Crickets

by folkbum

The righty blogs were all kinds of giddy over weekend revelations that a minor union cog stood outside a bar puffing himself up to a stranger about how he was almost single-handedly going to bring down the Walker campaign for governor. John-david Morgan couldn't even get the names or job titles of his alleged conspirators right, yet his drunk-talk was taken as gospel evidence of illegal coordination and a complex, interconnected web of operatives planning unspeakable horrors in the weeks to come.

So I waited with great curiosity to see how those same righty blogs would react to documentary evidence of actual coordination between the state Republican Party, Americans for Prosperity, and local Tea Party groups to engage in voter caging. In addition to, this time, the operatives getting the names and titles right, you have the people involved initially lying to the press to cover up what they had done.

You might be surprised to learn that all of this has been met, by the righties, with dead silence. Well, no, you're probably not surprised. I know I'm not.

CAVEAT: Since the story broke, Charlie Sykes hasn't been on the air. It's entirely possible that he will jump on this story later this morning, condemning the people involved in no uncertain terms (perhaps while getting their job titles wrong, too!), and then the herd will dutifully follow with their own critiques of the state GOP, AFP, and the Tea Parties. And if you believe that, I have some great lakefront property to sell that you may be interested in ...

451° Stupid

by folkbum

The latest So There! argument from my commenters (a So There! argument is a point so stupid that a reasonable response is impossible to craft because of the enormity of the stupid; see, for example, this video, taken by those on the right as a So There! on global warming but by those on the left as proof that some Congressmen are too stupid for their own good)--

By now you've lost the thread. I get it. Take two:

The latest So There! argument from my commenters is that because radical Islamists will use Quran-burning among Americans as a recruitment tool and potentially ratchet up the violence against American troops or other targets, therefore Islam as a whole is not a peaceful religion. So There!

See what I mean? It's hard to know where to start. But I suppose I will start with a question, as simple one, and if the commenters can honestly answer the question, maybe we can move on from there.

Why do you want to burn the Quran in the first place?

I mean, I think I know the answer. I think it's clear that a certain segment of the American right wants to provoke the exact reaction described above. Their worldview begins and ends with "teh mooslems is scary!" and they need occasional validation of this. That's why a peaceful Sufi congregation in Manhattan seeking to fix up its existing overflow prayer location has been transformed into a hive of radical jihadists bent on building a "victory mosque" at Ground Zero. And it's why the haters--Fred Phelps has been doing this for years, and you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks Phelps is anything other than a giant douchebag--that's why the haters want to burn Qurans. That's why, in a fit of utter imbecility, the burners have argued that "moderate Muslims" should want to burn the Quran, too: If you aren't willing to burn your own holy book, it just proves that you're a terrorist too, and that I'm right to hate all of you, even the moderates.

Otherwise, why do it? What's the point? What do you prove by burning a book, any book, ever?

Memo to J. Rawson Schaller

To: J. Rawson Schaller
CC: Patrick Dorwin
From: Your Humble Folkbum
Re: At least my co-bloggers have never threatened to kill anyone

Beauty may only be skin deep, but ugly goes straight through to the RSS feed. Someone needed to post this for posterity, and I gladly volunteered.

Note to casual readers: DO NOT click to embiggen the picture (or read the google cache, here) if you are offended by foul language and conservative commentators being open and honest about their murderous feelings for once.

Also, DO NOT click to embiggen the picture (or read the google cache) if you don't really care about cheddarsphere blog-wars. You will just end up asking questions that have no good answers.

Quote of the Day

by folkbum

Americans like [Andy] Schlafly think Jesus was the first coming of Milton Friedman.

Abstain from This Policy

By Keith R. Schmitz

A chart in yesterday's New York Times proves what a dismal failure the right wing's fairy tale abstinence only policy in particular and opposition to birth control in general has been to our country and to the young girls who have to live with the consequences.

Click here to access the piece by Charles Blow and pull up the chart under multimedia on the left.

With some graphic help the chart show lists countries of the world sorted under columns for teen births per 1,000 for 1970 and 1998, teenage abortions per 1,000 and teen sex by percentages.

The US has a high percentage of teens having sex, but there are some with higher.

It's the other columns that point up to the failure of our approach. In all countries births per thousand have fallen since 1970. In the US they have fallen by about 75%.

But look down the list. In almost all countries the rate of teen pregnancy fell by half or more, except in Catholic countries. Granted the numbers are smaller but in Ireland they actually rose.

These numbers tell us a lot. They tell us that as a country we have to thing more pro-actively about birth control and sex education. I know what's going on in many little heads. "We already shove birth control down kindergarteners' throats." We obviously are doing a bad job of it or no job. In the more open Danish society with kids having more sex than here, the teen birth rate is a minescule 8.1 per 1,000. Heck, many of these kids could be married.

These numbers also tell us about yet another failed conservative policy. In this case we have to do more than just tell kids to keep their knees together.

Yet another failed policy that joins the trash pile of others -- the Iraq invasion, deficit spending, tax cuts for the wealthy, mindless tax cutting. On top of that they want us to go to so-called "consumer-based health care," another faux-populist lame-brained idea that has worked no where on a mass scale and is simply another means to transfer wealth upward.

Yet another failed policy that tells us what this election is all about -- taking away the keys of government from conservatives and letting folks from the reality based side drive.

