As you can see in this confusing and poorly shot amateur video, Gladney was brutally beaten by goons and required immediate medical care (he is the guy who is briefly knocked over 6 seconds into the video and who is then shown up and running around and acting pretty much fine for the remaining 3 minutes). He got a lawyer and went to the hospital. (Maybe even in that order!)

And then of course he is suddenly showing up at demonstrations and on Fox News in a wheelchair and all bandaged up, because the union thugs dropped a piano on his head while he was just eating some birdseed under a giant "X." Gladney needs your help!

Supporters cheered. Brown finished by telling the crowd that Gladney is accepting donations toward his medical expenses. Gladney told reporters he was recently laid off and has no health insurance. [emphasis added]

Right. Well. Basically all the miserable perversions of our entire broken political system are just kinda sitting there mocking you, right? This litigious uninsured charity case is the new spokesman of the Republican Party.

Quinn, wife of former Washington Post editor (and abundant life-liver) Ben Bradlee, divides the world into two groups: those who have attended one of her garden parties, who are good and honest people (like Ken Starr), and those who have not, who are outsiders, not to be trusted (like Hillary Clinton).

At some point, perhaps recently or perhaps in the distant past, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. turned down a party invitation from Sally Quinn. Or so we are forced to assume, from this vague account:

What nobody will say publicly, for fear of being called a racist, is that he is notorious, especially among many of his colleagues (black and white) at Harvard, for being short-tempered and arrogant. I have had personal dealings with him in which his behavior was not honorable.

Yes. We all know how terrified people are of calling black academics "short-tempered" and "arrogant," adjectives we feel like we've heard applied to every single nationally prominent black intellectual in the nation besides Skip Gates.

But Sally Quinn, she knows the important thing is that discrimination goes both ways. Gates may have been wrongfully arrested, but Quinn was once yelled at by a black cop. Quinn, though, was scared of the yelling black man, with the gun, and so she did not Talk Back to him. She is, indeed, wiser and more honorable than Professor Gates.

My friend had a similar incident that night and was not so prudent. She was arrested, handcuffed and hauled off to jail. Were we singled out because we were white? Who knows. But if we had been black and the police white, would it have been a story about racial profiling? Probably. As I sat there seething with my child in his car seat in back, the first thing I thought of was: this is how most black people must feel every day when confronting the police.

Don't laugh at that last bit: Quinn, like black people across the nation, lives in a racially segregated ghetto ruled and policed by the ethnic majority. It is called Georgetown.

Here is a sentence both staggering and hilarious in its unselfawareness: "I mentioned on National Public Radio this week that in response to the Gates & Crowley incident, many of my white friends and colleagues have been discussing reverse discrimination."

Fill in the blanks yourself: "I mentioned on National Public Radio this week that in response to [a recent racially charged incident], many of my white friends and colleagues have been discussing [one of the occasional or perhaps even imagined inconveniences suffered by the ruling classes elevated to the status of a national issue of great concern]." (Those blanks are perhaps too specific for the passage to function as a proper Mad Lib, but we wouldn't want Quinn's essential and important point to be lost.)

(Confidential to WPNI: hope we don't put you out of business with all this stealing of your precious fucking article!)

This coming Sunday, in New York City's Central Park, the Phelps clan plans to visit an Israeli tourism event, with a calendar entry that reads, "All the remainder can sit and stew in your own filth, remain filthy until the day God spews you out of the land and punishes you for never repenting from having killed Jesus. You will be destroyed at the hand of Antichrist Obama, and you will eat your little cute, chubby, Kosher babies."

But... why would Antichrist Obama kill the Jews who haven't apologized for killing Christ and will they eat their little cute, chubby, Kosher babies before or after their destruction? Think these things through, Westboro Baptist Church!

Also we can't believe they didn't think to go after thew Jews until this last April! Although Fred has personally disliked them for some time.

The Anti-Defamation League notes that as far back as 1996, Fred Phelps wrote in a flier, "Fag Jew Nazis are worse than ordinary Nazis….

Yes. Right. What??

Blogger Brendan Nyhan conducted the study with students from Duke. His hypothesis: a negatively phrased correction ("he is not a Muslim") would be less effective than a positive one ("he is a Christian"). But, hah, neither one was remotely effective at convincing participants that the President is a Christian. Until they added... a black person!

