Conservatives
This isn't to say that they weren't well on their way there to begin with. Jonah Goldberg of the National Review Online's blog, The Corner, and an LA Times columnist (no, really, he is) gives Little Lord Pontchartrain some post-election advice:
I think James Baker and Dick Cheney should take Bush out to the woods around Camp David. After 24 hours in a sweat lodge, he should be given only a loin cloth, a hunting knife and a canteen of water. Bush should then set out to track and kill a black bear, after which he should eat its still beating heart so he can absorb its spirit. He should then…
So Bush fired Rumsfeld. Big deal. He should have done it 2800+ lives ago. Lest you think this election will somehow make Bush wiser, consider whom El Jefe Supremo Maximo picked to replace him: Bob Fucking Gates. Who is Bob Gates? Oh, that Bob Gates:
Robert M. Gates was the Central Intelligence Agency's deputy director for intelligence (DDI) from 1982 to 1986. He was confirmed as the CIA's deputy director of central intelligence (DDCI) in April of 1986 and became acting director of central intelligence in December of that same year. Owing to his senior status in the CIA, Gates was close…
For those of you who are fucking morons, the car is the Republican Party. Spin all you want baby, it sucks to be the car
I'm kidding about the last part of the post header. Sort of. So, what do you think the Republican spin will be?
I'll have more coherent thoughts later on Wednesday.
...because the only things they have left are voter intimidation and cheap tricks. As described by fellow ScienceBloglings coturnix and Josh, the Republicans are calling Democratic voters and either informing them that their polling place has changed or that they will be arrested if they vote illegally (the voters are accused of being out of state residents). These 'robocallers' are usually impersonating Democratic campaigns or election officials, the latter being a crime. The Republican crime wave has hit the following states:
Pennsylvania
Kansas
New Hampshire
New York
Connecticut
New…
Do remember when all those wackjob militia groups fantasized about UN Mongolian shock troops that would invade the U.S. and establish the One World Order under the control of the Trilateral Commission? (If you don't, you really missed the rightward anchor of the modern conservative movement). Well, the Missouri Baptist Convention has taken this sort of lunacy to a new level.
The president of the Convention, Rev. David Clippard, had this to say about the Islamofacist hordes (by way of Glenn Greenwald):
"Today, Islam has a strategic plan to defeat and occupy America," he told the 1,200-strong…
It's so hard to keep up with the Iraqi War and Occupation justifications. For those of us who opposed the Iraqi War and Occupation from the beginning, one reason was that our fellow citizens should not die to keep oil prices low. While it appears that the low oil prices never materialized, Bush and other Republicans are now arguing that we need to stay in Iraq to stabilize oil prices. It seems the GIs who unofficially named Iraqi base camps "Exxon" and "Mobil" knew what they were talking about. To paraphrase John Kerry from long ago--back when he was eloquent, what do you say to the last…
There is absolutely nothing the Republicans won't politicize. Now, they have launched the War on Vaccination. For a decade, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a foundation dedicated to improving public health, particularly among the poor and the elderly, has funded a "Vote and Vax" program at early voting facilities that serve poor neighborhoods in 24 cities. Basically, if you're over 50, you can get a vaccination at the polling location.
Thursday, in Houston, the Republicans filed a lawsuit to stop this program.
Nevermind that the program has been running for ten years. When the program…
Buckling under to conservative pressure to find the non-existent evidence that Saddam Hussein had, in fact, been building weapons of mass destruction, about a year ago, the Bush Administration placed online documents from the Saddam Hussein era that provided technical information on building various nuclear devices. Quoth the Grey Lady:
The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation's spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public…
While I don't think arguing for or against religious particulars is something any political party should adopt a few days before an election (or should be a political issue at all, for that matter), PZ is absolutely right when he says that Robertson and his ilk should be called out for the foolish bigots that they are. We wouldn't tolerate racially-based hatred (Got Macaca?), so why should we tolerate 'faith-based' hatred? O'Donnell was doing what was needed: staking out the flank.
If politicians won't do anything while El Jefe Maximo wipes his ass with the First, Fourth, Fifth Amendment,…
Apparently, this is how Sen. Macacawitz George Allen (R-VA) conducts voter outreach. Then again, he sucked on the whole body armor issue, so why would he give a damn about any soldier?
