Wingnut Web – FreeRepublic Itchin’ to shoot some Panthers Edition

Glenn Beck and Resistnet have dueling march on DC events in August/September. Beck has moved his event up in order to misuse MLK’s legacy to sell more copies of his terrible books, and also to rally his troops into a frothing, gnashing horde of hate. All because he’s a “real patriot”.

But wait! Remember when the Freepers went all nuts because some “Black Panthers” were at a voting place in 2008 and never shut up about it? They’re still talking about it, giving the guy lots of air time, in which he recently said…
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Oh, snap! RAHOWA in the Hizzouse! FreeRepublic throws it down with their longing of shooting the darkies!

Never on my watch is locked and loaded to shoot anyone with a tan at the Lincoln Memorial
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Drain Clogs – 07-07-2010

Iran has a robot. Iran, the new Japan.
It's a Mecca-nical Man!

Mitt Romney is a moron, and gets destroyed by Fred Kaplan

Harry Reid put the Sharron Angle website back up, so props to Harry Reid!

I was gonna do an article on this before I saw it linked on Kos, and may still do one, but this is the worst opinion column of the year.

Besides pimping garbage about vaccines causing autism, HuffPo is now hosting a creationist and editing out criticism to said creationist from its own writers.

Cartoon of the Day:

Drain Clogs – 07-06-2010

We’re getting threatened again, this time by our old pal Helene. You remember her? Her husband invented everything ever.

One thing he didn’t invent was a way to have us not make fun of her, thus she’s gone tattling to Dreamhost (our webhosting company) and “the property government authorities” – Looks like the jig is up! So here is her comment in full (found in the above link)

Hi Frankie,

You caught me. Bet I had you going for a minute didn’t I?

In any event, I have contacted Dreamhost and the property government authorities about your posts. I’m sure you will understand since you love our government nowadays and would love to be a part of their enslavement.

Boots. Shaking.

In the future world of 2010, rogue debt collecting companies can destroy your life with nothing more than a piece of paper.

Remember when Anthem Blue Cross decided to raise rates a ridiculous amount and pretty much got the Health Care Reform passed because of it, then backed off? Well, they’re gonna raise the rates again!

Republican John Oxendine paid his former campaign manager’s consulting firm to dispatch Christian teenage volunteers from TeenPact door-to-door promoting his bid for Georgia governor. But I’m sure this is all in the up and up, except for the fact that the group TeenPact is a non-profit with tax-exempt status that isn’t suppose to be doing that and can be fined and stripped of their status.

Wanna cover the BP oil leak and not go exactly where BP tells you to go? Pay $40,000 and go to jail! FUBP.

Who is lamer? Sharron Angle for sending a cease-and-desist letter to the Reid campaign after they quoted her old campaign website (full of crazy stuff) or Harry Reid for his campaign complying with the cease-and-desist letter?

Real Patriots sue the fire department

A Republican a member of an all-white country club? Shocks of shocks!

Riots in the USA! Yes, Puerto Rico is part of the USA, even if it isn’t a state.
Check out this awesome excessive force action!

Remember the Anonymous Tarp Wife who whined about being embarrassed because her husband’s crappy company destroyed the economy of the entire planet? Well, she’s Liz Peek, and now she thinks she can give financial advice. I’m no expert, but I have a feeling she’s completely and utterly wrong about everything.

Living wages are cool, unless you’re a jerk. Hey, there are lots of jerks in New York!

This WND dude used to love America more when it was a fictional country. But what do you expect from the author of Liberals: America’s Termites or It’s A Shame That Liberals, Unlike Hamsters, Never Eat Their Young. I think he needs a longer book title.

Cartoon of the Day:

You can’t spell “you” without ‘Glenn Beck U’!

Hey you on the couch! Yes, you.

Are you tired of entitled arrogant “educated” people like your boss or scientists always telling you what to do or saying how Global Warming isn’t a lie? Frustrated by the fact that the only thing setting you and “Mr. Know-It-All” apart might simply be a college degree or high school diploma? Attending a traditional education institution can take a lot of work and time, sometimes as much as 4 or even 5 years, possibly requiring a commute or even the need to read books, but thanks to the wonders of technology now YOU can enjoy the quality of a university education right in the comfort of your own home!