However, our hypothesis that the corrective affirmation would successfully reduce misperceptions was only supported when a non-white experimental administrator was present, suggesting a strong social desirability effect on the acceptance of corrective information. In addition, three-way interactions between the corrective affirmation, race of administrator, and party identification suggest that social desirability effects were more prevalent among Republicans.

But when fellow typical white people tried to convince Republicans that Barack Obama is a Christian, it "caused a backfire effect in which GOP identifiers became more likely to believe Obama is Muslim and less likely to believe he was being honest about his religion."

So, you know, cheers to The Washington Times and Fox.

Bill Ayers and Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who have nothing in common besides a lack of restraint, self-awareness, and connections to Barack Obama that they both wielded as weapons when he refused to endorse every aspect of their world-views and ideologies, pretended it was still 2008 and that anyone but Sarah Palin cared about them anymore and joined together to lead a march on behalf of the Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine.

While it would've been nice if maybe people with some vague connection to the peace process had led the march, these jokers did manage to get some headlines, so good work, Committee. Really helped your credibility, there.

Meanwhile Obama and Netanyahu will agree on precisely nothing, at all, because one is a pragmatist and the other wants us to nuke Iran.

This blogger is getting to the bottom of mustardgate. He is one of those guys who thinks he's really getting under the thin skin of those humorless liberals by making fun of our beloved messiah, when really we humorless liberals are actually just all like, really, dude? Two million-word posts on dijon mustard? Oh, also, he is a law professor at Cornell.

So in an impressive attempt to justify caring about the fact that Barack Obama likes dijon mustard, Professor Giggles decides to make it the story of how the media ignore Barack Obama's elitist love for elitist mustard, on his hamburgers and lunch sandwiches, and to prove this he cites like a dozen news articles, magazine stories and TV segments about how much Barack Obama likes the mustard that the media refuse to reveal that he likes, because they are IN THE TANK.

This man is a PROFESSOR OF LAW AT AN IVY LEAGUE SCHOOL. Meanwhile, Mark Steyn and Laura Ingraham have joined Hannity in taking this story beyond the internet. (But no one is reporting the real story here: Obama likes his burgers BURNT.)

And Canada is laughing at us, sirs. Canada.

Allison Iraheta, the most likable contestant left on this godforsaken God-and-pony show, went home the night after Danny Gokey sang his interpretation of Herod's slaughter of the children (it might've gone a little something like this). She was the last of this season's long string of sacrificial women and minorities (and a blind guy who wasn't very good), and her fate was sealed the day the producers decided the smug white-gospel walrus and West Hollywood's favorite aging jukebox musical understudy looked the funniest together.

THIS IS WHAT YOU'VE CHOSEN, AMERICA

Oh, right, the show itself. Uh, there were prerecorded performances from No Doubt, who arrived from 1995 to set right what's gone wrong with the future, maybe, and from Paula Abdul, who didn't sing into two microphones at once. "Daughtry," a band named after a chin-bearded fourth-place Idol finalist who's now actually sold more records than any other big old doughy white dude Idol contestant because he plays a style of music that Americans buy and listen to, sang something that went on forever.

And then, almost as an afterthought, they shuffled this season's actual contestants on stage to make the winners sit in chairs for a change. This all seemed to happen in a rush during the last ten minutes of the show. (WHY IS IT AN HOUR LONG?) Richard's boyfriend, the mewling triangle-mouthed worship-leader who doesn't actually sing like a damn worship-leader, was the first one declared safe. At that exact moment we knew it was over for Allison.

The girls who inexplicably wanted to sleep with Hat Giraud switched their allegiances to Kris, God remained in the pocket for Gokey, and Adam—who we still suspect is not as popular as everyone seems to think!—had basically received the biggest blow job Idol producers can give a contestant, in the form of the recap of the worrying shock "bottom three" appearance at the open of Tuesday's show.

Allison remained a kinda funny-looking Salvadoran high school girl from LA and so she was doomed.

All the judges should be brought up before a military tribunal for their refusal to offer the poor girl anything but the most perfunctory compliments, all of which were couched in niggling criticisms based on standards never applied to Gokey or Lambert (i.e., "you dressed funny this week").

