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Hitler, Darwin and the Sasquatch
Posted by General JC Christian, Jesus' General on July 9, 2009 at 5:39 PM.

This week I review "The End of Darwinism," a book praised by Pat Buchanan and panned by Ed Brayton, one of the most evil men in North America.

Here's my review. Please cast a vote to make it the top positive review if you are so inclined:

Once every generation, human kind is introduced to a truth so self-evident, we are left pounding the sides of our heads with large slabs of salami, wondering aloud how we did not see the truth much earlier. Such is the case with the first few chapters of Eugene Windchy's book, "The End of Darwinism."

His chapter tying Darwin to Adolph Hitler, Karl Marx, and Joseph Stalin was as well argued as anything I've seen since Art Bell first proposed his theory that sasquatch are biological androids built by draco-reptillian aliens bent on eating our gonadial tissues.

That said, I wish had Windchy taken a little more time and tied Darwin to someone even more evil, say, Perez Hilton, or perhaps the Octomom. But that's minor quibble. Hitler serves the author's purpose well enough. Octomom would be just gilding the shamwow.

Unfortunately, that's as good as this book gets. And that's sad, because it could have been so much more if he'd gone that extra step and exposed the evolutionists for the purveyors of sexual perversion they are.

Sure, he's not the only creationist whose failed to expose the evolutionists' depraved agenda. Read my other reviews and you'll see me taking other authors to task for this same thing. But, you'd think that someone who did such a great job exposing Stalin's love affair with Darwin would notice that biologists are trying exploit "our ancestral ties to animals" to seduce us into a living the modern bonobo lifestyle-- a lifestyle of peace where every argument is settled with a fluid-flinging round of hot ape thingy fencing, tongue spelunking, or wang swallowing. That, my friends, is un-American!

Or, worse yet,they want us to emulate the giraffe, where the male is forced to gargle the female's urine before he engages in the procreative act. That is not the kind of world I want for myself. And it's definitely not the kind of world I want for our children. I'll be damned if I'm going to sit quietly while good well-meaning Christian authors ignore any evolutionist plot to get us to gargle our wives' urine.

That is why I can only give this book 4 stars.

After Casting Sole No Vote on Slavery Memorial, Rep. King Keeps Digging Deeper
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on July 9, 2009 at 3:37 PM.

Rep. Steve King, a right-wing Republican from Iowa, was the only member of Congress to oppose a measure this week to honor the role slaves played in building the U.S. Capitol in the Capitol Visitors Center. In his initial explanation, he said his vote had something to do with including the phrase "In God We Trust" in the Visitors Center. The connection between the two is clear only to King.

Faiz Shakir reports on the Iowan's second explanation, which King offered during a radio interview:

"[O]f the 645,000 Africans that were brought here to be forcibly put into slavery in the United States, there were over 600,000 people that gave their lives in the Civil War to put an end to slavery. And I don't see the monument to that in the Congressional Visitor Center, and I think it's important that we have a balanced depiction of history."

Let me see if I can explain this to King in a way he'll understand. The Capitol Visitors Center includes information relating to the building itself. That's why the Capitol Visitors Center exists -- to offer visitors information about the Capitol.

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Airing of Grievances: Right-Winger Incensed over 'Commie's' Jab at 'Saturday Night Fever'
Posted by Roy Edroso, Alicublog on July 9, 2009 at 2:45 PM.

If you're having trouble understanding the depth of conservative commitment to Sarah Palin's ridiculous assumption of martyrdom, John Derbyshire offers an instructive sidelight at The Corner. He starts with a typical "The Fuhrer was sweet, the Fuhrer was kind" defense of Pinochet, but gets to his bigger fish: a new film by "Chilean commie film director Pablo Larrain" called Tony Manero, which sounds like an American Psycho-style knock on the Pinochet years (I haven't seen it, and evidently neither has Derbyshire).

That's bad and silly enough. What lifts Larraín's feeble bit of ComSympery to the level of outrage is the particular cultural icon he picked on as the target for his venom. It is none other than Tony Manero, the character played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Larraín's wretched, filthy movie is in fact titled Tony Manero.

 

Is there no decency any more? No restraint? No respect for our cultural heritage?

Chile had a narrow escape from Marxist-Leninist tyranny. We should never cease to remind the Left of that, if only because it annoys the hell out of them. Pinochet, with all his many faults, was a patriot who saved his country. We should keep saying that, too; and Pablo Larraín's absurd movie gives us the opportunity. It might all have gone unmentioned for another year or so if not for Larraín; but, as Tony Manero says to the customer in the paint store: "You brung it up."

