Sunday, August 15, 2010

Day after Saturday because I had shit to do links

If you are of the notion that more people voting in elections is a good thing, then this is good news. I'm sure it will produce the predictable voter-fraud hissy fit from the right, because how dare poor people walk around thinking they can go do things like vote (ew!), but it's a good way to balance out the voter suppression we've been seeing for the past ten years. I'm just waiting for the "They only sign up for welfare so they can register to vote twice" argument to pop up.

Andrew Breitbart has sex with goats.

You really can't get a better example of what is meant by white privilege then Dr. Laura's bizarre rant the other day. She now says she feels pretty bad about repeating the racial slur multiple times (but it was only to prove a philosophical point! Really!). No word on if she feels bad about telling the woman who was asking how to deal with racism from her husband's friends to basically suck it up, because apparently reacting poorly to being treated as some token black freak existing solely for the amusement and airing of racial grievances by white dudes is "hypersensitive".

This is pretty awesome. Bad-ass dancers from an Ohio strip club grow tired of constant protests from a local church, and decide to take them up on their offer to join their church - hanging out outside, grilling, and staging a protest of their own, in revealing clothing, with supersoakers. Woman with the "Beware the false prophets" sign, I love you. The pastor sounds like a total creep, promising the strippers that if they just turn to god, he "will put a roof over your heads, and your bills will be paid, and your children's bellies will be full". O RLY? Anyone that promises that sort of thing is full of shit, so good on them for calling out his little coffer-filling publicity stunt.

Via Balloon Juice - Third tier right-wing bloggers compile a list of the most terrible Americans that ever existed. Carter comes in at #1, beating out both John Wilkes Booth and Timothy McVeigh. I've got nothing, people. I can't even laugh at this level of stupid.

But at least it's still fun to pick on libertarians.

Lastly, let's talk about the Mosque in New York. So apparently Obama finally came out and scolded the bullies on the ground zero playground that keep throwing sand at kids that pray all funny. After much gushing over his mad 11 dimensional chess skillz and bravery yesterday to stand up for an unpopular project, this happy occasion turned out to be pretty short lived after Obama decided he needed to "clarify" his words the next day, after the predictable hissy-fit ensued. It's a damn shame. I would have gone all in if I were him, because in case he hasn't noticed by now, the fringe is going to paint him as a terrorist supporter no matter what, so he might as well be on the right side of history.

I don't know what to say about the "Ground Zero Mosque" at this point. This whole line of reasoning frustrates me, this idea that the moderate and fair stance is to claim that they have a right to build, but are totally assholes for doing so. I mean, no shit they have a right to build there. That's not even up for questioning. Allowing that Muslims have a "right" to practice their religion and build houses of worship isn't a reasonable compromise, dudes, so no cookies for you. I'm more interested in taking up the reasoning behind this mosque freak out, and why we are hiding behind this pseudo-civil "discussion" instead of just calling this crap out as the illogical, bigoted nonsense it actually is. I'm more interested in looking into why this freak out is happening now, instead of eight or nine years ago. As digby points out, the Bush administration, to their credit, was pretty good at keeping the crazy under wraps, it is now the combination of a well-funded right-wing media machine and the public's anxiety about the economy that is allowing the fringe a permanent home in mainstream discourse. The levels of xenophobia that the Republicans and the right-wing noise machine are sinking to as of late is becoming a bit unnerving. I have a feeling we will see a lot more of this in the next decade, as the GOP plan to appeal to the worst in it's ranks renders it obsolete. They aren't going to die quietly. And so this whole situation kind of makes me feel uneasy; I always try to take the more optimistic road and figured that this level of irrational fear and mistrust would never make it into mainstream discourse, and if it did, it would disgust people.

I was wrong.

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