Right Wing Wacko Pasters Always Entertain (Continued)

Frank Amedia says he miraculously resurrected an ant. You gotta start somewhere.

In this here blog thingy, I always love to quote some of the more, shall we say, colorful, evangelical right wingers who, I must admit are incredibly creative with their stories.

I've got a couple more, and let's start with the best one, which I think tops anything I've seen so far.

DEMONIC INSECTS

According to Right Wing Watch, Frank Amedia, who served as a volunteer "Christian policy liaison" for Donald Trump's presidential campaign, says he resurrected an ant back to life.

OK, OK, bringing an ant back to life isn't exactly the same as the Resurrection of Jesus, but you have to start somewhere.

Amedia begins his story: "This was the most incredible one." When you read on, you'll realize you can't argue with him.

On a recent trip to Israel, he was bitten on the leg by an ant while praying (of course!) and he instinctively swatted it before crushing it into pieces with his thumb.

OK, a little mean, but I would have done the same thing. Here's where it goes off the rails:

"All of a sudden, the Holy Spirit speaks to me so clearly. It was as clear as I have ever heard....It was the voice of the Father. The Father calls me son, an dthe Father said, 'Son, look at the ant......And the Lord said to me, 'Son, I hear the cry of an ant.'"

It's nice to know that the Lord loves all creatures, great and small, including ants, so it's good that the Lord heard the anguish of this poor ant.

Amedia continues: "I began to weep inside of me....And then the Lord said, 'Son, take your finger and touch the ant.'"

Or the little pieces of it, but whatever.

Anyway, Amedia, being obedient, did as the Lord instructed. And lo and behold!!!. Well, let's let Amedia tell us:

"The power of God shot out..and the ant, it came alive and the pieces all were together and it jumped up on my finger, came up slowly my palm, and stopped right there as if it was looking right at me.'"

The video of Amedia's tale, at the bottom of this post, is something to, um, behold, so it's worth the watch.

Amedia does have something of a fascination with insects. Back in November, 2016, Right Wing Watch tells us he warned us about demonic hornets. I hate hornet stings, so I don't blame him for calling them demonic.

But Amedia went pretty far with his story.

He warned us that he saw hornets "dipping these stingers into a cesspool" that contained "a liquor, a potion, and the potion was filled with all the vile characteristics and the power of witchcraft and occult, of abortion and murder and selfishness and deceitfulness.... and they were being sent out to invade humanity, and, if you will, inject these potions."

I guess in other words, the hornets were drinking Bud Light and then stinging us to inject us with that awful piss water. That's my theory, anyway.

Amedia, as always, goes on: "And I saw that they (the hornets) were dipping their tails in that putrid muck that was coing up from Abaddon (whereever that is) and being sent out to sting, sting, with homosexuality........ "

The rest is the whole litany of other "sins" he hates.

Oh, so that's why I'm gay! My mother wasn't liberal enough with the bug spray, and as a child, I must have gotten stung by a demonic hornet and here I am today. Oh well, bummer.

GOD COMMANDS US ALL TO OWN AR-15S

There's a lot of controversy these days about AR-15s, the semi-automatic weapons that are the centerpiece of so many tragic mass shootings in our nation.

Chuck Baldwin says you're not a true Christian unless you own an AR-15

It turns out, AR-15s are pure and godly, and everybody in this Christian nation should own one, or at least something like one of these.  

So says Chuck Baldwin, who, sadly, failed to win the presidency in 2008 as the Christian Reconstructionist Constitution Party's nominee. (Don't worry, I've never heard of this group, either.)

According to Right Wing Watch. (Again! I swear they're not making this stuff up) Baldwin informs us that any Christian that does not own the equivalent of an AR-15 "has denied the Christian faith" and is "worse than a heathen."

His proof is Bible passage 1 Timothy, Baldwin said that every adult has "a duty to provide for your family, but you cannot provide protection for your family without being equipped to do so."

OK.

I'm not a Bible expert, so I looked up 1 Timothy. Maybe I'm not a careful reader, but for the life of me, I could not find any reference to AR-15s in that Bible passage. I couldn't even find much there regarding protection of family. Oh, well.

Right Wing Wackos Have Interesting Theories On News Events

So here's one from the conspiracy kooks: One wacko
theory says that Ellen Degeneres was somehow involved
in the Las Vegas mass shooting. Um.....