I charitably assumed at first that Derbyshire was making a subtle joke, but as the screed wore on I realized that he was genuinely enraged that an art film few Americans will see trifles with the sacred images of Tony Manero and Augusto Pinochet. Even stranger, he found this cultural offense a suitable launching pad for new and louder defenses of the murderous dictator, to which most Americans are likely to respond, "Who are Pinoshay and Ayendi?"

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Panetta: CIA Lied to Congress
Posted by Booman, Booman Tribune on July 9, 2009 at 1:34 PM.

While the details are disputed, it appears that the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Leon Panetta went to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence late last month and confessed that the CIA had misled them, given them incomplete briefings, and (at least once) affirmatively lied to the committee during the Bush years.

This is no surprise. The Bush administration didn't believe in congressional oversight or the rule of law. It's a positive development that Panetta investigated the record and came clean with a promise to not repeat the mistakes in this administration. I hope we will learn some of the specifics of those deceptions, but that is not what concerns me here. What concerns me is the administration's response to this development.

The House Intelligence Committee has been working on legislation to address one of the key problems that arose during the Bush era. The law allows the administration to limit briefings to the so-called Gang of Eight (the Speaker/Minority Leader of the House, the Majority/Minority Leader of the Senate, and the Chairs/Ranking Members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees). It was as Ranking Member of the Senate Intelligence Committee that Jay Rockefeller was informed about key aspects of the NSA program. Rockefeller was concerned about the legality of the program but prohibited from even consulting a lawyer. He wrote a letter to Dick Cheney and put a copy in a secure safe. It was as Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee that Nancy Pelosi was informed about OLC rulings that allowed enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. She, too, was prohibited from sharing that information with anyone, including other members of the committee.

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Enough Psuedo-Feminist War-Mongering in the Name of Islamic Women
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on July 9, 2009 at 12:35 PM.

Sometimes hypocrisy is hard to discern, other times not so much.

When it comes to neoconservative claims that we have to occupy far-flung lands in order to defend Islamic women from their sons, brothers and husbands, it's nothing short of striking. After all, any mention of the "plight" of women in Christendom is dismissed by the very same conservative bobble-heads as the incoherent rantings of hairy-legged "feminazis."

I'm on a bunch of political press lists, including several from the Right. Today, I got this:

On Wednesday, French lawmakers met to discuss whether or not to legalize a nationwide ban of the burka, the head-to-toe dressing that Muslim women are expected, if not demanded, to wear. Academics present at the hearing called the tradition archaic and cult-like behavior. France, as it happens, has the largest Muslim minority out of every other European country.

Mano Bakh, an ex-Muslim banned from Iran for speaking out against Islamic radicalism, feels that US lawmakers should follow suit with evoking similar regulations.

Mano Bakh, it appears, is trying to join the prosperous ranks of "former Muslims" who tell right-wing activists that their virulent Islamophobia isn't racist at all, but is entirely justified. It's a great gig if you can land it.

“The Muslim religion belonged to a barbaric society that lived 1,400 years ago,” says Bakh. "Many of its facets are not applicable for today’s advanced world. The wearing of the burka is just one example.”

Of course, fake Western feminists (and I'm not talking about actual feminists -- you know, people who take issues that affect women seriously) don't give a damn about what the Islamic feminists they claim to care for actually want.

Case in point: the Burqa. I've met a large number of real, live feminists from majority-Islamic countries, and each and every one has said that dress is an obsession of Westerners, and that what they care about, fight for, and sometimes risk their safety over is reforming marriage and divorce laws, education, political participation, etc. What's more, they report that within their own, home-grown movements, women are themselves deeply divided over veiling. And, finally, because the dress issue is of interest to foreigners, it allows traditionalists to paint their indigenous fights as a product of Western meddling, endangering their persons and marginalizing their fights. Thanks for nothing.

That's not to say that indigenous women's rights activists don't benefit from international solidarity from their sisters and brothers abroad -- the point is that the expansion of rights is a domestic struggle that's worthy of support rather than something foreigners can realistically impose from without.

Let me leave you on an interesting note. In the midst of this whole French burqa brouhaha, IPS News sent a correspondent into the streets of Paris -- in neighborhoods with large Muslim populations. Guess what she found?

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Will the Dems Ever Grow a Spine?
Posted by Jill Hussein C., Brilliant at Breakfast on July 9, 2009 at 11:28 AM.

Can you imagine if the Republicans had the White House, the House of Representatives, and a 60-vote majority in the Senate?

We would have an evangelical theocracy and thermonuclear war with Iran AND North Korea right about now. Wouldn't that be swell?

But instead the Democrats have this kind of power, and they're STILL curled up in a fetal position in the corner, waiting for Newt Gingrich to steal their lunch money:

Senate Democrats spent their first full day holding 60 votes just as they have spent the previous 2 1/2 years without such a supermajority: scrambling to find Republican support for their key initiatives in order to choke off potential filibusters.