So long, Allison! Slash has your back! Maybe you can join Velvet Revolver!

This would make him America's highest-ranking atheist, which is a bit like being America's best-selling prune juice-flavored soda (better luck next time, Congressman Pibb!). But, you know, he hasn't actually come out as one, yet.

"What he calls his 'humanistic' way of thinking he attributes largely to his Irish Catholic mother, a teacher, and his father, a secular Jew, a social worker and his hero."

See, "humanist" is a code-word. Like "lifelong bachelor." "Secular Jew" is not code, that really just means straight-up atheist. But still! Ted himself can't admit to it straight up!

Now Ted was appointed Senator, so the list of open atheist elected to the Senate is still hovering near "zero." But what a step forward, at least until he steps aside to let Beau Biden have the seat in a couple years.

Of course there is an open atheist in congress—Pete Stark of California! And, amusingly, the Secular Coalition of America has a list of 22 closet atheist lawmakers. Atheists are the new gays! How great would it be if there was a mass atheist outing campaign?

It's sad, isn't it, that America just elected it's first secret Muslim president, but we non-believers will probably never live to see the day a fellow godless nihilist reaches that mountaintop.

Without jackets or even ties.

The New York Times' investigative Page One report is pretty jaw-dropping. George W. Bush's people can't believe what they are hearing. That guy wouldn't even let you in the Oval Office without a jacket and tie, meanwhile the new president is running around practically naked:

[Barack Obama] showed up Saturday for a briefing with his chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, dressed in slacks and a gray sweater over a white buttoned-down shirt. Veterans of the Bush White House are shocked.

“I’ll never forget going to work on a Saturday morning, getting called down to the Oval Office because there was something he was mad about,” said Dan Bartlett, who was counselor to Mr. Bush. “I had on khakis and a buttoned-down shirt, and I had to stand by the door and get chewed out for about 15 minutes. He wouldn’t even let me cross the threshold.”

And That One is always taking his jacket off, right there in the Oval Office, on account of the rain forest heat, which he prefers. Senior adviser David Axelrod: "“He’s from Hawaii, O.K.? ..You could grow orchids in there."

OK, fine. Is that why the president likes to roam around his office, looking to pick off the weak, and ambushed his poor secretary, who had his feet up on his desk?

“Wow, Gibbs,” the press secretary recalls the president saying. “Just got here and you already have your feet up.” Mr. Gibbs scrambled to stand up, surprising Mr. Obama, who is not yet accustomed to having people rise when he enters a room.

To savor these moments of warlord dominance, the president likes some hippie "Green Dragon" tea, which is made by a company called "Honest Tea," probably out of human bones?

Michelle Bernard tried to warn us all, people, about the Obamas doing "God knows what" in the White House. But we didn't listen. Now the ties are coming off and it's just terrible and the next thing you know actual work will be getting done. (Rahm still looks hot and well dressed, though, which is nice.)

Trouble is, Obama apparently forgot to ask Roberts to bring a Bible. Roberts, who can't tie his shoes or be trusted with sharp objects, obviously can't remember on his own, and Obama damn sure doesn't keep that particular book handy. So everyone just stood in a semi-circle (read: crescent shape, probably pointing toward Mecca) and enjoyed a secular humanist swearing-in, to which God was not invited.

"We decided it was so much fun . . . " Obama joked to the reporters, waiting for Roberts (LATE?). Asked if he was ready by Roberts, Obama replied "I am, and we're going to do it very slowly."

From tonight's pool report:

Justice Roberts with a staff member, Robert Gibbs, David Axelrod, Greg Craig, a WH Photographer and POTUS

Also four reporters: st pete, bloomberg, ap and reuters.

Some of you have asked and no, michelle obama was not there.
When we walked into Map Room, obama was on the couch, and roberts was in a chair to his left. For the swearing in, obama and roberts stood across room from where they had sat, with us and staff in loose semicircle. UPDATE: ...There was No Bible.

This should shut those strict-constructionist atheists right up.

See, back in the day, Barack Obama was just merrily going along his dorky way, at Occidental, a California college, for hippies. He wore OP shorts (ha!). And he was named Barry.

