From the Right

Doug Hoffman recently posted a new fundraising letter on his blog. Now, I know some of you might be wondering why the guy is trying to raise money for an election that already happened. It's simple, really. He wants to keep fighting until he gets the seat in Congress that ACORN stole from him. No, really, that's what he's claiming (if you click the link, make sure you note the url): As evidence surfaces, we find out that reported results from election night were far from accurate. ACORN and the unions did their best to try and sway the results to Obamacare supporter Bill Owens. (Also,…

...and it's easy to see why the right is so up in arms over Obama's plan to start off the new school year by talking to students. I've just finished reading the text of the speech, and it's just totally jam packed with anti-Republican ideological concepts. Here are some of the highlights: I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn't have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday - at 4:30 in the morning. Now I wasn't too happy…

In his latest column, Cal Thomas takes another swing at explaining the perils of health care. Last week, you might remember, he claimed that health care proponents want to kill off the old because we're evolutionists. This week, we're Hitler: Anyone wishing to revise America's medical system and model it after the systems in Britain and Canada ought to thoroughly examine how those health care systems function before plunging into the same pool. A reasonable conclusion is that these systems require long waits and treatments (if you can get them) that are inferior to what's available in the…

Yesterday, the Daily Kos and ThinkProgress reported on some spectacularly inane things that Texas Representative "Smokey Joe" Barton said about carbon dioxide. Now, Barton getting something wrong that involves science or the environment is, of course, nothing new. He is, after all, the man who recently Twittered his pride at "stumping" the Nobel Laureate Energy Secretary with a question that actually demonstrated nothing more than Barton's own ignorance of basic geology. As revealing as that whole little incident was, he managed to make more mistakes yesterday. Barton committed the errors…

At least two medical doctors think that it isn't, and have said so publicly. They feel that the "research has shown" that the new flu isn't going to be very virulent, and question the wisdom of spending $1.5 billion developing a vaccine that "may never be used". I suspect that few of you will be surprised to learn that both these doctors are also Republican members of Congress. Representatives Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun (both of Georgia) made their views known during floor speeches in the House yesterday. I was not aware that any research had been published that demonstrates that we know…

As of when I'm writing this post, a Google News search for the words "Inhofe" and "treason" returns no hits. When I search on "Inhofe" and "sedition", I get the same results. That's also true for a search on the milder combination of "Inhofe" and "inappropriate". What the hell is going on here? I realize this is old news, but one week ago yesterday, Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) issued a press release and the YouTube video embedded below. I don't understand why I'm not seeing any outrage. Just in case you're audio was malfunctioning, or you just didn't believe your ears, those helicopters…

The latest entry is one of the more recent "news" articles on the main page. This particular one is more malignant than humorous: "Dressed in black," a German 17-year-old former public school student kills 15 people.[19] Wearing all black is characteristic of anti-Christian belief systems. Our list of young mass murderers grows, and see how many were anti-Christian products of public schools.

By now, you've probably heard that there's been quite a bit of controversy over a little story about bureaucrats and rescue boats that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal told during his response to President Obama's speech earlier this week: Let me tell you a story. During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I'd never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: 'Well, I'm the Sheriff and if you don't like it you can come and arrest me!' I asked him: 'Sheriff, what's got you so mad?' He told me that he had…

Remember that Colorado State Senator I talked about yesterday? The one that voted against the HIV testing bill because he thought it would encourage humanity? It turns out that he really, really doesn't know when to stop talking. He gave an interview to the Rocky Mountain News after the vote. Reading the things he said, I'm well and truly past appalled. This man, who currently holds elected political office, clearly does not understand the concept of what it means to be a human being. What he said afterward: "What I'm hoping is that yes, that person may have AIDS, have it seriously as a…

I'm going to take a break from my semi-masochistic browsing of Conservapedia tonight. Instead, I'd like to take this opportunity to highlight some much more malignant views. There have been two separate incidents of hateful speech and behavior, involving two separate Colorado State Senators, in the past week. The first incident took place on Monday. Republican Scott Renfroe took to the floor of the State Senate to speak in opposition to a bill that would (OH NOES!) give some benefits to same-sex partners of state employees. Renfroe apparently started off by informing the crowd that Eve…

