ANOTHER SHORT ANSWER

The Fundies seem to have convinced about 13% of American highschool biology teachers that creationism/intelligent design is correct.   One reply to this disgrace was stated by A. J. Ayers: Even if there is a Great Designer, there is no reason to assume It is benevolent or even concerned at all with humans.

A BRIEF REPLY TO GOV. MITCH DANIELS

At the beginning of a WSJ op-ed shamelessly attacking HCR, Daniels writes:

Unless you're in favor of a fully nationalized health-care system, the president's health-care reform law is a massive mistake.

I am in favor and so was Winston Churchill.

LATEST GRIFTER NEWS

Bristol Palin is going to publish a memoir this summer.  This is something else I can blame on Granpa McCain.

ARE THEY ALL INSANE?

I recall hearing several years a promo for Michael Savage's radio show in which Savage claimed that global warming is a religion.   Now perhaps the best educated wingnut pundit has made the same claim:

Krauthammer: Global Warming Is A Religion

This claim presupposes that religious beliefs are either false or non-verifiable, something that I think the Fundies would strongly object to.

FOAMER & GLENDA PUSH BACK

Beck attempted to "instruct" Bill Kristol about the facts in Egypt and Mark Levin also took a swipe at Kristol.

KNST IS STILL A SOURCE OF AGIT-PROP

It is the most listened to wingnut station in Tucson and has a very annoying promo that I think is based on a caller to the local morning show.  In the ad, if I have heard it correctly, the caller claims to have been a professor at the U of A for 30 years and states that he won't go on the main campus because "it's a hotbed of communists."  Of course, this is preposterous but is a common belief about academia among the rubes.

So much for learning any lesson from the Giffords Shootings.

PAINE VS. CHRISTIANITY

In his book The Age of Reason, Tom Paine severs the causal link the Baggers, the Fundies and the Becksters attempt to make between democracy and the Christian faith. From Part II, Section 21:

Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics. As an engine of power it serves the purpose of despotism; and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests; but so far as respects the good of man in general, it leads to nothing here or hereafter.

PAINE VS. BURKE

A. J. Ayer calls it for Paine and I have a backup signature quote if I decide to switch from Mill's devastating comment.  From page 187:

There is no safe decision procedure for subjective conditionals in history and I should not venture to assert that but for Tom Paine the American States would never have been united or made themselves independent of Great Britain. There is, however, no doubt that his Common Sense and other early writings were major causal factors in the actual development of the American Revolution. It would perhaps not be fair to say that he took his political philosophy from Locke, since he claimed never to have read him, but he occupied the same theoretical position. What he did was to give Locke's principles a more radical application. We have seen that his gallant attempt to guide the course of the French Revolution was unsuccessful, and while in the first volume of Rights of Man he enjoys a logical triumph over Burke, the Conservatives who think of Burke as supplying them with a political warrant are perhaps not greatly susceptible to logic. The second volume is remarkable for its blueprint of a Welfare State, but I doubt if either the New Dealers in America or the politicians who built up the Welfare State in Britain were consciously influenced by it. As for The Age of Reason, its deism needs a stronger defence and its way of discrediting the Bible appears old-fashioned, though I suspect that it is still capable of making converts, especially among younger readers.

IS GLENDA BECK CRYING YET?

William "The Bloody" Kristol decided to hop on board Robert Kagan's Beck Bash choo-choo and I am glad:

But hysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

Even Rich Lowry, the Editor of the National Review, agrees with Billy:

Bill Kristol has an editorial on conservatives and Egypt. He takes a well-deserved shot at Glenn Beck’s latest wild theorizing:

Most of the comments on Lowry's post support the Beckster, which should tell us something about the sorry state of conservatism in America.

TIMES CHANGE...

often for the better.   When I read about the apparent conflicts of interest of Justices Scalia and Thomas, I recalled reading in Dean Acheson's memoir how close he was to Justice Frankfurter. This is a picture of them walking to work when Acheson was Secretary of State:

EVEN A NEO-CON WAR WHORE THINKS GLENDA BECK IS A NUT

(h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars)

Robert Kagan is one of the most influential neo-con war whores and even he thinks Beck is wacked:

KAGAN: Of course, it's panic-mongering of the worst kind. It's not the first time in American history that kind of panic mongering has played well on TV or in the press. But I hope that people who have some sobriety and some good sense won't look at a map like that and think that India, which I noticed was colored in, was about to become part of an Islamic caliphate. That shows a profound ignorance of India, as well as the rest of the world.