Announcing the groundbreaking of the nation’s newest institution of American academic thought and achievement, Beck University! Started by one of America’s most eminent educator, thinkers, and morning talk-radio hosts, Glenn Beck invites you and other patriotic like-minded Americans to submit a student application today and begin your journey into the world of a college education. By studying to get your degree at Beck University you will be joining the ranks of other college educated smarty smarts such as Ann Coulter, Former President Ronald Reagan, and Legendary football coach and occasional guest on Sean Hannity’s ‘Great American Panel’, Tony Dungy.

Beck University is accredited by the New England Educational Board of Non-Accredited Schools and is the only college education that’s available on a subscription basis (as part of the “Extra Features” section on Glenn Beck’s ‘Insider Extreme’, available exclusively at GlennBeck.com. Just read some of the Facebook Comments our eager students have left us inquiring about our fine institution and thanking us for establishing a mecca of educated thought like Beck University:

Some generous souls just wanted to thank Glenn for his service to the truthseekers of the world:

And some just wanted to hate on the snotty “college degree holders” who commented on how Beck University is completely and utterly ridiculous, an institution with no connection to reality whatsoever that the very thought of its existence is laughable and depressing:

And this was just the first 300 responses!

Yours Truly,

skiplogic

Beck University, Class of 2011

Charity Studies, Minor in Hope

Defense Working Capital Funds

A curious line I found skimming through the most recent war supplemental:

For an additional amount for ‘Defense Working Capital Funds’, $1,134,887,000, to remain available until expended.

It sounded a little like one of those shady investment wings that large industrial corporations have been using, or in this context, a slush fund.  I looked up some documents and found a few things, starting with this report (pdf) from the DoD comptroller.  The stated purpose:

A. Revolving funds were established to satisfy recurring Department of Defense requirements using a businesslike buyer-and-seller approach.  The generators of requirements justify the need for funds to the Congress, but are not always the organizations that execute the requirement.  In some instances, the ”customers” or “buyers” contract with DoD “provider” or ”seller” organizations that have expertise in the service or product required, and operate under business financial management principles.  Unlike profit-oriented commercial businesses, the revolving funds goal is to break even over the long term. Revolving fund selling prices established in the budget are stabilized or fixed during execution to protect customers from unforeseen fluctuations that would impact on their ability to execute the programs approved by the Congress.

Multiple GAO reports have been saying that this has not been happening.

Drain Clogs – 07-02-2010

GOP chair Michael Steele says more freaky things, this time he’s rewriting history!

“This was a war of Obama’s choosing,” Michael Steele said at the event. “This is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”

The right is outraged, as usual, and will do nothing.

“Terrorist babies are real! I’m not crazy! Why do you think I’m crazy?” – Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX)

Rand Paul called for an “underground electric fence” along the US/Mexico boarder, then struggles to explain his statement.

Lindsey Graham spoke ill of the teabaggers, expect them to be enraged:

In a previous conversation, Graham told me: “The problem with the Tea Party, I think it’s just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out.”

Barack Obama is the Karate Kid

Cartoon of the Day:

China will destroy America by being mean to animals

Resistnet poster rel find/forerunner (he posts under both accounts) has two passions: ranting about how alcohol can fuel every car in America, and ranting about how China will destroy America thanks to animal cruelty. Now, we here at Politisink.com love animals and abhor animal cruelty. However, there is a point where you go beyond a normal supporter of a cause and enter the Twilight Zone of Insanity. And brother, rel find is nucking futs!

As rel find/forerunner generally makes long giant posts that repeat a lot of the same content, this edition will be a highlight reel of quotes from several posts. We’re also skipping most of his alcohol fuel rants because we’re not sure if rel find is behind the site he keeps linking to or not. But let’s get to the main attraction, which is how China is going to destroy America.

The USA’s Downfall Is A Direct Result of Chinas Animal Abuse-Cruelty-Torture and Thereby All US Citizens Guilty-Liable-Complicit By Way of Massively Imbalanced Anti-American US-China FreeTrade Policy

This was the title of rel find’s big thread!