Then he started hanging out with this Eric Moore, and suddenly Moore is telling him how Barry is a terrible name "for a brother." Next thing you know Obama is going to protest marches and "cultural events" (read: hippie reefer fests), and emphasizing his African Islamic roots with his birth name, Barack.

Obama's been open about his misguided youth, but this guy has pictures. And thanks to an Occidental booster with a videocamera, Ben Smith at Politico and the Jason Linkins at Huffington Post, so does the world. Excerpts from the scandalous video are up top; a photograph missing from the excerpts is below (via HuffPo).

The Reverend George M. Docherty (pictured above with President Eisenhower) went on a tear in the '50s, talking about how the pledge needed to mention God every chance he got. One day the president showed up! The rest is history.

Docherty delivered a sermon saying the pledge should acknowledge God in 1952 at Washington's New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, just blocks from the White House.

On Feb. 7, 1954, he delivered it again after learning that President Dwight Eisenhower would be at the church.

Congress inserted the words a few months later.

Docherty died this week, on Thanksgiving. It's too bad he won't live to see President Barack Obama add "Allahu Akbar" to the end of his famous pledge.

“He’s neither-nor,” said Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter who works at a factory north of Mobile, while standing in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store just north of here. “He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.”

Good work, Alabama! There's more where that came from!

“I would think of him as I would of another of mixed race,” said Glenn Reynolds, 74, a retired textile worker in Martinsdale, Va., and a former supervisor at a Goodyear plant. “God taught the children of Israel not to intermarry. You should be proud of what you are, and not intermarry.”

Hey, can we get that a little more explicitly racist?

“He’s going to tear up the rose bushes and plant a watermelon patch,” said James Halsey, chuckling, while standing in the Wal-Mart parking lot with fellow workers in the environmental cleanup business. “I just don’t think we’ll ever have a black president.”

But there is hope!

“I’ve always been against the blacks,” said Mr. Rowell, who is in his 70s, recalling how he was arrested for throwing firecrackers in the black section of town. But now that he has three biracial grandchildren — “it was really rough on me” — he said he had “found out they were human beings, too.”

Ugh. God damn America, right? But hey, that's just the Alabama article! The one about college kids in Kentucky and Cincinnati should demonstrate that the kids today are all post-racial Utopians, right?

At the University of Cincinnati, Anthony Galarza, a graduate student in urban planning, said he had heard off-color jokes about an Obama presidency that suggested the White House would become “more ghetto” with “barbecues on the front lawn.”

Ha ha ha yes who knew that white frat kids could be racist assholes?

Ok. How about the rural Nevada voters? How is the Obama campaign reassuring them? By reminding them that Obama is only pretend black, obviously.

“I don’t want to sound like I’m prejudiced,” Ms. Mendive said. “I’ve never been around a lot of black people before. I just worry that they’re nice to your face but then when they get around their own people you just have to worry about what they’re going to do to you.”

Ms. Vance responded: “One thing you have to remember is that Obama, he’s half white and he was raised by his white mother. So his views are more white than black really.”

Problem solved!

And so, finally, we move to all-white all-Christian Colorado! This story was the most pointless of all the "white people talk like this about race" stories, because there is not even a stupid quote worth pulling and highlighting for your elitist amusement.

Wright, the pastor whose controversial sermons got the Democratic presidential candidate in hot water during primary season, mentioned the book in a spring address to the NAACP, and that it was coming out by the end of the year. But few guessed that Wright was planning a release date that maximizes risk to his former congregant.

Wright's usual publisher, Judson Press, doesn't seem to have the book on its roster. Anyone know which publishing house is financing the political poison capsule? In the meantime, maybe try and decipher what the book is going to be about, from its mention in Wright's NAACP speech:

40 years ago, Dr. Anthony (inaudible) quoted in '68 the Kerner report stated that they were two different Americas. And for 40 years one of those Americas has acted as if they were the only America. But all of that now is in the past. I believe a change is coming. Because many of us are going to change how we see others who are different...

So let me give you the outline of the rest of this message. You can either fill in the blanks for yourselves or you could wait for my book that will be out later this year...

Number one, many of us are committed to changing how we see ourselves. Number two, not inferior or superior to, just different from others. Embracing our own histories. Embracing our own cultures...

