporters that “A homosexual will kill you as soon as look at you.” Now they are, almost literally, telling people in West Virginia that we do in fact intend to kill them, and kill their children. Gay people are going to die because of this ad.

Pam over at the Blend notes this same group who made the ad…Campaign Secrets…also created an attack ad against the AARP back in 2005. AARP’s crime back then was opposing Bush’s plan to let the stock market play with your social security pension money. To discredit AARP, Campaign Secrets cooked up this little gem:

Dig it. The AARP is wrong about social security, because it hates our men in uniform and loves faggots. That, literally, was the message.

So I’m seeing yet another Alliance Defense Fund sob story fly across my Google News page this morning…

Student sues L.A. City College district over gay-marriage speech

A classroom dispute at Los Angeles City College in the emotional aftermath of Proposition 8 has given rise to a lawsuit testing the balance between 1st Amendment rights and school codes on offensive speech.

Student Jonathan Lopez says his professor called him a "fascist bastard" and refused to let him finish his speech against same-sex marriage during a public speaking class last November, weeks after California voters approved the ban on such unions.

When Lopez tried to find out his mark for the speech, the professor, John Matteson, allegedly told him to "ask God what your grade is," the suit says.

Whenever I see a story like this one pop up I scan down the article for the words "Alliance Defense Fund" and I am seldom dissapointed.  That’s Pat Robertson’s ACLU evil mirror and it exists, not so much to defend the rights of Christians as to inflame religious passions in the mob toward secular government.  Whenever you see the Alliance Defense Fund in a news story, the first thing you have to assume is that most of what you are reading is Alliance Defense Fund spin, because they’re very good at finding reporters who are too lazy to fact check them.

This story is a case in point.  Your first reaction may be to question the wisdom of calling a student a fascist bastard in class.  Certainly telling a student to ask God what their grade is was way out of line.  Perhaps you didn’t notice this little tidbit in the L.A. Times story…

The Los Angeles Community College District’s offices were closed Friday for the Presidents Day holiday, and the general counsel, Camille A. Goulet, could not be reached. But in a letter to Alliance, the district said it deemed Lopez’s complaint "extremely serious in nature" and had launched a private disciplinary process.

The Alliance Defense Fund is a master at this.  They tossed this story out on a weekend, when nobody from the school district would be available for immediate comment.  That way, they get to spin the story the entire weekend and through Monday, the holiday, without fear of anyone hearing both sides of the story.

But in a letter to Alliance, the district said it deemed Lopez’s complaint "extremely serious in nature" and had launched a private disciplinary process.

In the letter, Dean Allison Jones also said that two students had been "deeply offended" by Lopez’s address, one of whom stated that "this student should have to pay some price for preaching hate in the classroom."

We are only getting the ADL’s spin on this story…but even in that spin there is a germ of something not-quite-right.  It wasn’t just the professor, but at least two students in the class who were offended enough by the speech to register complaints.

But, you say, even so, the ADL’s side of it is serious enough.  Professors shouldn’t be calling students fascists.  In class.  Other students should be told to respect the sincerely held religious beliefs of their peers, no matter how offensive those beliefs may seem to them.  But notice the one thing you aren’t hearing from the ADL, or in fact, any of the other news sources: the speech the student gave.

It isn’t there.  Not in the L.A. Times.  Not in the San Jose Mercury News.  Not in the ADL press release.  Not even in the right wing loony bin that is Town Hall even, where you would expect to find nothing but hosannas for outright Christainist Fascism.   The closest you get to the actual content of the speech in Town Hall, is this:

In November, Jonathan Lopez attempted to give his informative speech on God and the ways he has seen God act miraculously in his life and in the lives of others. In the middle of that speech, Lopez spoke of God and morality and read the dictionary definition of marriage. He also read two verses from the Bible.

But before Lopez was finished with his speech, Professor Matteson interrupted him. After calling Lopez a “fascist bastard” in front of other students, Matteson invited students to leave the class if they had been offended. When no one left, the professor dismissed the entire class.

But in fact even the ADL conceeds that two students were offended enough to register their complaints.  But look at that carefully.  In the middle of that speech, Lopez spoke of God and morality and read the dictionary definition of marriage. He also read two verses from the Bible.  Would one of those verses have been this one…perchance…?

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.

We don’t know.  All we know at this point, is that something was said during that class that shocked and outraged enough of the people who heard it that…well…what exactly?  The suit doesn’t accuse the school of actually penalizing Lopez in any way, other then having his speech cut short and being ridiculed in front of the class.  Which I’m sure has never happened to any other college student in a public speaking class.  Oh yes, it accuses the the professor of making threats of retaliation…but no actual retaliation is in the ADL’s accusations.  When you look at this one critically, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything at all other then…well…a lot of empty speechifying.