UPDATE: Glenda isn't backing down.

CONOR FREIDERSDORF ALMOST GETS IT

He correcly lays out some of the most damning arguments against Fats Limbaugh but he doesn't quite grasp Pigboy's stupidity, ignorance and mendacity:

For all Rush Limbaugh's supposed brilliance and quick-wittedness, he would be terrified to debate a critic in a neutral written form – he knows that stripped of his broadcasting mastery, call screeners, and a medium where flawed arguments drift into the ether without rebuttal, his ideas would be shown for the weak, contemptible, indefensible nonsense that they are. A bully in the recording studio, he is too cowardly to test himself in direct debate on the Web.

Limbaugh couldn't deal with a caller who pointed out that the average working man does need a union to negotiate contracts and wound up contradicting himself.  To another caller, Limbaugh falsely denied that Reagan raised taxes.  Finally, Limbaugh altered an audio clip of Ken Starr to falsely claim Starr approved of the "nuclear option.".

UPDATE: Mike Stark was the 2nd Limbaugh caller and you can find the audio and transcript at DKOs.

A GOOD SET OF ST. RONNIE LINKS

Campaign for America's Future has links to several articles that debunk the Reagan mythology.

CASHING IN

I suppose this is consistent with their worship of the Free Market Fairy.

Palin trademark application refused -- for now

Justice Thomas’s Wife Sets Up a Conservative Lobbying Shop

I COULD ONLY TAKE A LITTLE "FOAMER" LEVIN TODAY

He's busy giving a blowjob to a corpse, Ronald Reagan.  For a more realistic view of St. Ronnie, check out David Corn's list.

CUBACHI IS ANOTHER RIGHT-WING MORON

There's been some fuss about Sen. Rand Paul's call to severely cut foreign aid because that would hurt the largest single albatross America has, the state of Israel.  ABC News uses the typical misdescription of Israel in an article abut budget cuts:

...including to key U.S. ally and top recipient Israel.

Cubachi repeats the same lie:

Israel is our one true ally in the Middle East.

I HAVEN'T BEEN KEEPING TRACK

but Glenda Beck seems to have made a number of predictions over the last two years that have been FAILs.   The only one I can recall now is his prediction that something miraculous would happen at his 8/28 rally and if you think a flock of geese travelling south is a miracle, then I guess you are 100% rube.  Media Matters has found a number of other dire predictions from the Beckster and it seems that Beck has made 7 apocalyptic predictions in the last 4 years.

MARK "FOAMER" LEVIN WORKED IN THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION

Levin is maniacally opposed to HCR and wants to repeal the Great Society and the New Deal.  Someone else who worked for St. Reagan thinks there is no doubt that HCR is constitutional, someone who wasn't a rotating flunkie lawyer like Levin. (h/t Ian Millhiser at Think Progress)

In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today on “The Constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act,” President Ronald Reagan’s former Solicitor General — Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried — tore into the reasoning of Judge Roger Vinson’s decision striking down the Affordable Care Act, saying the issue should be a “no brainer”:

I am quite sure that the health care mandate is constitutional. … My authorities are not recent. They go back to John Marshall, who sat in the Virginia legislature at the time they ratified the Constitution, and who, in 1824, in Gibbons v. Ogden, said, regarding Congress’ Commerce power, “what is this power? It is the power to regulate. That is—to proscribe the rule by which commerce is governed.” To my mind, that is the end of the story of the constitutional basis for the mandate.

The mandate is a rule—more accurately, “part of a system of rules by which commerce is to be governed,” to quote Chief Justice Marshall. And if that weren’t enough for you—though it is enough for me—you go back to Marshall in 1819, in McCulloch v. Maryland, where he said “the powers given to the government imply the ordinary means of execution. The government which has the right to do an act”—surely, to regulate health insurance—“and has imposed on it the duty of performing that act, must, according to the dictates of reason, be allowed to select the means.” And that is the Necessary and Proper Clause. [...]

I think that one thing about Judge Vinson’s opinion, where he said that if we strike down the mandate everything else goes, shows as well as anything could that the mandate is necessary to the accomplishment of the regulation of health insurance.