I believe we are in this mess because of a lack of morals. It’s amazing how we all don’t see and feel it. There will be no hope for any nation if they don’t dissacociate themseles with Communist China.

Communist China is the new AntiChrist.

If you want this nation to be saved then you must in your own way get that message flowing all over the internet.

Please don’t flow your message all over my keyboard!
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Drain Clogs – 07-01-2010

Conservatives think Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, George Soros, and Harry Reid are giant monsters, and now one GOP group has decided to just make Nancy Pelosi an actual giant monster in their commercials. I am sure the fact that she is gunned down by Republicans is totally not a threat and it would have been perfectly acceptable to make a commercial with liberals gunning down George W. Bush in 2003.

“Illegals gonna cut off your head!” – Arizona Governor Jan Brewer.

Dem Senator Mary Landrieu is pretty awful, unless you are an oil company.

One thing you learn on the internet is that Digby is usually right. Here she talks about Terrance Wall, conservative idealist who got screwed over because Real Conservatives are a bunch of money-grubbing bastards.

Um….what the fuck is wrong with Arizona??

via

Cartoon of the Day:

Appreciating Serious People

David Weigel resigns from the Washington Post for his unprofessional behavior, making an apology on the way out.

I’m a member of an off-the-record list-serv called “Journolist,” founded by my colleague Ezra Klein. Last Monday, I was deluged with angry e-mail after posting a story about Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.) that was linked by the Drudge Report with a headline intimating that I defended his roughing-up of a young man with a camera; after this, the Washington Examiner posted a gossip item about my dancing at a friend’s wedding. Unwisely, I lashed out to Journolist, which I’ve come to view as a place to talk bluntly to friends.

The WaPo ombudsman explains that Weigel, “bears responsibility for sarcastic and scornful comments he made,” on Journolist, which he describes as “supposedly private” and that this raises questions about the role of Serious bloggers.

With bloggers such as Weigel, “I think The Post needs to decide what it wants to be online,” said Dan Gainor, a vice president at the conservative Media Research Center. “Does it want to be opinion? Or, does it want to be news? The problem here was that it was never clear.”

“If it’s going to be opinion, it ought to have somebody on the conservative side — something Dave Weigel never was,” he said.

If The Post wants to assign a “good neutral reporter” to cover conservatives, “we’d be thrilled,” said Gainor. But quickly added, Weigel “wasn’t one. He looked at the conservative movement as if he was visiting a zoo. We’re more than that.”

Gainor raises valid points. Klein’s blog posts clearly pass through a liberal prism. For that reason, liberals have a comfort level with what he writes, and conservatives know where he’s coming from, even if they disagree. In contrast, Weigel’s blog seemed to confuse many conservatives who contacted me. Was he supposed to be a neutral reporter, some wondered? Others complained that he was a liberal trying to write about conservatives he disdained.

Which brings me to the Serious “liberal” Ezra Klein, who made some very revealing comments on this and what he sees as related.

I was on all sorts of e-mail lists, but none that quite got at the daily work of my job: Following policy and political trends in both the expert community and the media. But I always knew how much I was missing. There were only so many phone calls I could make in a day. There were only so many times when I knew the right question to ask. By not thinking of the right person to interview, or not asking the right question when I got them on the phone, or not intuiting that an economist would have a terrific take on the election, I was leaving insights on the table.

That was the theory behind Journolist: An insulated space where the lure of a smart, ongoing conversation would encourage journalists, policy experts and assorted other observers to share their insights with one another.

Suddenly, he brings in the Rolling Stone profile that got McChrystal fired and reporting on Afghanistan generally.

In a column about Stanley McChrystal today, David Brooks talks about the union of electronic text, unheralded transparency, 24/7 media and a culture that has not yet settled on new rules for what is, and isn’t, private, and what is, and isn’t, newsworthy. “The exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important,” he writes.

….

Broadly speaking, neither journalism nor the public has quite decided on how to handle this explosion of information about people we’re interested in. A newspaper reporter opposing the Afghanistan war in a news story is doing something improper. A newspaper reporter telling his wife he opposes the war is being perfectly proper. If someone had been surreptitiously taping that reporter’s conversations with his wife, there’d be no doubt that was a violation of privacy, and the gathered remarks and observations were illegitimate. If a batch of that reporter’s e-mails were obtained and forwarded along? People are less sure what to do about it. So, for now, they use it.

