(h/t to Balloon Juice)

It is with great interest as well as concern that I watch the ever increasing massive head-explosion of the right-wing. Our real problem at this point politically is the portion of Democrats that still give the right-wing political clout, but nevertheless, it's important to keep an eye on the fringiest of the fringe. Hell, even the “birther” nonsense has gone mainstream, with Cranky-ass White Guy Lou Dobbs on CNN giving it credence.

Those of you who follow these things with interest are probably well aware that one of the ways the right-wing was able to hold power for so long was by convincing social conservatives to vote against their interest. You know the drill by now; vote to end abortion, get a capital gains tax cut. And so on.

But the latest, from a the right-wing nutter site, Human Events, must be seen as an example of not only right-wing gay hate, but a not-so-subtle synergystic word spew of defending defense industry pork under the guise of homophobia.

So who knew that fighter jets could stop the nefarious homosexual agenda? Below the jump for the madness…

You can read the entire Human Events email here. It's about a “special message from one of their advertisers”, an organization known as the “Pray in Jesus' Name Project“, which seems to be one of those groups intent on turning the U.S. military into an Army of God. A visit to their site has them making hay about the “Pentagon burning soldiers' Bibles”, giving one the perception that the Pentagon was forcibly burning soldiers' own personal Bibles. But of course, the truth of the matter, expanded on here, is that the said Bibles were in native Afghani languages, and were being used to prosteletyze, a big no-no.

So the latest pile from this group is targeting Sen. Leahy, for attaching hate crimes legislation to a defense bill, the one that will kill the unnecessary defense pork known as the F-22 fighter jet. Apparently, the nutter group fears the hate crime legislation, as they say it might somehow keep them from broadcasting their vile homophobia from the pulpit. They call the hate crimes legislation the “Pedophile Protection Act”. So, make sense of this:

Let's tell them to strip all homosexual rights from the Defense Authorization Act, please fund F-22's, or at least keep the Brownback Amendment which protects pastors reedom of religious speech.

Wow, that's a rather diverse agenda, no? There's even a picture of the Senator talking to a soldier, with the caption, “Leahy to soldiers: No funding unless you protect the homosexuals”. Somehow I suspect if I tried to confirm that he said that, I'd probably at most get a laugh out of it. 

I wasn't able to track down if defense contractors have ties to this organization, but as far as I can gather, it seems to be pretty popular for fundie servicemen who more than likely do view our Middle Eastern misadventures as a modern-day crusade. Sure, it's fringy-as-all-hell, but disturbing, nevertheless, as right-wing fanaticism and the military do not usually make for a good mix when put together, especially if we're actually trying to undo the damage done by Bush and his God-brigade. I take little comfort in knowing what Jesus' warplane of choice is, either. Perhaps they're hoping to use it to bomb San Francisco and Provincetown in an upcoming secret bombing capaign. Good to know the cat's outa the bag now.

I was going to call this diary “Obama's Greatest challenge” or some other lofty title, but after thinking about it, it's not really that great of a challenge at all.It just requires a bit of courage.

What I'm talking about is the story that broke over the weekend, which shouldn't have surprised anyone with a functioning brain stem:

Democratic senators on Sunday called for an investigation into reports that Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, instructed the Central Intelligence Agency not to tell Congress about a secret counter-terrorism programme.

Of course, none of this rises to the Clinton oral transgressions, right? Expectedly, the GOP is the one supplying the outrage here, promising a “scorched earth” policy, and raging a holy hell war if the administration looks into the matter further.

Below the jump for more of the madness…

Now, in a sense, Obama screwed the pooch early on on this one, when pressed about what to do about the endless Bush crimes, he gave that “we need to look forward, not backwards” bullshit, so he's going to obviously have to backpedal on his “don't rock the boat for the sake of political expediency” comments. As usual, Obama's worst mistakes and blunders tend to come from one thing: pandering to Republicans. You'd think he'd learned his lesson by now, him being a smart guy, and all, right?

So, now we have the tired and true Book of Republican Outrage and Obfuscation here in full play. We have this classic one from McCain (why does this guy still get any face time on TV?):

“The question is: Do we want America's image harmed more by dragging this out further and further?”

…which conveniently ignores the fact that perhaps if McCain was so concerned about “America's image”, he would've done something to stop all these nasty things we've been doing for the last few years instead of enabling it.

