You may recall the American Crisis of Atheist Attack Ads from last year around this time. You may also look forward to seeing them next year around this time. Why do we, as humans, repeat the same, useless behaviors, over and over? Because of this:

Last year, a similar campaign by the association drew strong reactions.

The head of the Catholic League linked secular humanists to figures like Hitler and the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Crazy Bill Donohue is our god.
[Pic via]

Bill Kristol, the man who is wrong about everything, in the world, consistently, thinks that this is the right strategy. Or, at least, he thinks that the entire speech was Barack Obama admitting that George Bush and Bill Kristol were right about everything and Michael Moore is fat. Maybe?

It seems a little weird, to us, that a blog post on the most important foreign policy issue of the day, written for "the Foreign Policy Initiative," opens with a Michael Moore quote, in order to make fun of Michael Moore, but we are not respected conservative thinker Bill Kristol, so what do we know?

Anyway. Bill Kristol thinks an Afghanistan troop surge is a good idea so basically this will be Vietnam 2. (3? 4?)

Contestant #1: Drudge sidekick Andrew Breitbart knows how to handle scientific disagreements.

Thank you. Contestant #2: Some crazy birther group, that put the following ad in the Washington Times about, I don't know, British monkey Obama something something.

Who is the biggest wingnut of this day? Choose, why don't you? [Pic via]

First up, the mighty Glenn Beck offers a new way to look at Obama's health care proposal:

"We're the young girl saying, 'No no! Help me!' and the government is Roman Polanski. In the end I think we're all going to be cowering in France."

The Obama administration is a child rapist. He just might be on to something. Next up, Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden gets truly provocative about Obama bowing down to foreign leaders:

But Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy '60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to "hope" for "change." It's no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of "the 57 states" is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.

How much more pride would our nation have today if only Obama's mother had been attracted not to the lowly dirt-people of the third world, but rather to fine American men, like, say, Wesley Pruden, pictured? Vote for the most outrageous American hero, below!

The "Black People Tweet Like This" thing does not hold a candle to the "antisemitic British National Party members tweet like that" thing, in terms of windows into confusing and unfamiliar worlds.

It's all here: death, UFOs, swine flue as UN extermination plot, and typos.

‘Antarctica's Icy Lakes Home to Plethora of Viruses' ‘American Exceptionalism' 'Brit Tapes UFOs Beaming Up Water Buffalo'

from the UK today: 'IM NOT BEING RACIST BUT ETHNICS ARE PANDERING TO ETHNICS AND GAYS' 'I think am on another plant with you'

‘UN GLOBALIZED tyranny' ‘Flu Found In Denmark Minks' ‘FROM OUR PIG WITH LIPSTICK IN CHARGE' ‘FBI Boss Taken To School On Marijuana Reality'

'seek medical help & stop ur filthy acts & golden showers' 'Palestinians used by Arabs 2incite vilence Comeon Israel just build the Temple'

'#bestfeeling the joy when you see the look on someones face when they call you a "racist!" & you reply I KNOW!'

'Lucifer is Mechanical – God Miraculous: keep this in mind' Keep that in mind when? When you read the words *deus ex machina*? Actually...

'govt using Sesame Street/"elmo" to indoctrinate kids on H1N1' 'White Pride Emails' 'MightBeALiberal if u think hilary clinton isn't a dyke'

So. Here are some more data points for the "what Twitter does to your brain" scientists.

The conference, organized by Phyllis Schlafly (she is still around!), took place in St. Louis, which was a neat trick because it meant that even though five congress members and various presidential contenders were there, no one actually covered it, because who wanted to go to St. Louis this weekend?

Issues discussed: "How To Counter The Homosexual Extremist Movement," "How To Stop Socialism In Health Care" and "How To Recognize Living Under Nazis & Communists."

Oh, and Joe the Plumber was there.

Wurzelbacher was given a golden wrench and golden plunger by Reps. Price and King, the purpose of which was to throw a wrench in the works and to flush out Washington, according to the Free Press. He lamented the value placed on good speeches by politicians, quoting Benjamin Franklin's comment that "well done is better than well said."

And Michele Bachmann! Whoo boy! She said that if conservatives take control of Congress next year they will "repeal" ACORN and "defunding the left is going to be so easy and it's going to solve so many of our problems."

And Mike Huckabee wants to somehow send the east side of Manhattan adrift, into the sea, because of the UN building and because he is a terrorist.