Because if I had been born in 1969, I would be 36 years old, and the Bush administration's new abstinence program which is now targeting people up to 29 years old would ignore me. Said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that supports sex education:
They've stepped over the line of common sense. To be preaching abstinence when 90% of people are having sex is in essence to lose touch with reality. It's an ideological campaign. It has nothing to do with public health.
Maybe the Republicans are just trying to drum up business for their…
A while ago, I described how I feel estranged from the internet Progressives:
Bloggers like Kos constantly remind people that the lefty blogosphere isn't liberal (sounds kinda like the DLC doesn't it?). Actually to say that the internet progressives don't stand for much of anything is unfair. It's just that what most of what the internet progressives stand for is what any sane, reality-based person should stand for.
I bring this up because Jerome a Paris, over at Daily Kos, asks "Is DailyKos a rightwing website?"
He then describes the typical response to two issues he regularly raises,…
More than a few conservatives are upset about the Michael J. Fox commercials because they're unfair: how do you respond to the emotional pull of someone who has Parkinson's disease? If you watch the full-length CBS interview, Couric cruelly hammers Fox over and over with the question of if he overexaggerated his symptoms for the commercial (she's obviously trying hard to dispel the image of being the nicest of the big three anchors). But where she truly entered the realm of tastelessness was when she repeated Rush Limbaugh's charge that Democrats use victims for political purposes.…
Lance Mannion notes that Rush "Big Pharma" Limbaugh uses words in the same way creationists do: as weapons. From Mannion (italics mine):
Fox's offense was making campaign commercials for candidates who will vote to expand and fund stem cell research, but Limbaugh doesn't care about that. What he cares about is that those candidates are Democrats who will also vote to make it harder for rich white guys like Rush to get away with whatever they want to get away with.
Rush's anger and outrage are real; the words he used to express them weren't. This is why if the Republicans find a disabled…
Michael Schiavo reports on a truly weird campaign event held by gay hating family values protecting Republican congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave. She was so terrified of Schiavo, the husband of Terry Schiavo, that she tried to have him arrested. And that's not the weird part.
From Billmon, comes this little factoid hidden in the latest Gallup poll:
That's right, 14% of Americans think the Republicans are too liberal. That's one in seven. This explains a lot of things...
(from oldamericancentury.org)
Conservative activist keeping a sharp eye out for Democratic Google Bombers
Majikthise reminds us to join Operation Google Bomb. If you want to join, the html code is here. You'll find some very interesting articles about some not very nice people in the next paragraph.
--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl
--AZ-01: Rick Renzi
--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth
--CA-04: John Doolittle
--CA-11: Richard Pombo
--CA-50: Brian Bilbray
--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave
--CO-05: Doug Lamborn
--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell
--CT-04: Christopher Shays
--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan
--FL-16: Joe Negron
--FL-22: Clay Shaw…
In the Tennessee Senate race, the Republicans have been viciously playing the race card. They have been referring to Democrat Harold Ford as 'Fancy' Ford because he, a single black man, has dated...white women (note: 'fancy' is an old Southernism for, at best, a lothario, and, at worst, a pimp). Now, the Republicans (the NRCC) have run an ad where they point this out. Even the candidate is publicly protesting the ad (although he's probably loving it in private).
So, this week, one of those helpless white female victims of Ford commented on l'affair du Fancy:
But all of this - this focus…
Some stupid is so powerful that it can only be viewed safely through the StupidViewer 9000
(from here)
Here's a joke: a Republican staffer of a conservative Christian Republican goes into a synagogue and tells the congregation that his candidate is more Jewish than they are. It's not very funny, and, sadly, it's true. You see, Republican Congressman J.D. Hayworth of Arizona has a slight Jewish problem.
It started when he supported Henry Ford's Americanization program, claiming that Ford's program was only trying to get immigrants to speak English. What is the Americanization program?…
Did you ever think in 1999 that Congress would pass a bill, and that a President would sign a bill that eliminates habeas corpus at the whim of the president? I sure as hell didn't. This is why the utter warping of our political system by the mindless Christopath Uruk-hai, the anti-gay bigots, and the blastula liberationists is so devastating: because it allows other forms of extremism such as the Federalist Society and those who believe in the 'unitary executive' to flourish unchecked.
From Keith Olbermann:
OLBERMANN: Does this mean that under this law, ultimately the only thing keeping…