Then, in the same article, there's the “playing politics/impugning the patriotism of the criminals” line from NY Rep. Peter King (he of the “we don't need to acknowlege slavery” fame):

“It's a wrong and shameful criminalizing political differences,” Mr. King said during an interview with The Washington Times. “I would find it very hard to work with the administration on bipartisan issues if the attorney general and the administration start going after patriotic Americans who have dedicated their lives to protecting us.”

But King is a completist in terms of the playbook. He has to also throw in some Euro-bashing and Palinesque pandering to anti-intellectuals, when he also said this is “an effort to appease Europeans and U.S. intellectuals,” because, you know, we can't have smart people making decisions about justice and other trivialities, right?

I could go on forever with the excuses, but I won't, as if you're reading this, you've heard them all before.

Thankfully, it seems like Atty. Gen. Holder might be moving forward on this, regardless of the whining, and on the surface, he's not playing politics:

“I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda,” he told the magazine. “But that can't be a part of my decision.”  

It's good to hear that kind of talk, but more often than not from Dems, we get a lot of talk and very little action. We've seen too often how many times, simply in the face of GOP bloviation, we've let war under false pretenses, torture, and countless other crimes go unpunished. It's getting to the point where one has to wonder what has to happen to prod them into actually holding someone, anyone accountable.And given what they've gotten away with, imagining that is a scary prospect indeed.

The chioice is really simple, and in some ways, I personally feel this as a make-or-break moment for Obama. He can stand up for the rule of law or he can continue to care what batshit insane Republicans think (the “rule of whiners”). I don't have high expectations, but I'm ready to be surprised.

Odum did a fine job below in regards to the so-called "tea party" "movement" and explaining how it's going to try to basically inflate its numbers this Independence Day weekend, cornering the market on "patriotism". Considering how much of it's based on deception, that's not surprising.

Something else not surprising? Despite the repeated insistence of many of its organizers that it's a "non-partisan" event, it's not surprising that the Anti-Defamation League just released a must-read report, non-partisanly entitled White Supremacists and Anti-Semites Plan to Recruit at July 4 Tea Parties.

The Tea Party phenomenon, which began with anti-tax rallies staged across the country on April 15, 2009, will continue as activists in almost every state are planning similar events on July 4. Notably, white supremacists are again planning to participate. As they have done with other political and social issues, for example, promoting the Ron Paul campaign and using the immigration debate, white supremacists and anti-Semites are planning to exploit Tea Parties to disseminate their hateful views and recruit a larger following.

According to the report, there's been an uptick of activity on the Neo-Nazi site, Stormfront, with lots of comments similar to this:

"A big crowd of irate White folks protesting the government seems like the perfect time and place for us WN's to promote our cause, at least to my way of thinking."

"I think they'd be ideal for spreading WN literature and gaining recruits in large numbers, more quickly."

Yes, I know, one can't judge a site solely by its comments, but we are talking one of the biggest hate-sites on the web, here. That's not all though, as apparently, a group called "Whites Forward" has formed another group, Tea Party Americans Coalition (TPAC), with the expressed function of spreading their message at these rallies. I guess they know a good opportunity when they see one, eh?

Now, of course, in no way am I trying to paint all of the teabaggers with some broad Anti-Semitic brush. Even though they're egged on by some of the most deluded, immoral characters we know of such as Glenn Beck, by no means does one going out and protesting tax breaks for the middle class and expressing feigned outrage at Obama over things that were just fine under Bush equivocate somehow with being a jack-booted skinhead. Even I can see that, through my hopelessly partisan worldview.

But I don't see too many of those Stormfront guys at any of our rallies, do you?

Ok, so David "Diapers" Vitter apologizes after his affair and gets a warm round of applause at the GOP luncheon. Same with John Ensign. I suppose Mark Sanford will get a full on Argentinian banquet from the GOP before the week is done. Larry "Wide Stance" Craig? They tried to get him to resign.

You know, they really need to drop this "family values" nonsense and just stick with the warmongering/plutocratic/corporatist bit. At least we know they're never gonna be hypocritical about that, right?

(crossposted on five before chaos)

and that would be… Glenn Beck. Yeah, that Glenn Beck, he of the hysterics, teabagging, hatemongering, and America's most high-profile purveyor of right-wing bullshit conspiracy theories. And of course, you know the other guy, Thomas “Obviously a Good Confederate” Naylor, of the punchline known as Second Vermont Republic, the Vermont seccessionist group that GMD brought to your attention two years ago of having lots of friends in the Neo-Confederate movement.