 

In short, Tuesday's seating of Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) did little to change the balance of power in the chamber.

Democrats have a large enough majority to pass bills without any GOP support, but they are grappling with internal divisions on key issues such as health care, climate change and union organizing. In addition, caucus leaders and President Obama would like at least some Republican backing on key measures so they can say they are enacting a bipartisan agenda, which then-Sen. Obama made a cornerstone of his 2008 campaign.

This is what happens when you listen to David Broder and the rest of the Washington press idiots who are hedging their bets in the current power structure and still sucking up to Republicans "just in case." Republicans are ruthless and brutal, and Democrats are wusses. It's really become that simple. Does anyone recall any effort whatsoever during the Bush years to seek "bipartisanship"? My recollection is eight years of "My way or the highway" and "You're with us or you're with the terrorists."

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Welcome to Post-Racial America! (No Black Kids Allowed)
Posted by Staff, AlterNet on July 9, 2009 at 10:38 AM.

Pretty stunning:

More than 60 campers from Northeast Philadelphia were turned away from a private swim club and left to wonder if their race was the reason.

"I heard this lady, she was like, 'Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?' She's like, 'I'm scared they might do something to my child,'" said camper Dymire Baylor.

The Creative Steps Day Camp paid more than $1900 to The Valley Swim Club. The Valley Swim Club is a private club that advertises open membership. But the campers' first visit to the pool suggested otherwise.

When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool," Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email. "The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately."

The next day the club told the camp director that the camp's membership was being suspended and their money would be refunded.

"I said, 'The parents don't want the refund. They want a place for their children to swim,'" camp director Aetha Wright said.

[...]

The explanation they got was either dishearteningly honest or poorly worded.

"There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club," John Duesler, President of The Valley Swim Club said in a statement.

'Paranoid' Netanyahu Calls David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel 'Self-Hating Jews'
Posted by Ben Armbruster, Think Progress on July 9, 2009 at 9:23 AM.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports today on the “atmosphere of permanent crisis” surrounding the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. According to the report, a handful of Netanyahu’s top aides “dislike each other: They are constantly badmouthing each other and blaming each other for leaks.” One aide even revealed that Netanyahu attacked President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior advisor David Axelrod as “self-hating Jews”:

Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office. Two months after his visit to Washington, he is still finding it difficult to communicat[e] normally with the White House. To appreciate the depth of his paranoia, it is enough to hear how he refers to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s senior aides: as “self-hating Jews.”

An aide also said that Netanyahu thought that his recent speech tacitly endorsing a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict (an endorsement that came with enormous caveats) “would become mandatory reading at schools in the United States, and when he realized that Obama gave no such order, he went back to being frustrated.” Matt Yglesias notes that Emanuel, who has taken a leading role in the Obama administration in pushing the two-state solution, has frustrated many in the right-wing American Jewish community for being too “tough” on the Israelis.

Toilet to Tap: Will Tampa Be Next to Use Reclaimed Water for Drinking?
Posted by Jennifer Vettel, Water Matters @ Columbia on July 9, 2009 at 8:32 AM.

Memo to Obama: You Can Do a Lot Better on Detainee Policy
Posted by Booman, Booman Tribune on July 9, 2009 at 6:01 AM.

Obama is doing a lot of things well, but he's screwing up his detainee policy very badly. Dealing with the Gitmo detainees is just not something you can finesse and resolve without taking a political hit. I know Congress is not cooperating and that that makes it nearly impossible to disposition these cases in a just manner. I know that other countries' willingness to take these detainees off our hands is limited, and that puts us in a real bind if we deem them too dangerous to release into our population and yet don't feel we can convict them in a court of law. I understand that neither the people nor the Congress will casually accept any Gitmo detainees being released in America even if the administration deems them harmless.

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We Need a Jobs Package, Not a Stimulus Package
Posted by Mike Lux, Open Left on July 9, 2009 at 5:01 AM.

This seems like Framing and Political Strategy 101 to me, but since few other people are talking in this way, let me just lay out a basic idea: all this talk about doing a stimulus package versus not doing a stimulus package is fundamentally besides the point. What we need is a comprehensive policy package that is very simply focused on one thing and one thing only: jobs.

I know the policy wonks on Capitol Hill may be confused by that paragraph because, they would say, well, a stimulus program would create jobs. Well, yeah, that is the idea of stimulus. But my point is this: the politics of a second stimulus package are a dead end. The politics of having a debate about a policy package that will create jobs is a helpful thing. Announcing a second stimulus package gets Democrats into a defensive crouch about why the first one failed, and gets us into that same "can we get to 60" dance with Ben Nelson, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins that caused the first stimulus bill to be pared back and rendered less effective.