EDMUND BURKE IS A LITTLE BETTER THAN DE MAISTRE

but only a little.  Aside from his belief that only a hereditary monarchy can secure individual liberties:

No experience has taught us that in any other course or method than that of an hereditary crown our liberties can be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our hereditary right. - Reflections on the Revolution in France

Burke admits that many peoples lives are in fact miserable and that is as it should be:

...they worked from dawn to dark in the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly, unmanly, and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations to which by the social economy so many wretches are inevitably doomed. If it were not generally pernicious to disturb the natural course of things and to impede in any degree the great wheel of circulation which is turned by the strangely-directed labor of these unhappy people,...

These people are only accepting of their lot because of what Marx called "the opium of the people":

They must labor to obtain what by labor can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavour, they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice.

WHAT'S MISSING IN THIS PASSAGE?

Howard Kurtz wrote this in The Daily Beast:

Instead, history will record that Rumsfeld became a principal player in the Bush administration's drive to invade Iraq, which led to the execution of Saddam, the deaths of more than 4,400 American soldiers and a long, grinding war that will forever define his reputation.

I was first struck by the lack of mention of Iraqi civilian deaths, estimated to be from 99,383 to 108,514.  Other sources have placed the number even higher.

GLENDA BECK SAYS CODE PINK IS BEHIND THE VIOLENCE IN EGYPT

This was done on his radio show today.   Here's the reality:

Gangs Hunt Journalists and Rights Workers
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and J. DAVID GOODMAN
Published: February 3, 2011
NY Times

CAIRO — Security forces and gangs chanting in favor of the Egyptian government hunted down journalists at their offices and in the hotels where many had taken refuge on Thursday in a widespread and overt campaign of intimidation aimed at suppressing reports from the capital.

Representatives of human rights groups were also targeted. Egyptian security police raided the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, detaining as many as 16 people, including some of the country’s most prominent human rights activists and several foreign researchers.

I DON'T THINK BAGGERS READ MUCH

You may recall that Glenda Beck had a crush on Thomas (Tom) Paine and even named one of his assembly line books after one of Paine's books.  A few days ago, I was reminded that Paine was an ideological opponent of perhaps the greatest conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, so I took out a book by analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer on Paine and found out a little more about both writers.

Perhaps the most surprising fact about Paine is that he supported a progressive income tax and was an early proponent of the Welfare State.   From Ayer, page 106:

In addition to doing away with the poor-rates, Paine also proposes only to abolish the tax on houses and windows, which 'falls heavy on the middling class of people',' and the commutation tax. Even, therefore, allowing for the economies that he thinks that he can effect, he is aware that he will need much more money to carry out all his intended reforms. His solution is to introduce what we now call a graduated income tax, proceeding from 3d per pound on incomes up to £500 a year, 6d per pound on incomes from £500 to £1,000, rising by increments of 3d up to the second and third thousand, sixpence to the fourth and fifth, and thereafter by a shilling per pound on each additional thousand up to the limit of £23,000, on the last £i,000 of which the plutocrat will be paying 100 per cent. Thus, according to Paine's calculations, the most that anyone will be able to keep out of his annual income, however great it may be, will be £ 2,370, that is, nearly half a million pounds in today's purchasing power. It may be remarked that this is more than would be allotted to the best-paid civil servants. At the other end of the scale a man earning £50 a year would pay only twelve shillings and sixpence in tax and a man with an income of £1,000 a year would retain £979 of it. If one keeps bearing in mind that these figures have to be multiplied by forty to reach today's equivalents, Paine's tax can hardly be considered punitive, even for the possessors of great wealth.


We come at last to his proposals for reform. I list them in his own words.

Provision for two hundred and fifty-two thousand poor families.

Education for one million and thirty thousand children.

Comfortable provision for one hundred and forty thousand aged persons.

Donation of twenty shillings each for fifty thousand births.

Donation of twenty shillings each for twenty thousand marriages.

Allowance of twenty thousand pounds for the funeral expenses of persons travelling for work, and dying at a distance from their friends.

Employment, at all times, for the casual poor in the cities of London and Westminster.'