According to Huckabee, "it's time to get a jackhammer and to simply chip off that part of New York City and let it float into the East River, never to be seen again!" We are pretty sure the UN building would be seen again! If it avoided running aground in Williamsburg it would probably just wash up on Montauk.

O'Keefe told the Washington Post he acted independently in making his ACORN videos. But the Village Voice has traced a series of benefactors to the firebrand: The Leadership Institute conservative think tank appears to have given O'Keefe $4,000 for a monitor with which to make his movies, and $500 to start his conservative newspapers. Then there's the "small government group" through which the money of PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel came.

Thiel's people told the Voice that Thiel didn't know of O'Keefe's videos until he saw them on YouTube. But they acknowledged that $10,000 of his contributions reached O'Keefe. O'Keefe's estranged friend Liz Farkas apparently told the publication that Thiel ponied up a full $30,000, and that the money was used to produce the ACORN video. Thiel's people disputed that larger sum, to the Voice. But they acknowledged that the group Thiel funded was behind another O'Keefe video, in which fake, oversized "Sweepstakes" checks are delivered to various families and revealed to be bills, a stunt designed to illustrate the scale of recent federal bailouts.

Any modestly resourceful college kid knows how to stretch $10,000, so it's quite possible Thiel's money ended up being used on the ACORN video, even if he didn't know it. Why not embrace the fact? Here is a young man whose clever reporting stunt showed up the mainstream national media and may well be the undoing of its subject. O'Keefe started a conservative college publication, just like Thiel, and wants to bolster right-wing politics using YouTube, just like Thiel.

Besides, with his funding of O'Keefes earlier video, Thiel has gotten over his earlier disdain of media producers who "try to be gratuitously meaner and more sensational than the next person... like a terrorist who is trying to stand out and shock people." Those were the words Thiel used to condemn Valleywag as "the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda;" they would seem to fit O'Keefe nicely.

(Thiel pic by Auren Hoffman)

We haven't made any of these up:

* SPEECHLESS - SILENCING THE CHRISTIANS
* THUGOCRACY - FIGHTING THE VAST LEFT WING CONSPIRACY
* DEFUNDING PLANNED PARENTHOOD
* ACTIVISM AND CONSERVATISM: FIT TO A TEA (PARTY)
* THE THREAT OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
* OBAMACARE: RATIONING YOUR LIFE AWAY
* MARRIAGE: WHY IT'S WORTH DEFENDING AND HOW REDEFINING IT THREATENS RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
* THE NEW MASCULINITY
* WAIT NO MORE: FINDING FAMILIES FOR WAITING KIDS
* TURNING THE TIDE IN YOUR GENERATION

Nor did we make up what that "New Masculinity" session was apparently about: protecting the children from being turned gay by Playboy. Take it away, Chief of Staff to Senator Tom Coburn:

A session on the "New Masculinity" went deep into the reasons why, and how, conservatives could prevent children from entering pre-marital domestic partnerships or from embracing the "malady" of homosexuality. Michael Schwartz, the chief of staff to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), told the audience that praising one's parents in nightly prayers could enforce the notion of marriage, and telling children that "all pornography is homosexual pornography" could prevent them from becoming perverted.

Yes, of course!

And Mitt Romney, who is the Republican party's leading 2012 contender (and a so-called "centrist!") is openly praising this weirdo nonsense hard-right conspiratorial mystical Mormon pseudohistory called The 5,000 Year Leap. (The book also informs Glenn Beck's bizarre interpretation of history and the constitution.) It is hard to overstate how weird and fucked up that is and how terrifying the idea of these people returning to power is. This is like a 1988 speech from Paul Tsongas in which he announces that he's been seriously studying The Illuminatus! Trilogy, except all that just would mean was that he was high, not that he believed the Rothschilds banded together with Ho Chi Minh, the civil rights movement, and the Council on Foreign Relations to establish a New World Order.

After fighting in Korea, Novak covered politics for the AP and The Wall Street Journal. In 1963, with his wife working in President Johnson's White House as a secretary, Novak teamed up with with Rowland Evans to start the "Evans-Novak Political Report, a daily syndicated column that Novak continued writing, after Evans' retirement, up through this last February.

Novak was a great reporter. That's undeniable. He also used his column to advance a conservative political agenda, which is, obviously, an old tradition that has made something of a comeback. But his advocacy journalism skirted ethical lines on multiple occasions, especially in his constant use of anonymous sources. In 1972, he quoted an unnamed Democratic Senator as saying presidential candidate George McGovern's platform was "amnesty, abortion, and legalization of pot." The catchier "amnesty, abortion, and acid" line caught on, though critics accused Novak of inventing the quote. Decades later, Novak claimed the quote was from Thomas Eagleton, McGovern's eventual running mate. Eagleton had just died, and thus couldn't confirm it.