So what is this all about?  Simple.  It’s about generating a news story about Christians being persecuted to inflame the mob…to keep it fired up for the ongoing culture war.  I strongly suspect that when we eventually find out what it was this lout actually said to his classmates it won’t seem such a clear cut act of religious persecution after all.

Of course…the reporters on the story could simply have done their damn jobs.  The obvious thing here is to dig up what Lopez actually said.  Nobody seems to have bothered doing that.  And the ADL and Town Hall would have their reasons one strongly suspects, for not telling.  Where are the goddamned journalists in this country?  They all retire or something?

In the wake of the passage of Proposition 8, and predictably, you heard the voices from the back bench bellyaching that we were all fighting the wrong fight.  Why are we making such a big deal out of marriage they asked, when we still lack basic anti discrimination protections in jobs and housing?  Why are we putting so much energy into a fight about same-sex marriage, which most of the country is against anyway, when gay people can still be fired from their jobs, denied housing, denied service in stores and restaurants?  Let’s fight for the basics first, they say. 

Sure.  Go right ahead…

Ruzicka, Sutherland wage campaigns against gay rights

Equality Utah’s Common Ground Initiative — a push for legal protections for gay and transgender Utahns — has drawn hundreds of marchers to a Capitol Hill rally, thousands of petition signatures and even broad-based support in statewide opinion polls.

The initiative also has ignited a backlash, led by defenders of "traditional marriage" who want to crush the effort.

Rather than "common ground," Gayle Ruzicka and the Constitutional Defense of Marriage Alliance are touting "common sense." And a Salt Lake City-based conservative think tank, The Sutherland Institute, wants Utahns to stand on "sacred ground" instead.

"The family is the central unit of society, and so our efforts in this regard are ultimately to protect the traditional family and protect marriage," said Sutherland spokesman Jeff Reynolds, who acknowledged Equality Utah has run a "very effective" campaign.

Next week, his group will kick off its Sacred Ground Initiative, a counteroffensive aimed at defeating the five gay-rights bills, all sponsored by Democratic lawmakers, that make up the Common Ground Initiative.

"The message [from opponents] is that our bills are an attack on marriage — which is exactly what they’re not," said Will Carlson, Equality Utah’s public-policy manager. The proposed laws range from protecting someone from being fired for being gay to establishing a statewide domestic-partner registry that would afford some legal protections, such as hospital visitation, to same-sex couples.

Emphasis mine.  Here’s why we’re fighting for same-sex marriage.  Because every fight we’ve ever waged as a people has been turned into a fight over same-sex marriage by our enemies.  Watch it happen again in the fight for these so-called "common ground" gay rights bills in Utah.  Just like it’s happened every time since the days of Antia Bryant and Save Our Children in Florida.

It’s ironic that the bigots understand our fight better then many of us do.  The same logic that says it’s wrong to deny a gay man a job simply because he is a gay man, what do you know, leads in a straight and narrow path to the conclusion that it is also wrong to deny a gay man the right to marry the man he loves, simply because both of them are gay.  To concede it in the one case is to concede it in the other.  Though our enemies deny that rhetorically, you can see they know it perfectly well by how they turn every fight we engage in, for every meager right that heterosexuals take for granted every day, into a fight over same-sex marriage.

Deemphasize same-sex marriage all you want.  Our enemies will underline it in neon.  The homosexuals aren’t just fighting for the right to hold down a job.  The homosexuals aren’t just fighting for equal housing.  The homosexuals aren’t just fighting for the right to adopt.  The homosexuals aren’t just fighting for safe schools.  The homosexuals aren’t just fighting for the right to serve in the military.  The homosexuals aren’t just fighting to repeal the sodomy laws.  The homosexuals are fighting to make their perversion morally acceptable.  They are fighting for the honor and the dignity of their perverted sexual relationships.

Yes.  Yes we are.  That’s the heart of it.  Marriage isn’t central to this fight, but it’s damn close.  Closer then anything else in civil law.  If our sexual relationships are morally and civilly the equal of heterosexuals’ then not only is there no reason to deny us a job, there is no reason to deny us the right to marry.  That is why every fight in this struggle, is a fight over same-sex marriage.