It's been quite a week for extreme right wingers, nationalists, neo-nazis, and all wackos on the far right.

They've spent the week explaining things to us and proposing solutions to problems that are just stunning in their brilliance and creativity.

I'll offer just a few examples

1. ELLEN DEGENERES MASTERMINDED LAS VEGAS SHOOTING

Milo Yiannopoulous, the zany former Breitbart writer who we learned through Buzzfeed that he collaborated with white supremicists, has solved the big Las Vegas mass shooting mystery. The assault, the nation's worst in modern history, left 59 people dead, including the shooter, who committed suicide.

Milo's explanation is brilliant. Of course, he raises more questions than he answers. First, Milo said there is an "extraordinary lack of curiosity in the media" about the shooting because the guy who did it was white.

He also noted the media stopped asking about the security guard who first encountered the shooter in the hotel. He went "missing" and avoided the media until he appeared on Ellen Degeneres' show this week.

Milo noted that the guard was "sweating and panting like he'd been briefed to say certain things and not others" while being interviewed by Ellen. Moreover, Ellen supposedly has a "relationship with the hotel chain," and that, of course, proves that she was in on it, or maybe even masterminded it for all I know, but Milo didn't go quite that far.

Milo didn't offer a motive, but the right wing hates gay people, who they believe all are capable of unspeakable crimes. Ellen is gay. Then again, so is Milo, so this is a bit complicated.

2. JOURNALISTS SHOULD BE SHOT IF THEY ASK QUESTIONS/DO THEIR JOB

In May,  then Montana Congressional candidate Greg Gianforte assaulted Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs because Jacobs was aggressively asking him questions, which reporters are supposed to do.

Gianforte won the election anyway, and ended up being convicted of misdemeanor assault. Gianforte apologized to Jacobs, and donated $50,000 to a press freedom group. It all ended well, right?

Well, Karen Marshall doesn't think so. She's with the Gallatin County, Montana Republican Women, and she said had Jacobs questioned her like he did Gianforte, she would have shot him.

Get that? If a journalist asks obnoxious questions, they deserve to be murdered. Why should the public, via the media, know what an elected official does or thinks? It's none of our business, right? Democracy, is stupid, Marshall seems to think.

So yeah, Marshall is creepy and someone to definitely stay away from.

3. ROY MOORE SAYS GAY MARRIAGE WORSE THAN SLAVERY

I learned this week I've been committing a crime against humanity since 2012. That's when I married Jeff, my same sex husband. We're happy, but Roy Moore came into the picture to set things straight.

We learned from Moore that gay marriage is worse than slavery. 

First, some background. Moore just won the Alabama Republican primary for U.S Senate to fill the now empty seat of Jeff Sessions, who is now the very odious U.S. Attorney General. Moore won fame for, among many things, being kicked off the Alabama Supreme Court for defying federal court orders to remove a 10 Commandments statue and for telling state judges to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell ruling legalizing gay marriage.

Moore is still very, very bitter about gay marriage.  This statement by Moore came out last November, but there's no evidence that he's changed his mind.

"In 1857, the United States Supreme Court did rule that black people were property. Of course that contradicted the Constitution, and it took a civil war to overturn it. But this ruling in Obergefell is even worse in a sense because it forces not only people to recognize marriage other than the institution ordained by God and recognized by nearly every state in the union, it says that you now must do away with the definition of marriage and make it between two person of the same gender or leading on, as one of the dissenting justices said, to polygamy, to multi-partner marriages."

Of course, if you don't want to be gay married, and don't want such ceremonies in your church, you're free to avoid that. And since when did Obergefell legalize polygamy?

And two guys or gals marrying each other is worse than holding someone captive for a lifetime and forcing him to work endlessly for no pay?

Oh, well.

WACKIEST OF ALL: HOLLYWOOD FULL OF DEVIL WORSHIPPING CANNABALS

There's a so-called pastor names Rodney Howard-Browne who took part in a "laying of hands" prayer on Donald Trump in the Oval Office last summer. He's got some interesting ideas on what really goes on in Hollywood.

And he says it's much worse than the extremely icky revelations about Harvey Weinstein.

Howard-Browne informs us that Hollywood is rife with devil worshippers who conduct human sacrifices and drink the blood of children.