So, anyways, fact-checking (oh, who am I kidding, reality) has never been one of Beck's strong suits, so of course he has Naylor on his show for an interview. Given that Naylor's completely lost the support of the left in Vermont due to his love of the Stars n' Bars and all it stands for, he must figure, what the hell, why not shoot for the paranoid right? Beck heaps tons of praise on him, of course, and unquestionably accepts Naylor's ridiculous claim that a whopping 60,000 registered Vermont  voters support secession (yet SVR, oddly enough, has about 1,000 supporters), and I've yet to meet anyone who takes Naylor seriously at this point. Well, I can think of one person… I'll get to him in a minute.

You can read the very cordial interview between Beck and Naylor here. Naylor starts off by thanking Beck for “stirring the pot” (would that be those rabidly succesful tea parties, perhaps?) , and then imparts such wisdom as:

The movement rolls on, in spite of the fact that Vermont is probably the most left-wing state in the country and voted very strongly for Barack Obama. This poses a challenge for us. But people are beginning to see that, really, there's not much difference between his policies and those of George W. Bush…. People were more angry at George W. Bush, but now, under Obama with the economic meltdown, there's genuine fear.

Yes, Unreconstrcted Confederates such as Naylor have a lot to fear from Obama, at least in their warped world view. As for this “movement rolling on”, well, Dr. Naylor, that train left the station two years ago. 

Beck, like Naylor's organization, also has the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the exemplary hate-watch group which released a report last year on SVR, with this beautiful quote from Naylor himself that really shows what the man is all about:

In the face of these criticisms, Naylor remains defiant. “I don’t give a shit what you write,” he told the Report. “If someone tells me that I shouldn’t associate with the League of the South, it guarantees that I will associate with the League of the South.”

Beck is on record as saying how the far-right, racist John Birchers are “starting to make more and more sense to him.”

Tommy Reb doesn't have too many friends left in these parts, but he can always count on Rob “Is he a racist? I dont know. And frankly, it is none of my damn business, at a personal level,” Williams of Vermont Commons, whose integrity lies flapping in the wind like a noose from a magnolia tree, posted in a blog post at that site that I'm not going to link to, the Beck video, with this brief commentary:

And Mr. Beck seems surprisingly lucid and thoughtful this evening.

Indeed. These people never seem to learn, PhD's notwithstanding.

Seems like almost like it's becoming a weekly occurrence, eh? Nutter heads will continue to explode… From the UPI wire:

The New York State Assembly has approved a measure to allow same-sex marriages, shifting the fight over the bill to the state Senate, analysts said.

By a vote of 89-52, the Assembly moved late Tuesday to approve the same-sex marriage initiative, with several legislators who had rejected a similar measure in 2007 changing their votes this time, The New York Times reported.

It goes to the Senate next, where passage is less certain.  If it does indeed pass, the governor is expected to sign it.

I took some time today on my lunch break to attend the “Healthcare is a Human Right” rally on the Statehouse Lawn. I was busy running around hobnobbing and such, so I don’t have a lot of details as to who was speaking at what time and so on. It was very well attended, much more than anything else at the Statehouse in quite some time, and unsurprisingly, much more well attended than the tax-day whinefest (although there were a few rather quiet anti-choice protesters in attendance). More photos below the jump.

Even though the day was overcast, there was a good energy in the crowd.

And of course, Bernie was there, giving a rousing speech…

Well, how do ya like this?  

The Iowa Supreme Court this morning upheld a Polk County judge’s 2007 ruling that marriage should not be limited to one man and one woman.

The ruling, viewed nationally and at home as a victory for the gay rights movement and a setback for social conservatives, means Iowa’s 5,800 gay couples can legally marry in Iowa beginning April 24.

There are no residency rules for marriage in Iowa, so the rule would apply to any couple who wanted to travel to Iowa.

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Shelly Wolfe and Melisa Keeton, who waited for word of the ruling outside the Polk County Recorder’s Office, immediately called their pastor anyway to make plans.

“We’re going to make it legal,” Keeton, 31, of Des Moines said.

I’m speechless.  

For those of us not easily “distracted”, there's an interesting conference happening next week in Montpelier on monetary reform policy. An introduction:

Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution reads,“The Congress shall have power…To coin money (and) regulate the value thereof…” Yet Congress has largely ceded that “money-creating” power to the private Federal Reserve Bank (the FED), from which that same Congress then borrows money back at interest whenever we need to spend more than we collect in taxes. This might not be a problem if the FED were actually part of the U.S. Government, the way the name makes it sound like it is. But the Federal Reserve is not a part of the Federal Government. To be sure, the President appoints the Fed Chairman, but the FED itself is owned by the private banks, and is a private corporation.