Via Brad DeLong…  Now I see that the republican bellyaching over contraceptives is even more dishonest then just their usual crude sexual mores posturing…

Bad Faith Economics

Paul Krugman:

Bad Faith Economics: As the debate over President Obama’s economic stimulus plan gets under way, one thing is certain: many of the plan’s opponents aren’t arguing in good faith…. John Boehner, the House minority leader, has already made headlines with one such shot: looking at an $825 billion plan to rebuild infrastructure, sustain essential services and more, he derided a minor provision that would expand Medicaid family-planning services — and called it a plan to “spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives.”…

Emphasis mine.  And it get’s better…

[T]he bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created…. It’s as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch. (The actual cost of a free school lunch, by the way, is $2.57.)…

Nice.  They keep this up throughout the recession and they’ll be lucky if they get more votes next election then Lyndon LaRouche.

Yes, yes…network news is to news, like processed cheese food product is to cheese.  But as it turns out, there Is a way to find out from your TV what’s going on in Washington.  You just have to adjust your perspective a tad. 

For example…have you noticed all those "clean coal" ads on TV lately?

EPA Abruptly Backs Away From Proposals to Alter Air-Pollution Rules

The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday abandoned its push to revise two air-pollution rules in ways that environmentalists had long opposed, abruptly dropping measures that the Bush administration had spent years preparing.

One proposal would have made it easier to build a coal-fired power plant, refinery or factory near a national park. The other would have altered the rules that govern when power plants must install antipollution devices. Environmentalists said it would result in fewer such cleanups.

EPA officials had been trying to finalize both proposals before President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in Jan. 20. But yesterday, an agency spokesman said they were giving up, surprising critics and supporters of the measures.

Rule of thumb:  When you suddenly start seeing a lot of feel good advertising from some big corporate interest groups, it’s a safe bet they’re trying to push something through congress.

What the coal and energy corporations want you to know, is that coal is clean.  Swell.  That’s really swell.  Glad to hear it.  But if coal is clean then why do they need congress to change the clean air act?

Atrios (Duncan Black), pouts…

And, uh, New Yorker? How about some credit for the "Friedman Unit." It’s mine, damnit, mine!

It is.  And hilarious it was too…in a laugh to keep yourself from crying kind-of way…

Duncan Black (Atrios) remarks ironically...

Nobody Could’ve Predicted

That if you put someone on the teevee who reflected the views of the sizable chunk of the country they would have a big audience.

Brian Williams couldn’t do it. Neither could Joe Scarborough, Rita Cosby, Dan Abrams, Ashleigh Banfield, Deborah Norville or Alan Keyes.

But MSNBC’s new 9pmET show did. The Rachel Maddow show topped CNN’s Larry King Live in the ad-friendly A25-54 demo during the month of October. King still wins the Total Viewer crown and FNC’s Hannity & Colmes is #1 in both measurements.

All that ad money lost because you didn’t listen to my advice to provide companion programming for K.O.

And you bet your ass that if NBC was just a television network they’d have rushed to where the viewers were faster then the speed of light.  But NBC isn’t just a television network.  It’s a subsidiary of The General Electric Corporation.  In addition to all those household appliances they make, GE also happens to be a major Defense Department contractor…one of those pieces of the military industrial complex president Eisenhower once warned the nation about.  So what if nobody but other right wingers watch their extremist pundits?  They get the message out, and NBC can make up the loss with their other programming.

Once upon a time, the major TV networks viewed their news divisions as something of a loss, or at best a break-even part of the whole.  But they let them have a degree of independence because the airwaves were seen as a public trust, even by corporations like RCA.  They still mostly skewed to the Establishment line, but there was enough respect for the place actual journalism has in a democracy, that reporting the facts usually won out over sticking to the party line.  No more.  The minute Rachel Maddow looks like she’s having a measurable impact on the Narrative the show will be pulled, just like they pulled Donahue and Moyers.

Via Kos…  Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been watching this for decades…

The failure of the character assassination attempt, part II

I wrote earlier that Obama’s favorabilities have surprisingly survived this election intact, given the amount of shit that has been flung in his direction. Part of the reason is that the GOP overreached in their attacks. While arguing that he was inexperienced could’ve gained traction pre-Palin, the stuff about being a Muslim Marxist Manchurian candidate was simply, well, ludicrous.

In this narrative, Obama is “a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists,.” Once elected, presumably, will reveal himself to be the monster that he is, in the manner of Kang and Kodos in that classic 1996 Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons.