A few minutes ago, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal finished delivering the Republican response to President Obama's kinda-sorta-but-not-really State of the Union Address. During his reply, Jindal took aim at some of the items contained in the stimulus package. One of the remarks, in particular, caught my attention. Jindal claimed that the stimulus included, "$140 million for something called 'volcano monitoring.'" The reference about volcanoes might have given Jindal an opening for an attempt at snark in his next sentence ("eruption of spending"), but it wasn't based in reality. Here's…

Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning has apparently found an innovative new way to get his colleagues in the National Republican Senatorial Committee to support his re-election campaign: threaten to sue. Yes, I really am serious. Bunning threatened to sue the committee if it supported Williams or any other challenger. "I would have a suit against the NRSC if they did that," he said, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. "Support of incumbents is the only reason for [the NRSC's] existence," Bunning added. "So if they recruited someone and supported them in a primary against me, I would be…

At their best, editorial cartoons are a wonderful way to examine politics in a slightly different light. An editorial cartoon that appeared in today's New York Post shows us just what editorial cartoons can be at their worst. Just in case the NY Post decides to try and dump this one down the memory hole, here's a copy of the cartoon: Words simply fail. If you want to express your opinion of this particular piece of art, you can contact the New York post at (212) 930-8500, or email the Page Six editor, Richard Johnson, rjohnson@nypost.com. Technorati Tags: politics, flaming small-minded…

No. But that's apparently not enough to keep some people from making the claim. There's a story that's making the rounds on some right wing blogs that John Holdren said, at his confirmation hearing, that he thinks that 1 billion people will die as a result of global warming by 2020. So far, that claim has been made at The National Review Online by Chris Horner: Just got this e-mail from someone up on the Hill, regarding John "Clearly NOT the 'Science' Guy" Holdren's confirmation hearing as (of all things) chief science advisor to the president). I do think it's fair to say we told you so…

As you may have heard, Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich) is in a bit of hot water right now. The Congressman, who is the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee, posted a number of updates to his Twitter page while in Baghdad recently. The Congressman's motivation? Apparently, his constituents' need to know outweighs mundane concerns like operational security: The spokesman, Dave Yonkman, added: "He believes in giving people in West Michigan as much access as possible, and posting on Twitter allows him to provide real-time insight into the sights and sounds of his…

Like most people who pay attention to the news, I've been treated to several weeks of Republicans using the Detroit bailout as an excuse to bash unions. Like a broken record, it was easy to ignore for a while, but the repetitive droning of discredited canards (like $70/hr wages) is getting more and more and more annoying. And it's particularly annoying because the vast bulk of the union-bashing is coming from the alleged free-market conservatives. What the hell is so conservative about beating up on unions, anyway. Unions are the quintessential model of a market based solution to a problem…

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about the role that the Community Reinvestment Act played (or, rather, did not play) in causing the current global financial meltdown. I was planning to get out of the issue there, but a really nice article by Devilstower over at Daily Kos sucked me back in. During the time when I wasn't paying any attention to the issue, the right wing noise machine added a new villain to their attempts to blame Wall Street's mess on the left: ACORN. In 1977 Democratic President Jimmy Carter passed the Community Reinvestment Act to provide housing to poor people. In the…

There's something truly amazing about Uncommon Descent's DaveScot. He misrepresents data in a stupid way, gets caught, gets embarrassed, and then he does it again. And again. And again. It's like he expects it to work this time - and never mind the fact that it hasn't in any of the last 37 attempts. It's entirely possible that he has the same ability to learn from experience as a badly concussed pigeon. Today's shining example involves a post of his entitled "Voter Preference by Education Level". In this post, he provides a set of statistics involving education level and current choice of…

What a difference a day makes. Last night, the picture of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher (aka Joe the Plumber) we all had was the one John McCain painted for us: a hardworking plumber with serious plans to buy the plumbing business he's worked for for "all these years", who won't be able to do so if Obama wins because Obama will raise Joe's taxes. Today, after reality has had a chance to be heard, the picture is very, very different. Let's start with the basics: Joe isn't going to see a tax increase under Obama's plan. He's going to see a tax cut. If he buys the business, he might see an…

Apparently undeterred by last week's marijuana misadventure, DaveScot just decided to add another topic to the growing list of things he has absolutely no understanding of but writes about anyway. In today's installment, he joins the growing list of right-wingers who have decided to blame the current subprime mortgage crisis on the Democrats who passed the Community Reinvestment Act of 1975. Predictably enough, it doesn't take much effort or research to figure out that this claim has very, very little resemblance to the truth. The basis behind the claim that the CRA caused the subprime…