And, more recently, Novak became famous for his revealing that Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame was a covert CIA operative, as part of a Bush White House attempt to smear a critic who'd correctly noted that they were inventing intelligence to justify a war against Iraq. Reporting that is generally understood to be a crime, but Novak was never prosecuted.

Novak's role, which he understood and embraced, was to act as a proxy for political attacks by conservative politicians. You leaked your smear to Novak, and he reported that "neutral" Republican sources said something nasty about McGovern or Joe Wilson or even Fred Thompson. He was also generally considered a mean old man and his brain tumor was diagnosed after he was hospitalized after he hit a pedestrian in his black corvette and kept driving, claiming to be unaware that he'd hit anything.

He was 78, and a kinder remembrance may be found at his hometown paper.

In defending himself, Beck cites his show that aired earlier in the evening where he assembled a round-table of like-minded wingnut folk (Glenn Beck never, ever has anyone on whose viewpoints run contrary to his own) to examine the backgrounds of the people Barack Obama has surrounded himself with in regards to health care reform. Sounds fair enough, right? But what Beck fails to mention is anything about his show's opening segment where he brayed on and on like a goddamn hyena with a wasp up its ass about eugenics, a segment laced with comparisons of Obama to Hitler and the Nazis. Of course, he wraps all of this horseshit up with a pretty little bow by dropping numerous coy little disclaimers, all of which essentially translate to, "I'm not saying Obama's a Nazi, but Obama's a Nazi." And oh, he also cried over the thought that his cerebral palsy-stricken daughter might not have been allowed to live under "Obamacare" eugenics.

So yeah, Glenn Beck's not a fearmonger. And now you know.

Oh, and one last thing — Plenty has been made lately about advertisers dropping their sponsorships of Beck's show. Well, besides all of the pharmaceutical company ads and spots run by companies selling gold commodities, there are a few other major corporations still advertising on Beck's show that I noticed tonight. They include: UPS, HSBC, Visa, Pearle Vision and Broadview Home Security, just to name a few. Just saying.

In Sunday's Parade magazine, Bill O'Reilly writes a long, glowing tribute headlined "What President Obama Can Teach America's Kids." It's not like a sarcastic "he can teach the kids to be a secret radical communist" thing either.

"Barack Obama, a youngster in Hawaii without his parents around, has toughed it out and become one of history's great stories, no matter what happens going forward," he writes at the end. "What he has achieved in his 48 years is simply astounding. Consider the odds. The United States is a nation of more than 300 million citizens. Only one person is currently the Commander in Chief. That man had no fatherly guidance, is of mixed race, and had no family connections to guide him into the world of national politics. That adds up to one simple truth that every American child should be told: 'If Barack Obama can become the President of the United States, then whatever dream you may have can happen in your life.'"

Now most of this inspiring life story and only-in-America stuff was covered by almost everyone else back in January, and none of it is even remotely controversial or scandalous, but admiring a man you disagree with is not a very popular concept in the partisan media.

Of course Bill has always held himself to be more independent than true-blue GOP water carriers (even when that is patent bullshit), and he has generally shown no desire to be thought of as a right-wing talk radio shock jock, but his self-declared independence rarely stops him from whole-heartedly embracing the arguments and language of Republican talking points on nearly every issue. (He's still going after GE and abortion doctors, obviously.)

But: Obama did his show. Obama showed him that courtesy, and Bill didn't end up being one of the leaders of the right-wing media revolt against the president.

Let this be a lesson to Democrats: doing O'Reilly may grant him unwarranted legitimacy, but it'll shut him up, too. If you're nice enough to him he'll write a long column about how pretty you are and how much he wants to kiss you and stuff.

We'll monitor the usual channels for outraged conservative blogger responses to this bit of turncoatery.

There is some legislation being drawn up that will hurt FedEx, but not affect UPS, and so FedEx has launched a little campaign against this legislation. One might think that the American Conservative Union, one of the most powerful voices in the conservative movement since the group's founding in the 1960s, would be opposed to this legislation on principle, because the legislation is pro-union and might hurt the ability of a successful corporation to make a profit by any means necessary.

Well, they were opposed to it. At least, they were when they sent FedEx a letter asking for $3 million in exchange for a targeted lobbying campaign on behalf of a position they theoretically already believed in. But when FedEx declined to mail them a check, suddenly the ACU was signing off on a pro-UPS letter decrying the lies and manipulations of FedEx! Funny, right?