If you want to take a look at their reasoning, I recommend the work of Stanley Kurtz over at the National Review…

Stanley Kurtz being the guy who doctored up marriage statistics from Scandiavian countries so he could claim that legal same-sex marriage resulted in the decline of heterosexual marriages and that children were being raised mostly by unmarried parents now.  Over at Slate, associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and research director of the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, M. V. Lee Badgett shows how Kurtz did it…

Despite what Kurtz might say, the apocalypse has not yet arrived. In fact, the numbers show that heterosexual marriage looks pretty healthy in Scandinavia, where same-sex couples have had rights the longest. In Denmark, for example, the marriage rate had been declining for a half-century but turned around in the early 1980s. After the 1989 passage of the registered-partner law, the marriage rate continued to climb; Danish heterosexual marriage rates are now the highest they’ve been since the early 1970’s. And the most recent marriage rates in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are all higher than the rates for the years before the partner laws were passed. Furthermore, in the 1990s, divorce rates in Scandinavia remained basically unchanged.

Of course, the good news about marriage rates is bad news for Kurtz’s sky-is-falling argument. So, Kurtz instead focuses on the increasing tendency in Europe for couples to have children out of wedlock. Gay marriage, he argues, is a wedge that is prying marriage and parenthood apart.

The main evidence Kurtz points to is the increase in cohabitation rates among unmarried heterosexual couples and the increase in births to unmarried mothers. Roughly half of all children in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are now born to unmarried parents. In Denmark, the number of cohabiting couples with children rose by 25 percent in the 1990s. From these statistics Kurtz concludes that " … married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon," and—surprise—he blames gay marriage.

But Kurtz’s interpretation of the statistics is incorrect. Parenthood within marriage is still the norm—most cohabitating couples marry after they start having children. In Sweden, for instance, 70 percent of cohabiters wed after their first child is born. Indeed, in Scandinavia the majority of families with children are headed by married parents. In Denmark and Norway, roughly four out of five couples with children were married in 2003. In the Netherlands, a bit south of Scandinavia, 90 percent of heterosexual couples with kids are married.

That’s a higher rate then some states here in America.  Mostly bible belt states.  But look at this.  First Kurtz gerrymanders the marriage statistics in Scandinavia by including time frames when it was declining Prior to the passage of same sex civil unions, to prove that those civil unions had an adverse affect on heterosexual marriage.  In fact, after civil unions passed heterosexual marriage rates Improved.  But that wasn’t enough.  Kurtz also pointed out the fact that many heterosexual couples have their first kid out of wedlock, deliberately omitting the fact that they almost always marry afterward, in order to lead people to believe that there was some sort of massive population of kids living with unmarried parents in Scandinavia now.  That this conclusion is absolutely false, that you can only arrive at it by concealing the fact that most parents do in fact marry after their child is born, mattered nothing to Kurtz.  He had something to prove, and damn the evidence.  This is what passes for virtue and morality among social conservatives.

Now he’s peddling the Obama is a marxist and/or muslim terrorist claptrap.  How…unsurprising…

Mark Weigel reads a note from the kook pews, and takes it apart…line by line…

Another question yet to be resolved is whether Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, a prerequisite pursuant to the U.S. Constitution. There is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than, as he claims, Hawaii.

What evidence? We have a newspaper announcement of Obama’s birth in Hawai’i from 1961, and we have a Hawai’ian certificate of live birth. Obama did have Kenyan citizenship until he turned 21; as the son of Barack Obama, Sr, it was automatic. And it did not negate his American citizenship.

There is also a registration document for a school in Indonesia where the would-be president studied for four years, on which he was identified not only as a Muslim but as an Indonesian.

Here’s the document. It does identify Obama as a Muslim and identifies Indonesia as his "nation of citizenship," but that’s what his parents wrote down on their seven-year old son’s school form. If Gaffney thinks this negates Obama’s American citizenship, he doesn’t understand the law.

If correct, the latter could give rise to another potential problem with respect to his eligibility to be president.

Completely false. The document lists Honolulu as Obama’s "place and date of birth."

Curiously, Mr. Obama has, to date, failed to provide an authentic birth certificate which could clear up the matter.

False. I’ll link it again. Unless Gaffney believes that the state of Hawai’i is forging documents for Obama, this is proof that he was born in Honolulu.

This is fever swamp, Vince Foster-was-murdered, Bush-blew-up-the-WTC stuff…

Yes…isn’t it.  Oh…but look…it isn’t some babbling nutcase churning this stuff out from his parent’s basement…

Neoconservative pundit Frank Gaffney, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense, has bid adieu to polite society with this column on "the Jihadist vote."

Let me repeat that: Former Deputy Assistant Secretary Of Defense.  These are the folks who have been running the country for the past, oh, Eight Years.  The debacles that are Iraq, Katrina and the national economy starting to make sense now?  Here…let me explain something to you…  No…Wait…  Let Them explain something to you…

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

-Ron Suskind, Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush

This isn’t just the heart of the Bush presidency…it’s the heart of the republican grassroots.  ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore”…  Actually…yes it is…

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.  They are not entitled to their own facts.  Lies have consequences.  The erosion of trust has consequences.  You can’t just keep on making things up and expect nothing to come of it…  When stocks become worthless, markets fail.  When the word of the people becomes worthless, democracy fails.