It is the private banks that have the power to create virtually all our money, out of thin air through the fractional reserve banking system. Our money supply (the checking deposits,savings deposits, CDs, money markets) comes into existence as loans, repayable at interest. By switching to a U.S. Treasury-issue system of money creation, all new money would be created “debt-free” without any need to ever pay it back to the Treasury.

This is not an inconsequential matter for our society. The world is drowning in debt. It is well documented that public debt has been increasing exponentially in recent years, such that in FY 2008, the U.S. Government paid $451 Billion in interest (c. 15% of the total of the federal budget). About fifteen cents of every dollar that we pay the IRS goes to interest on the debt!

It's some pretty heady stuff. I attended a conference in Massachusetts a few months ago, which was basically a history of the U.S. monetary system, followed why the reasons our current system as it currently stands is unsustainable and contributes to a lot of the problems we have in society right now.

The details of the conference:

A group of local citizens under the moniker The Kettle Pond Institute for Monetary Reform is bringing Joe Bongiovanni to the Pavilion Auditorium in Montpelier, Wednesday April 8 from 7-9 PM to present his talk: America’s Debt Crisis and the Need for Monetary Reform.

He’ll cover: what money is and how the FED and the private banks create money as debt in our country. He will explain the unsustainability of debt-created money. Then he will introduce the notion of debt-free money, its history in the U.S. from Colonial times through Lincoln’s time, and he will argue for its potential to create a more equitable and peaceful society. He will end his presentation by discussing The American Monetary Act, a draft of legislation that attempts to enact changes that Joe advocates which may be accessed here.

There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion after the presentation. Joe is very clear that this talk will be geared towards the person on the street. “For too long,” he says, “we have left decisions about our money system to the “experts” who are surely fine people, but who have no incentive to change the status quo.”

I know some of the people involved in this, they really have done their homework. It's not Ron Paul/fringe stuff. It's one of those things that stays of the radar of the national dialogue, in part because of its complexity, and of course, because the big banks and such are the ones making a killing on our current monetary policy. Hope some of you can make it.

You can download the full press release (excerpted above) here.

(crossposted at five before chaos)

…simply refuses to go away. I got to hand it to Joe, though, for an idiot who's managed to turn the art of saying moronic, uninformed things into both high art and a career, he's doing something rather brilliant in that regard.  His most recent topic, even though he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, is rallying against the EFCA legislation (the legislation that will make it easier for workers to unionize and will NOT do away with the secret ballot option no matter how many times opponents lie that it will):

Joe the Plumber is hitting the campaign trail again! He’s been pressed into service to do a series of events throughout Pennsylvania rallying opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act, the organizer of the events confirms. Mr. Plumber will speak at rallies against the measure in Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia on March 30th and 31st, according to a spokesperson for the anti-EFCA group Americans for Prosperity.

“The public loves Joe the Plumber,” the spokesperson, Mary Ellen Burke, claimed to me. “They see him as a role model.”… Pressed on whether Joe the Plumber has any particular claim to being a spokesperson on the issue, Burke replied that “he represents the American worker.”

Where, oh where to to begin? Hmm, a correction is apparently in order, about “representing the American worker”. First off, before the campaign happened, if I remember correctly, “Mr. Plumber” was unemployed. I know, a nitpick. But to be more accurate, the quote should have said “represents the thoroughly uninformed, uneducated worker incapable of critical thinking or factual analysis who buys into the perceptual victimhood portrayed by the WATB GOP”. Or something like that. Apparently, real plumbers are pissed about this, too. From, Rick Terven, the political and legislative director for The United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry of the United States and Canada:

“Joe the plumber is selling out real plumbers. Right now, labor law is stacked against real plumbers. Real plumbers want and need the Employee Free Choice Act as a way to empower themselves to join a union, without fear of intimidation or losing their jobs. Joe the Plumber doesn’t speak for real plumbers.”

And about the spokesman saying how “the public” sees Joe as a “role model” (although I'd be hard pressed to find anyone to admit that an unemployed, uninformed dunce who knows nothing except how to shill for people who work tirelessly against his own interests is somehow a “role model”)… I'm curious as to who else they may consider a “role model”. Howzabout this guy? He's not funny either, isn't really what he says he is, and makes a career out of being ignorant (although, admittedly, his is just an act):

I can't fight the nagging suspicion that if the GOP were still in charge, Larry'd be in charge of the FCC or something. They do things like that, you know. They can't help it.

(h.t to The Political Carnival) Have a great weekend, folks.