And I just thought most Hollywood actors were sort of narcisstic hedonists, but otherwise pretty harmless.

The Gays Did It

This wacko says Texas was devastated by
Hurricane Harvey because The Gays Did It.

I notice this repeatedly with every disaster.

The religious nutjobs all blame The Gays whenever there's a calamity. It's like clockwork.

It's as much of a cliche as TV reporters getting blown away while yelling into a camera on a hurricane-blasted beach.

We saw "The Gays Did It" with Hurricane Harvey and we'll surely see it if Hurricane Irma turns out as bad as feared.

Here's an account from Right Wing Watch:

"Extremist anti-LGBTQ pastor Kevin Swanson is joining other radical religious right activists in declaring that Hurricane Harvey is God's judgment on Houston and other cities the refuse to repent for their embrace of 'sexual perversion.'.....

"....Swanson said it is no coincidence that Houston was hit by this storm because 'it was persecutiving pastors and churches' and recently had a 'very, very aggressively pro-homosexual mayor. On top of that, the Texas legislature recently failed ot pass a bill 'that would have prevented cross-dressing men from using the women's restrooms' because 'they wanted to encourage the abomination of men attempting to dress lie women and women to dress like men.'"

Phew! That's a lot to unpack.

I'm sure Swanson and his ilk are too snowflakey and just plain flakey to sit down with someone to see if we can pick apart their logic.

But I would love to get in the same room with him and force him to answer these questions:

If God hated the former lesbian mayor of Houston, why now with the flood? She's not the mayor anymore.

Surely, some of Harvey's victims did not vote for that former mayor and some probably supported the failed "bathroom bill" in Texas in which transgendered people would have been prevented from using restrooms that go along with their current gender.

So why were your allies victimized by Harvey and by extension God, Mr. Swanson?

The Harvey flooding and devastation was, if anything, even worse in Port Arthur and Beaumont, Texas. Those cities are pretty conservative and I think neither ever had a gay mayor (but I could be mistaken)

So why the suffering in Port Arthur and Beaumont?

Why is it always The Gays that prompt God to unleash disasters on unsuspecting cities? Why doesn't God also smite cities that have adulterers, liars, sinners, etc. Only the Gays. Makes me suspect you think God might be a self-loathing closeted gay person. Is that what you think?

Today, Right Wing Watch told us about another loathesome "preacher," Jim Bakker, who used Houston to say The Gays Did It and to hawk his line of survivalist products.

Hey, nothing like making a buck off of God's imagined wrath, right?

All this is meant to get the general public to hate gays, because The Gays seem to be causing one cataclysm after another. I can't believe that these purveyers of The Gays Did It don't realize that nobody is buying it, and everybody is laughing at them.

Probably even God is laughing at them at this point.

Even people who don't really believe The Gays Did It rejoice in bringing it up. The odious Ann Coulter got a lot of heat after Harvey when she Tweeted:

"I don't believe Hurricane Harvey is God's punishment for Houston electing a lesbian mayor. But that's more credible than 'climate change.'

Okey dokey.

The former Houston mayor, Annise Parker responded via Twitter: "Darn it, I thought no one knew I had super power over weather."

As a gay guy, I wish I did have such power.  I want to be one of the gays among those Gays Who Did It. Of course I would never want to unleash a disaster on anyone, including these weird "religious" nutcases. Nice weather for everyone, but with enough well-timed rain to prevent droughts.

I'd make exceptions, though. For the Gays Did It preachers and hucksters and swindlers, I would impose on them a lifetime of  low, dark overcast, fog and freezing drizzle. And nothing else.

There's plenty of real-life blame to go around for weather disaster. It's legitimate to blame the randomness of nature, bad luck, poor planning and development decisions, recklessness, even global warming.

We all know that most of us wouldn't want to make deadly disasters worse than they already are. Most of us have an impulse to help, which explains the many millions of dollars from so many Americans that are pouring into Texas for hurricane relief.

A few people like to make things worse, though. Or at least more bizarre. Like The Gays Did It crowd.

They're their own weird little disaster.

"Pizzagate" Just Keeps Getting Weirder And Weirder

Dallas Mavericks center Andrew Bogut was sidelined by a knee
injury, which wouldn't be exciting news except for the fact
the weird Pizzagate conspiracy theorists say Bogut
is actually being punished for publicizing Pizzagate.  