Here's what a $3 million donation to a conservative advocacy group gets you:

"For the activist contact portion of the plan, we will contact over 150,000 people per state multiple times at a cost of $1.39 per name or $2,147,550 to implement the entire program," the letter says. "If we incorporate the targeted, senator-personalized radio effort into the plan, you can figure an additional $125,000 on average, per state" for an estimated 10 states. The total would be $3,397,550."
[...]
Under the grass-roots program ACU proposed, "Each person will be contacted a total of seven times totaling nearly 11 million contacts total in the 10 targeted states." "Within 72 hours of an agreement on the whole plan, we can have the data sets delivered and the first round of e-mail ready for delivery," the offer states. "Within seven days, the mail can be in the USPS system and the phone call delivered."

But, you know, if you don't pay up, the ACU will lobby against you, free market capitalism be damned.

The ACU puts on the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the most important gathering of conservative leaders of the year and a necessary stop for all would-be Republican presidential candidates. Their Directors list is a who's who of conservative thought leaders past and present. And this is all pretty embarrassing!

(And Paul Krugman notes that this sort of behavior by right-wing think tanks has been suggested before, though, as we said, it has never been revealed so explicitly.)

Update: UPS responds: "UPS has not paid or contracted with any signers of the letter, including the American Conservative Union, to obtain their support on this issue. Any suggestion that UPS has done so is false." And, you know, the ACU could've just signed on to the anti-FedEx letter out of spite, and not for cash!

Why would any good, patriotic American say such a thing in a discussion about border protection? Because all of our politicians crave is the approval of Europeans and to hold on to their cushy jobs and it's going to take an attack from Bin Laden to wake America up to the fact that our leaders need to use "as much violence as necessary" to firmly establish our place in the world. Meanwhile Beck just sat there nodding his approval.

Yeah.

The neoconservatives aren't even trying to hide their pulling for such things anymore. And these are the same people who revel in cloaking their deranged beliefs in patriotism, mind you.

Happy 4th of July weekend everybody!

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Dear internet: to say something or someone is "racist" is not saying "it or he or she would like to round up every Hispanic person and shoot them" or "it or he or she is just as bad at Hitler." But it reliably enrages at least one dumb commenter every time we suggest that a white person did or said or drew something racist. So hey, we will just keep it up! All the weird resentments are just floating to the surface, these days! If everyone is so mad at the Political Correctness for not allowing them to mock a Puerto Rican woman with pinatas and sombreros then they will surely appreciate it if we just give up on the friendly polite euphemisms and say "oh hey that is racist."

But is this racist? Sure, probably. Who knows what the fuck is going on here, besides the magazine equivalent of a group of children acting out to get a rise out of grown-ups.

The crazy talk started earlier tonight when Talking Points Memo front page editor Justin Elliott noticed an odd passage contained in an article in The Hill about conservative strategies for opposing Sotomayor's nomination which focused on a speech she gave in 2001 at the Berkeley School of Law.

Conservative critics have latched onto the speech as evidence that Sotomayor is an "activist judge," who will rule on the basis of her personal beliefs instead of facts and law.

"Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see," Sotomayor said. "My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage."

Sotomayor also claimed: "For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir - rice, beans and pork - that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events."

This has prompted some Republicans to muse privately about whether Sotomayor is suggesting that distinctive Puerto Rican cuisine such as patitas de cerdo con garbanzo - pigs' feet with chickpeas - would somehow, in some small way influence her verdicts from the bench.

Curt Levey, the executive director of the Committee for Justice, a conservative-leaning advocacy group, said he wasn't certain whether Sotomayor had claimed her palate would color her view of legal facts but he said that President Obama's Supreme Court nominee clearly touts her subjective approach to the law.

"It's pretty disturbing," said Levey. "It's one thing to say that occasionally a judge will despite his or her best efforts to be impartial ... allow occasional biases to cloud impartiality.

"But it's almost like she's proud that her biases and personal experiences will cloud her impartiality."

Having seen this piece on the possible Republican "eating pigs' feet with chickpeas clouds judicial impartiality" line of attack, another Talking Points Memo staffer, Brian Beutler, thinking that there's no way any of this could actually be true, followed up with The Hill's Alexander Bolton, who reported the piece, for confirmation that this asshattery was really being taken into consideration.

I called Bolton earlier today and asked him whether this was for real—whether any conservatives were genuinely raising this issue. He confirmed, saying, "a source I spoke to said people were discussing that her [speech] had brought attention...she intimates that what she eats somehow helps her decide cases better."