Voters don't know what it means to say you are going to stimulate the economy, but they do know what a job is. And right now, what we need is jobs sooner rather than later. My point here is not to just rename the stimulus bill the jobs bill. In fact, there are quite a few things the White House and Congress can do to focus on jobs that don't involve just spending more, although more money will certainly need to be spent. Here is what I would include in a comprehensive package:

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Jeb Bush Proves Irony Is Not Dead
Posted by David Waldman, Daily Kos on July 8, 2009 at 5:00 PM.

It must be great to be able to run your brain through the dishwasher each night:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) tells Esquire that President Obama didn't tell voters what he was going to do during the presidential campaign.

Said Bush: "Barack Obama would not have gotten elected if he'd let us in on his secret plan prior to the election. He would not have gotten elected if he'd said, 'My idea is to create a $1.8 trillion deficit for the next fiscal year. My idea is to spend $750 billion over the next ten years on a government-sponsored, government-subsidized health-care policy. My idea is to create a massive cap-and-trade system [based on the idea] that CO2 is [a] pollutant and we need to tax it in a massive way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.' Those ideas, which are now embedded in his budget, and the ideas in the stimulus package, weren't central in his campaign."

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Sen. John Cornyn Blames Exorbitant Travel Costs on Size of Texas
Posted by Ben Armbruster, Think Progress on July 8, 2009 at 3:32 PM.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) has tried to portray himself as an upstanding lawmaker dedicated to fiscal restraint. He has frequently criticized “wasteful spending” in the federal government and even called President Obama’s spending plans “reckless.”

Last month, Politico published a chart illustrating the transportation costs from the offices of all 100 U.S. Senators. Topping off the list was Cornyn, who has spent over $150,000 on travel costs during the first half of the 2009 fiscal year.

When a local ABC News affiliate in Dallas (WFAA) asked him about his expensive travel habits, Cornyn called Politico’s report “a cheap shot.” The reporter then asked the obvious follow-up, “In what sense was it a cheap shot? They were using the Secretary of the Senate information?” However, Cornyn wouldn’t budge and instead decided to dig in:

CORNYN: Oh yeah, not every state is the same. When you represent a state as big as Texas and traveling home from Washington D.C. every weekend, it unfortunately costs some money.

The “Texas is a big state” defense seems plausible on its face, but the same records Politico reported show that Texas’s other U.S. Senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R), spent nearly 43 percent less on travel than Cornyn during the same period ($87,651).

Moreover, California Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who represent a state similar to Texas in size and population (and one that’s further away from Washington, DC), spent less than Cornyn on travel combined (Boxer $72,473; Feinstein $29,917; Total $102,390).

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Evan Bayh Sticks Up for GOP Obstructionism
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on July 8, 2009 at 2:20 PM.

BAYH STICKS UP FOR GOP OBSTRUCTIONISM.... Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told his colleagues yesterday, "Don't let the Republicans filibuster us into failure. We want to succeed, and to succeed, we need to stick together."

It sounds like a pretty simple, common sense concept. The electorate has given Democrats a chance to govern, and expect them to deliver. Members of the caucus "may vote against final passage on a bill," Durbin said, but like-minded colleagues should at least reject the idea of "allowing the filibuster to stop the whole Senate." He concluded, "We ought to control our own agenda."

Some "centrist" Dems don't see it that way.

Evan Bayh, a moderate from Indiana, said he would not be inclined to vote to cut off a filibuster on a bill if he opposed the substance of the underlying measure, and he predicted his colleagues would feel the same way.

"Most senators aren't sheep," he said. "They don't just go blindly along without thinking about things, and I don't think we want them to do that."

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Conservatives Attempt Satire, Fail
Posted by Staff, Whiskey Fire on July 8, 2009 at 1:01 PM.

There's nothing more confusing than wingnut attempts at satire.

Here for instance is an emanation that recently made itself detectable over at NRO, where the zingers include advice, intended, if you please, as satirical, that the GOP might at some point begin filing "frivolous ethics complaints against all [Democratic] elected officials" (keep in mind that that this is supposed to be in the tradition of Swift (Ernie Swift, a guy I was in junior high school with, who liked to snort his own boogers for yuks)) -- something we're supposed devoutly to wish has never ever occurred to Republicans ever in the past (see also the 1990s, et passim) (and yes, this sentence is grammatical, motherfucker: the convoluted (but correct) structure mirrors the convolution of the logic being discussed, and so this sentence, in fine, exhibits a pleasing symmetry of content and form). We also learn that the election of Barack Obama, as well as the elaborate conspiracy to pull the wool over the eyes of the nation so that Sarah Palin always looks like an idiot whenever she talks, even though she's IN TRUTH Jesus, Buddha, Milton Friedman, and the Fucking Wizard of Oz wrapped into one magical moose-murdering package, is really all to do with a Sinister Hidden Agenda:

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