We now live in a world where a big subset of people will believe anything, and the biggest proof of all is Pizzagate, which believe it or not, is getting even weirder, which I never thought was possible.

As the New York Times explains this convoluted conspiracy theory, it was borne from Wikileaks, which released emails hacked from John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton's campaign manager.

Note, you really have to read this New York Times explainer. It is SO amazing people will leap to such weird conclusions as fact. God help us.

Anyway, within Podesta's emails were mundane missives, including plans between Podesta and his brother, lobbyist Tony Podesta, to meet at a Washington DC pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong  for dinner.

Somebody on 4chan, a wacko extreme right wing message board, noted the phrase "cheese pizza" in the emails.

According to the nuts on 4chan, pedophiles use the initials "c.p." to denote child pornography. "Cheese pizza" has the same initials, so naturally, according to the wonderful minds on 4chan, Podesta was running a child sex ring at this pizza place, and that of course meant Hillary Clinton was also running this child sex ring.

Totally logical, right?

That, of course led to a another nutcase from North Carolina to head up to Washington DC to personally investigate Comet Ping Pong and rescue the children from the nonexistent sex ring in the nonexistent basement of the restaurant.

He shot up the place, but alas, rescued no children, since there were no children to be rescued.

That hasn't stopped the Pizza Gate conspiracy people, who won't let facts get in the way of their juicy scandal. They're still threatening employees of the pizza place, and people who work at neighborhing businesses, since they're in the same neighborhood and are obviously in on the crime.

In the latest development, some of Donald Trumps most paranoid, weird supporters are claiming NBA Dallas Maverick's center Andrew Bogut was banned from playing because he sort of agreed that Pizzagate might actually be a thing,  says the Daily Beast. 

The theory goes that Bogut was exposing "the truth" about Pizzagate, so they forced him to stop playing to silence him.

In reality, he was sidelined by a knee injury, that thousands of people saw on TV, but never mind eyewitnesses or reality.

There's a surprising number of people who subscribed to the "They're Silencing Bogut" theory.

As the Daily Beast notes, Reddit, which can be a swamp of weirdness anyway, has a lot of people on this "story." For instance, one headlined "Bogut Risked His Career To Help Expose The Truth,", written by WhiteGenocideXLV, had over 8,000 upvotes on Reddit.

As the Daily Beast also notes, this post was put up just a few hours after Bogut played 22 minutes in a Mavericks' 12-point win against the Los Angeles Lakers.

And never mind a whole bunch of people actually witnessed Bogut getting injured, and, again, there's a widely viewed video of Bogut injuring his knee on YouTube.

But video proof of something isn't good enough for the Pizzagate enthusiasts, no siree!

This will remain alive forever. It also helps explain why so many people voted for Trump. If some people are willing to suspend disbelief and become convinced Hillary, Podesta and even Barack Obama are running a child sex ring out of a Washington DC pizza parlor, they'll believe anything.

Even Donald Trump's slightly less fanciful statements and promises.

We blame the politicians for the failures and embarrassments and corruption in the United States. But let's face it, they're totally aided and abetted by too many head smackingly stupid, moronic people who will believe anything they hear, as long as it feeds their ignorant emotions.

As I've said before, too many of us live in a fact-free world, and that is at all of our peril.

Conspiracy Nutjobs Delight In Torturing Orlando Shooting Victims

Patience Carter, who was injured during The Pulse nightclub
massacre in Orlando, was victimized again by nutjobs
 claiming she's a crisis actor partiipating in a government
ruse to take all our guns away, or something.
Photo by Zack Wittman/Tampa Bay Times 

A woman named Patience Carter was shot and injured at The Pulse nightclub during the massacre there earlier this month and a friend she was with was killed.

Carter, like all the victims in this shooting deserves all the support and love anybody can give her,  obviously.  

But cue the nutjobs!

Every time something like this happens the conspiracy weirdos come out of the woodwork to tell us the same old story they have. This massacre didn't happen. It was staged by the government to take all our guns away and suspend all our civil rights.

And those victims we all saw on TV? Those are all crisis actors brought in to stage the "shooting"

Riiiigghht.

You'd think the conspiracy wackos would come up with something original, but that's the narrative they give every time.

We could safely ignore these idiots if they didn't make sport of harassing people like Patience Carter. But they seek people like her out, splash her all over the internet and "expose" her as the fraud she is clearly not.