Many of us are committed to changing how we see others who are different... Many of us are committed to changing, number three, the way we treat each other. The way black men treat black women. The way black parents treat black children. The way black youth treat black elders and the way black elders treat black youth...

The way we treat the latest immigrants because everybody in here who's not an Indian do be an immigrant. Some of you all came on a decks of ship and some of us came on the bows and hauls of the ship, but we all are immigrants. The way we treat non Christians and folks who don't believe what we believe, we're committed to changing the way we treat each other. The way Sunis treat Shiites, the way Orthodox Jews treat reformed Jews. The way church folk treat other church folk. The way speakers of English treat speakers of Arabic — Maasalam al hal.

Please run and tell my stuck on stupid friends that Arabic is a language, it's not a religion. Barack Hussein Obama. Barack Hussein Obama. Barack Hussein Obama. They are Arabic-speaking Christians, Arabic-speaking Jews and Arabic speaking atheists. Arabic is a language, it's not a religion. Stop trying to scare folks by giving them an Arabic name as if it's some sort of a disease.

Same people thought that the Irish had a disease. When the Irish came here. Did you hear my me O'Malley? O'Reilly? They thought you were - well they might have been might, the way we treat each other, many of us are committed to changing the way we treat each other...

Well, he hasn't lost his incendiary touch!

I think the idea that the Obamas are branded as unpatriotic [let alone as terrorists] in certain sectors is preposterous. It seemed to me that depicting the concept would show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is.

Rachel Sklar, who jumped on the story over at the Huffington Post, isn't buying it:

...it's got all the scare tactics and misinformation that has so far been used to derail Barack Obama's campaign — all in one handy illustration. Anyone who's tried to paint Obama as a Muslim, anyone who's tried to portray Michelle as angry or a secret revolutionary out to get Whitey, anyone who has questioned their patriotism— well, here's your image.

Right, because if there's one source right-wing scaremongers love to cite, it's the New Yorker!

Jake Tapper of ABC News agrees with Sklar:

Knowing the liberal politics of the magazine, I believe the magazine's staff when they say the illustration is meant ironically, as a parody of the caricature some conservatives (and some supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.) are painting of the Obamas.

But it's still fairly incendiary, at least as these things go. I wonder what the reaction would be were it the Weekly Standard or the National Review putting such an illustration on their covers.

Intent factors into these matters, of course, but no Upper East Side liberal — no matter how superior they feel their intellect is — should assume that just because they're mocking such ridiculousness, the illustration won't feed into the same beast in emails and other media. It's a recruitment poster for the right-wing.

So participants in important political discussions, especially those who have loud voices by dint of talent, power or medium of publication, should tailor their self-expression in such a way that it can't possibly be misappropriated by extremists! Gee, that sounds familiar.

Well, this is the part in the campaign where we find out who among Barack Obama and his supporters truly do want to set aside the melodramatic hysterics that have cropped up around political dialog in this country over the past seven years, and who is instead destined to join the extreme right in opposing a long and proud American tradition of brazen free speech and rough-and-tumble dialog that have all too often been set aside in recent years in the name of sensitivity — patriotic or otherwise.

Or maybe I'm just touchy because these anti-French-defamation people weren't happy with my own caricature of stereotypes over the weekend. Whatever, talk amongst yourselves!

[Huffington Post]

Fox has a fantastic story and gets to mock Jesse Jackson, and Barack Obama finds the spectre of "militant," scary-to-whites black people distancing themselves from him without him having to sell anyone out! Seriously, will the white people who watch Fox News think, upon hearing this tape, that they are forced to side with Jesse Jackson? Will Bill argue that Obama has sold out the black community by calling for more personal responsibility and less reliance on the government, which seems to be what Jackson thinks?

Or will everyone just pile on Jesse, like always, and help Barry win over those blue-collar whites Chris Matthews thinks are so important?

WAS THIS WHOLE THING ENGINEERED?

HIV has been found in saliva and tears in very low quantities from some AIDS patients. It is important to understand that finding a small amount of HIV in a body fluid does not necessarily mean that HIV can be transmitted by that body fluid. HIV has not been recovered from the sweat of HIV-infected persons. Contact with saliva, tears, or sweat has never been shown to result in transmission of HIV.

Oh, Texas. You never cease to make us want to give you back to Mexico.