UPDATE: Later in the column Gaffney cites Pennsylvania attorney Philip Berg, who’s filed a frivolous lawsuit against Obama on this citizenship conspiracy theory. That would be this Philip Berg.

Now, it is time for world leaders to take the lesson learned from Iraq and issue a warrant for the arrest of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney; arrest them; take them to a neutral country; try them for the murder of over 2,800 people from more than 80 countries on 9/11/01 and, when found guilty, sentence them appropriately. Jurisdiction would be proper in any of the more than 80 countries whose citizens were murdered on 9/11.

I compared Gaffney’s nonsense to 9/11 trutherism for a reason.

UPDATE II: This is pathetic: a Toledo station runs a "local hero"-type story on Berg, which puts legal documents from Hawai’i on equal footing with his fact-free claims. It’s mind-boggling. On the one hand you have a government certificate that says Obama was born at 7:24 p.m. on 8/4/61 in Honolulu. On the other you have Berg’s claim, from his lawsuit:

Obama’s grandmother on his father’s side, his half-brother and half-sister all claim Obama was born not in Hawaii but in Kenya.  Reports reflect that Obama’s mother traveled to Kenya during her pregnancy; however, she was prevented from boarding a flight from Kenya to Hawaii at her late stage of pregnancy (which, apparently, was a normal restriction, to avoid births during a flight).

Notice the distinct lack of quotes and sources? It’s because the "Obama’s African family members claim he was born in Kenya" story is an internet myth. They have never claimed that. There is no such story. Go ahead and try to find it.

An internet myth.  Note that.  It’s what the grassroots are saying.  To each other.  Among other things.  Over and over.  Obama is a Muslim.  Obama has ties to al Qaeda.  Obama is a traitor.  Obama is a terrorist.  So it is, that the republican grassroots take their collective consciences around behind the barn and shoot it.  Anything to win, even if it means taking a running bellyflop into the gutter.  But it’s not just Obama they are hurling bullshit shit at.  They are taking a dump on the very flags that they are busy waving.

It’s one thing to oppose the other party’s candidate on the basis of their record.  It’s one thing to oppose them on the basis of their beliefs.  It’s one thing to oppose them just because you don’t like their looks, the cut of their clothes, or because the sky is blue.  Fine.  It’s your right.  But when you spread lies you are not opposing the man.  You are hating on democracy.  You are giving it the middle finger.  A democracy is the sum of its citizens.  Corrupt yourself, and you corrupt your country.  It’s one thing for the politican on your TV screen to do it, it’s one thing for the talk radio host you tune into every day to do it, but when You lie to your neighbor for political gain, you are shitting on America.

This precious democracy we all share, that was bestowed us with the blood and treasure of so many of our forebears, asks only that you treat its core value, the election, with care and attention, and give to it whatever honest consideration you can, to the best of your ability.  We all make mistakes sometimes in the ballot booth.  Some votes we cast we long live to regret.  But the important thing is we try and are honest.  With ourselves.  With our neighbors.  Disagree we may.  Vehemently.  Fine.  So long as it’s honest.  That is what so many good people in so many generations past have died for, so that we could do.  Speak freely and honestly to each other.  Persuasively.  Bluntly.  Calmly.  Angrily.  Whatever.  But honestly.  Because you can.  Because people died to give you that freedom.  That’s all American is obliging you to do every election year.  Instead, you are feeding it poison. 

America is dying from that poison.  I hear you speak of your patriotism, your love of flag and country.  Over and over again I hear it.  I see you wave the flag.  I see it on your front doors.  I see it on your bumpers.  I see you wearing it on your lapels.  Fine.  Swell.  Whatever.  You love America?  Then Stop Lying.  Stop.  Your motherfucking lies are killing it.

[Update…]  Here’s a link to Factcheck.org on Obama’s birth certificate, since the one Weigel linked to isn’t enough for the kook pews.  As if…anything could be…actually…  I’m sure they have a way of explaining away this too…

In fact, the conspiracy would need to be even deeper than our colleagues realized. In late July, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961…

Dig it.  They went looking through the newspaper archives and found the birth announcement.  Of course…it’s all part of the consperacy you see…

Chutzpa: Conducting state business via your personal email account to get around state government email retention policies, then complaining that your privacy was violated when hackers uncover your little scheme.

Priceless: You support Bush’s warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.

President Palin.