So is he implying that being critical of the war in Afghanistan is grounds for being fired?  This is pretty interesting because the public is split over Afghanistan:

You would think that a roughly even split would merit commentary “opposing the Afghanistan war” occasionally, especially through the “liberal prism” (a majority of Democrats oppose the war), but no, it’s the job of Serious People to determine the range of acceptable opinion.  If they were serious (as opposed to Serious) about reporting, they might raise some of the following points:

First, this argument tends to lump the various groups we are contending with together, and it suggests that all of them are equally committed to attacking the United States. In fact, most of the people we are fighting in Afghanistan aren’t dedicated jihadis seeking to overthrow Arab monarchies, establish a Muslim caliphate, or mount attacks on U.S. soil. Their agenda is focused on local affairs, such as what they regard as the political disempowerment of Pashtuns and illegitimate foreign interference in their country. Moreover, the Taliban itself is more of a loose coalition of different groups than a tightly unified and hierarchical organization, which is why some experts believe we ought to be doing more to divide the movement and “flip” the moderate elements to our side. Unfortunately, the “safe haven” argument wrongly suggests that the Taliban care as much about attacking America as bin Laden does.

Second, while it is true that Mullah Omar gave Osama bin Laden a sanctuary both before and after 9/11, it is by no means clear that they would give him free rein to attack the United States again. Protecting al Qaeda back in 2001 brought no end of trouble to Mullah Omar and his associates, and if they were lucky enough to regain power, it is hard to believe they would give us a reason to come back in force.

Third, it is hardly obvious that Afghan territory provides an ideal “safe haven” for mounting attacks on the United States. The 9/11 plot was organized out of Hamburg, not Kabul or Kandahar, but nobody is proposing that we send troops to Germany to make sure there aren’t “safe havens” operating there. In fact, if al Qaeda has to hide out somewhere, I’d rather they were in a remote, impoverished, land-locked and isolated area from which it is hard to do almost anything. The “bases” or “training camps” they could organize in Pakistan or Afghanistan might be useful for organizing a Mumbai-style attack, but they would not be particularly valuable if you were trying to do a replay of 9/11 (not many flight schools there), or if you were trying to build a weapon of mass destruction. And in a post-9/11 environment, it wouldn’t be easy for a group of al Qaeda operatives bent on a Mumbia-style operation get all the way to the United States. One cannot rule this sort of thing out, of course, but does that unlikely danger justify an open-ended commitment that is going to cost us more than $60 billion next year?

Fourth, in the unlikely event that a new Taliban government did give al Qaeda carte blanche to prepare attacks on the United States or its allies, the United States isn’t going to sit around and allow them to go about their business undisturbed. The Clinton administration wasn’t sure it was a good idea to go after al Qaeda’s training camps back in the 1990s (though they eventually did, albeit somewhat half-heartedly), but that was before 9/11.   We know more now and the U.S. government is hardly going to be bashful about attacking such camps in the future.  (Remember: we are already doing that in Pakistan, with the tacit approval of the Pakistani government). Put differently, having a Taliban government in Kabul would hardly make Afghanistan a “safe haven” today or in the future, because the United States has lots of weapons it can use against al Qaeda that don’t require a large U.S. military presence on the ground.

Fifth, as well-informed critics have already observed, the primary motivation for extremist organizations like the Taliban and Al Qaeda is their opposition to what they regard as unwarranted outside interference in their own societies. Increasing the U.S. military presence and engaging in various forms of social engineering is as likely to reinforce such motivations as it is to eliminate them. Obama is hoping that a different strategy will eventually undercut support for the Taliban and strengthen the central government, but it is still an open question whether more American involvement will have positive or negative effects. If we are in fact making things worse, then we may be encouraging precisely the outcome we are trying to avoid.

The humanitarian purpose?  The State Department was alright with the situation in the 90’s.  From a 1997 State Department cable:

But it’s the guy that reports on tea partiers that gets fired for a lack of objectivity.