HANNITY ISN'T GIVING UP

He's still telling his listeners and viewers that the Muslim Brotherhood is an extremist group that will likely take over Egypt.  This is despite being told otherwise yesterday by Khairi Abaza (Foundation for the Defense of Democracies), Fouad Ajami (Hoover Institution) on TV and Daniel Hannan (Conservative MEP) on radio.

MICHAEL SCHEUER TELLS THE NAKED TRUTH!!!

And is was on Glenda Beck's TV show, perhaps the last place one would imagine that occurring,  One possible reason is that Glenda was out sick yesterday.  A search of Beck's site failed to return a transcript of this exchange but it is available on LexisNexis¹:

BOLLING: Mr. Scheuer, how do I put this nicely -- would it be terrible if the Obama administration or Mr. Obama came out and said, hey, guys, look, Mubarak stay in power until September, you can leave in September, we're backing you through September? Would that be a bad idea?

SCHEUER: Well, certainly, I think that is what he's going to do anyway no matter what Mr. Obama says. But we have a real problem because the security of Israel depends on Arab tyranny. If Mubarak goes, if King Abdullah in Jordan goes, Bashar al-Assad goes, whatever government replaces them will not be as effective and certainly not as pro or at least neutral toward Israel. So, American policy --

[snip]

BOLLING: Hold on, guys. Gentlemen, Mr. Scheuer, is a pro -- is an Obama backing to the Mubarak government a sign to the people of Egypt or maybe even the people in the Middle East that we're still firmly implanted on the side of Israel?

SCHEUER: Oh, sure it is. Israel is such an enormous detriment to the United States, relationship with the Israelis, that it's going to become clear to Americans that this is just going to cost us blood and lives the longer we pursue this relationship with the Israelis.

¹Fox News Network
February 2, 2011 Wednesday
SHOW: BECK 5:00 PM EST
BECK for February 2, 2011
BYLINE: Eric Bolling, Dominic Di-Natale
GUESTS: Michael Scheuer, Zuhdi Jasser, Robert Spencer, John Hofmeister, Steve Moore, John Hofmeister, Steve Moore, Betsy McCaughey, Michael Cannon, Chris Horner
SECTION: NEWS; Domestic
LENGTH: 6817 words

14 to 2

(h/t John Cole)

That's the actual score of Obamacare in the federal courts:

Today, a judge in Florida issued a decision in a case filed by 25 Republican Attorneys General and Governors striking down the Affordable Care Act. This ruling is well out of the mainstream of judicial opinion. Twelve federal judges have already dismissed challenges to the constitutionality of the health reform law, and two judges – in the Eastern District of Michigan and Western District of Virginia – have upheld the law. In one other case, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia issued a very narrow ruling on the constitutionality of the health reform law’s “individual responsibility” provision and upheld the rest of the law.

MORAL ABSOLUTES VS. POLITICAL RELATIVISM?

Frank Manuel's book on Western utopias reminded me of the conflict between supposed universal values and particular social structures.  Herder recognized and valued "the deep diversity of values between nations" whereas Kant insisted upon a universal concept of personal freedom.  Some conservatives seem to prefer the latter approach when they discuss the events in Egypt. On the one hand, they prefer a version of Kant's principle modified by their belief in the Free Market Fairy but on the other hand they fear that Egypt may not share our political values, especially when it comes to Israel, and on that basis frown upon the revolt in Egypt.

WARS IN EUROPE

I think most people don't realize how long it took for (mostly) Western Europe to stabilize after the fall of the Roman Empire so here's a timeline from what I hope is a reliable source, beginning in 600 A.D. and ending when I get tired of copying & pasting.

The point that I'm trying to make is that it took centuries for the West to stabilize, so we shouldn't expect the Arab world to do it in a matter of a few decades.