The magic of context II: Obama explains his "civilian national security force." Pre-emptively. To the Military Times.

by folkbum

Earlier in the week, we learned that if you take a sentence or two out of context--as the right-o-spherians are wont to do--you can "raise" all kinds of "questions," even though anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that the "questions" are ridiculous on the face and and downright sinister upon examination.

However, the outrage machine can be set to 11 because, you know, the object of their hate refuses to "answer" the "questions" or "explain what he means." Sorry, let me make that "DEMAND THAT THE MAN HIMSELF CLARIFY WHAT EXACTLY HE MEANS." As I should have said in that earlier post (having sadly forgotten the magic word), whallah!, pretty soon you have Barack Obama's secret plan to take away your guns and "re-educate" dissenters.

I wish I were exaggerating. The paranoia is that bad.

Thankfully, Barack Obama figured out, on the exact same day as he made his speech about service to the country in Colorado Springs, that he should elaborate on the idea. To the Military Times.

Actually, Obama doesn't make it explicit in the MT interview that he's following up on the ad-libbed line from his speech; in fact, I would bet the interview with the paper happened a day or a week before (but published on the same day) and, perhaps, it was the way he phrased things in the interview that led to his inserting the sentences in question into his speech. To refresh your memory, here's what Obama said that got the right-o's in a fury:

We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

Now consider this from Obama's Military Times interview (my bold):

Q: YOU SAID YOU DON’T WANT TO ROB PETER TO PAY PAUL, SO HOW ARE YOU GOING TO PAY PAUL? TROOP INCREASES ARE AN ENORMOUS EXPENSE.
A: [. . .] I should add, by the way, that part of the change that I want when it comes to Army and Marine structures is the mix of training that we’re providing and mix of personnel that are in these forces. One of the things I have been so impressed with is the heroic job that our men and women in uniform have done basically on the fly having to train themselves on the spot to function as engineers or function as social workers or function as translators or political consultants. There’s just been a whole bunch of work that has been done that we haven’t prepared people for. They learn on the job, but if anything Iraq should have given us a template for the kinds of skill sets that we’re going to have to provide to our military. And that’s true in Iraq. That’s true in Afghanistan. That also means, by the way, that we’re going to have to, I believe, reconfigure our civilian national security force. In a way that just hasn’t been done.

I mean, we still have a national security apparatus on the civilian side in the way the State Department is structured and [Agency for International Development] and all these various agencies. That hearkens back to the Cold War. And we need that wing of our national security apparatus to carry its weight. When we talk about reinventing our military, we should reinvent that apparatus as well. We need to be able to deploy teams that combine agricultural specialists and engineers and linguists and cultural specialists who are prepared to go into some of the most dangerous areas alongside our military.

Q: WHAT SECRETARY GATES HAS CALLED SOFT POWER.
A: Absolutely, but the only problem with soft power is the term itself makes people think it’s not as strong as hard power. And my point is that if we’ve got a State Department or personnel that have been trained just to be behind walls, and they have not been equipped to get out there alongside our military and engage, then we don’t have the kind of national security apparatus that is needed. That has to be planned for; it has to be paid for. Those personnel have to be trained. And they all have to be integrated and that is something that we have not accomplished yet, but that’s going to be what’s increasingly important in our future to make sure that our military has the support that it needs to do what it does the best, which is fight wars.

In other words, Obama wants to do exactly what he said he'd do in that speech, exactly what I tried to explain he would do to the fingers-in-ears panic-knobs who were sure Obama had let slip some reference to top-secret brown shirts.*

It's easy to see how, I think, the phrase "civilian national security force," which is what Obama just described here as everyone who makes diplomacy easier, the world healthier, and America's image stronger, could be inserted into his speech right after the lines "And we'll also grow our Foreign Service, open consulates that have been shuttered, and double the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 to renew our diplomacy." In the Colorado Springs speech, the phrase comes after his description, in the MT interview, the phrase comes before. But in both places, he's talking about the same thing, and it has nothing to do with arming civilians and enforcing the Obamacode.

So stop building the bunkers, my rightistatic friends. Ease up on the kung-fu grip you have around your guns and failsafe switches. Put the tin-foil hats back in the drawer.

And stop being so deliberately stupid.

(Hat tip to this amazingly brave and funny website.)

*A commenter inferred from the out-of context quote that Obama was planning to establish his version of the Stasi. Though the Stasi were the East German secret police, I accidentally called this a reference to Nazis. I would like to apologize to all the good Nazis I have slandered by confusing them with the Stasi.

What I learned from Wisconsin's conservatives this week*

by folkbum

When the Supreme Court of the United States overturns a state law duly enacted by the legislature of that state, it is an activist court making a bad decision by overturning the will of the people. Alternatively, when the Supreme Court of the United States overturns a state law duly enacted by the legislature of that state**, it has done a great service for the Constitution and our freedoms.

Also, when Supreme Court of the United States overturns a law duly enacted by the Congress of the United States, it is an activist court making a bad decision by overturning the will of the people. Alternatively, when Supreme Court of the United States overturns a law duly enacted by the Congress of the United States, it has done a great service for the Constitution and our freedoms.

* I went with this format since I figured "Heller High Water" was already taken by someone, somewhere. Also note that my wry irony about Scalia's "[i]t will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed" rationale made the front page of Daily Kos, but some other guy got the credit, though I clearly beat him to the punch.

** For purposes of this post, we'll consider Washington, DC, a state, since the principle is the same.

They Won't Even Need Hydrogen

By Keith Schmitz

Aptly named event from Americans for Prosperity on July 26th

Tailgate for Taxpayers...

Hot Air Tour