Bolton said the source was drawing, "a deductive link," between Sotomayor's thoughts on Puerto Rican food and her other statements. And I guess the chain goes something like this: 1). Sotomayor implied that her Latina identity informs her jurisprudence, 2). She also implied that Puerto Rican cuisine is a crucial part of her Latina identity, 3). Ergo, her gastronomical proclivities will be a non-negligible factor for her when she's considering cases before the Supreme Court.

This definitely beats the time Strom Thurmond tried to derail the nomination of Thurgood Marshall by saying that the robes worn by justices would fit him too tight around the crotch, thereby impairing his judgment. And no, this didn't actually come from The Onion.

Conservative Whispers To Hill Reporter Of 'Concern' About The Impact Diet Will Have On Her Jurisprudence [TPM]
Critics focus on Sotomayor speech in La Raza journal [The Hill]

The National Republican Senatorial Committee launched a robo-call campaign directed at 100,000 Democratic voters. The call includes a quote from the former president talking about how much he loves Specter, the senator who yesterday switched to the Democratic Party from the Republican side.

Then it reminds them he's against card-check union votes, a huge priority for organized labor right now. Have fun campaigning for this guy, Mr. President!

Specter is now already playing serious defense, having been framed as both a turncoat opportunist and now as a Bush patsy. He should have come out of the gate yesterday blasting, tying himself to some key issue instead of just blathering about how he couldn't get elected without switching parties. But he's a sitting senator so he's probably still unbeatable.

(Update: We originally referenced the 2009 primary, but Specter's senate seat is up in 2010.)

The last major populist ranter, Lou Dobbs, now appears to be close to finishing out his days at sad, third place CNN, where even the network president is taking potshots at the xenophobic anchor's ratings ("He could stand to attract a few more viewers").

Beck, a "rodeo clown" and would-be comedian, is clearly planning to avoid this fate by blending his political ravings with weird, wacky hijinks that prove he is just that crazy — and just that hard to look away from. If it's easy to become inured to his strategy day-to-day, reviewing the collective evidence really drives the point home, as seen in the clips compiled by video intern Luke Sacherman and posted at left.

Glenn Beck: Flash in the pan or enduring part of the Fox News circus? Only time will tell, but neither Fox not America's many populist demagogues over the centuries have yet lost by underestimating their audience.

Witness the way Douthat packages his debut Times column. A dyed-in-the-wool Republican can imagine Douthat to be a party-line ideologue: The headline reads "Cheney for President;" the reader is invited to fantasize about a "disciplined and ideologically consistent" 2008 campaign by the former veep, which is "good for the country"; Cheney is a "diamond-hard-distillation" of "'real conservatism'" with a likely platform of endless warmongering and cuts to George W. Bush's pansy welfare programs (ummm...).

A reader who hadn't finished his coffee might have glossed over the scare quotes Douthat put around the term "real conservatism," or the line "a Cheney defeat could have been good for the Republican Party." And he might have missed how Douthat is against arresting torturers, but wants torture at the center of national debate for the same reason he wanted Cheney in a presidential campaign: So that it can be exposed as politically bankrupt and purged from the Republican Party along with an entire strain of conservatism.

We need to hear more: What was done and who approved [torture], and what intelligence we really gleaned from it...

Here Dick Cheney... has an important role to play. He wants to defend his record; let him defend it. And let the country judge.

Basically, Douthat just wrote a column slamming Cheney, torture and various other things Democrats hated about the Bush presidency. Which is very much what one would expect from a columnist at the liberal Times.

But Douthat's conservative, and sounds conservative, so it's not cliché. You see? Very cunning, this one. Let's hope he keeps using his powers for good rather than evil.

That snub, alone, was widely noted, at especially on Twitter, where McCain is very proud to be in the "top twits" list.

But if you listened right, it was easy to hear the former Republican presidential candidate compounding the insult when he added, "I've left out somebody's name and I'm going to hear about it."

You can read that at least two ways, perhaps by design: "I've left out someone in particular's name, on purpose" or "I've inevitably on accident left out someone's name, lord knows who, probably someone in a desolate flyover state, but please don't make a joke about my age and fading memory capacity, thanks."

Assuming that McCain hates his former running mate is actually the charitable answer that gives him the benefit of the doubt. That alternative is that he's already forgotten about the woman who ran at the bottom of his ticket like six months ago, poised to someday inherit the presidency.

Ya, he hates her.