600-616 Aethelfrith's Wars (England)
633-641 Oswald's Wars
670-674 First Frankish Civil War
685 Pict-Anglian War
687 Second Frankish Civil War
714-719 Third Frankish Civil War
733-750 Aethelbald's Wars
771-796 Offa’s Wars
771-814 Conquests of Charlemagne
793-1016 Viking Raids In Europe
894-956 Magyar Raids in the Holy Roman Empire
907-954 Magyar Raids in France ( Magyars) (Germany )
978-980 Franco-German War
1002 Ardoin's Revolt
1004-1014 Ardoin's War
1006-1007 Revolt of Baldwin of Flanders
1026-1030 Scandinavian War
1054 Battle of Dunsinane
1065-1072 Castilian Civil War
1066 Norman Conquest of England
1072 William I's Invasion of Scotland
1076 William I's Invasion of Normandy
1077-1082 Norman-French War (Philip I )
1077-1106 German Civil War
1079-1080 Anglo-Scottish War
1079 Viking Conquest of Man
1081-1085 First Norman-Byzantine War
1081-1084 Holy Roman Empire-Papacy War
1089-1096 William II's War with Robert Curthose
1091-1093 William II's invasion of Scotland
1098-1108 Second Norman-Byzantine War
1109-1113 Anglo-French War
1109-1112 Aragonese-Castilian War
1116-1119 Anglo-French War
1123-1135 Anglo-French War
1137-1157 Danish Civil War
1138-1155 English Dynastic War
1138 Battle of the Standard
1140 Portugese-Castilian War
1157 Henry II's Campaigns in Wales
1159-1189 Anglo-French War
1160-1168 Danish War against the Wends
1165 Henry II's Campaigns in Wales
1167-1183 Wars of the Lombard League
1173-1174 Anglo-Norman Rebellion
1185-1189 Asens' Uprising
1197-1214 German Civil War

MITTENS CAN'T FACE REALITY

You may recall that many Fundies were mortified that Glenda Beck was allowed to give the commencement address at Liberty University.  Somehow Mittens Romney think they won't be bothered by a Mormon President:

Romney downplays Mormon issue
By KASIE HUNT | 2/1/11 3:37 PM EST
Updated: 2/1/11 3:41 PM EST
POLITICO

Romney waved off the issue.

“I don’t worry so much about the politics of... a candidacy that I might have, how it will affect political polls,” he said. “The great majority of Americans understand that this nation was founded on the principle religious tolerance and liberty so most people do not make their decision based on someone’s faith. But you don’t worry about that.”

WHAT ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE THINKS ABOUT IRAN'S BOMB

They still think it's at least a year or two away.

Iran not working on bomb: Israel intelligence head

(AFP) – Jan 25, 2011

JERUSALEM — Iran is not currently working on producing a nuclear weapon but could make one within "a year or two" of taking such a decision, Israel's military intelligence chief said on Tuesday.

"The question is not when Iran will acquire the bomb, but how long until the leader decides to begin enriching (uranium) at 90 percent," Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi told parliament's foreign affairs and defence committee in his first briefing since taking up the role in November.

Once such a decision is made, it would take "a year or two" to produce a nuclear warhead, he said, adding that Iran would then need more time to develop an effective missile delivery system for it.

Kochavi said it was unlikely that Iran, which currently enriches uranium to 20 percent, would start enriching it to the 90 percent level needed for a bomb, because it would be in open breach of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty exposing it to harsher sanctions or even a US or Israeli military strike.

He said Iran was reluctant to do this at a time when the country was going through a period of "instability" and "religious tension."


"At the moment, it's not in Iran's interest to move their programme ahead," he told the committee.

RICHARD COHEN CHANNELS SEAN HANNITY

Just like Hannity, he's using the Muslim Brotherhood as a bogeyman to justify attempts to thwart democracy in Egypt.

IS IT DRUGS???

Kevin Drum caught one of Glenda Beck's better paranoid fantasies and took the time to give us a brief excerpt:

Here's Egypt, Libya, Tunisia. What's next to Tunisia? Algeria, also on fire now, the riots are starting here. Morocco is on fire. What's across from Morocco? Spain. Connected to France, and Germany, and Italy, also on fire. And Greece, also on fire. Which brings you right back here to Turkey. The entire Mediterranean is on fire.

This is getting some attention in the blogosphere (Atrios, Benen, Sullivan) and let's hope this is another step toward a general recognition that Beck is a weird clown.


UPDATE: A comment on the Wonkette thread about this farce:

I got half way through this and am confused. How did Spain catch fire?

A NARRATIVE CONTRADICTION

Some of the radio gasbags have been wondering why the press hasn't been giving former president George W. Bush credit for the democratic movement in Egypt while at the same time criticizing Pres. Obama for not supporting Pres. Mubarak, which would prevent Egypt from turning into an Islamic state.