According to Slate, the "proof" the conspiracy dingbats offer is that Carter is supposedly a crisis actor , which is obvious because she had interned at television station WTFX.

She worked for awhile at a TV station! Which proves she's an actor!

Or something like that.

Patience Carter meets with President Obama after the
Orlando shooting, not before, as the conspiracy nutjobs
would have it. 

Carter also Instagrammed photos of herself after the shooting, including one in which President Obama was comforting her when he went down to Orlando after the crime. 

Someone changed the time stamps on Carter's Instagrams to make it look like they were taken before the shooting, then re-posted them on line.

Hey, if you do a sleight of hand and change the time stamp, then the time sequence really did alter, apparently. What, these conspiracy theories have Cher's "If I Can Turn Back Time" as a constant earworm in their sick little heads?

Similarly to this situation, the kooks tortured parents of young children who were killed in the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut school massacre. As if these grieving parents needed more pain in their lives.

I'm not sure what to do about these nutjobs. Trying to bat away their idiotic rantings is just a fruitless, endless game of whack-a-mole.  Still, they deserve all the ridicule we can throw at them, which is what I'm trying to do here.

As for Patience Carter, she ended up "thanking" the morons who were bothering her with the nutty conspiracy theories. On Instagram she wrote: "It's your outrageous insensitivity that makes me want to heal even faster, and grow even stronger."




WTFX

Stupid Guy Wants To Secede From U.S.; Create Anti-Gay Nation Called Reagan

A bizarre man named Douglas MacKinnon
would carve out a new, conservative country
from the southern U.S. and maybe
call the new nation "Reagan" after his hero.  

I don't know whether to laugh out loud or get deep chills from the idea making the rounds by a guy named Douglas MacKinnon.

He thinks it will be a swell idea of southern states secede from the union and form a new country called "Reagan."

He's got a whole book out on the subject called "The Secessionist States of America: The Blueprint for Creating A Traditional Values Country...Now."

Yes, I know this has been tried before with tragic results, but maybe MacKinnon thinks two times is the charm.

Besides, that little matter called the Civil War in the 1860s was the North's fault, anyway, MacKinnon says, according to Right Wing Watch. 

He said greedy Northerners like President Lincoln "waged an illegal war that was in fact not declared against the South after the South basically did what we're talkin sbout in this book now in terms of peacefully, legally and constitutionally leaving the union."

Yeah, I know. Slavery is such a traditional value.

It's a bit odd that MacKinnon gets his inspiration for his new nation, called Reagan, from Abraham Lincoln, given he was a commie pinko who held the nation together despite the Civil War.

MacKinnon quotes Honest Abe to give his rationale for his new nation. "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."

I guess he thinks a good reason to overthrow the government is because not everyone votes Republican like he does.

In MacKinnon's view, the real problem with the current state of affairs is The Gays. It's always The Gays. You can't even discriminate against or insult The Gays anymore without being forced to bake cakes for them or tell the world what great football players, it seems.

MacKinnon's solution is to secede and form a country where it's OK to Hate The Gays. That'll teach 'em!

To form his new country of Reagan, MacKinnon would start with the supposedly conservative strong holds of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

You'd think he'd include Texas, but probably not, he says,  because of all those icky brown people from Mexico coming over the border. Traditional values are white, not Hispanic, you understand.

I'm not sure what he'd do with South Beach in Florida, what with all those hideous Gays, Hispanics and Liberals. And aren't there gay bars in Atlanta? What would he do with those?  

There hasn't been uniform praise for MacKinnon's book on Amazon's customer review page.

Here's a bit of sarcasm  from somebody calling himself "Better Than Jesus," pretending to be a big fan of MacKinnon and his book: 

"As a frothing desperate, impotent, fat self-righteous 40 year old infant with a world view so simplistic it might as well have been drawn in crayon, I am constantly on the lookout for shrieking noise that confirms the divisive lunacy on which I base my sense of self.

I felt the first stirrings of an ideological erection when I read about how climate change is a communist conspiracy, and even gained some small sense of priapic emotion from wallowing in contrived paranoid fantasies about black presidents and birth certificates, but have never been able to truly achieve the climax of faux-conservative gibbering that I, and my wife-sister craved."

MacKinnon said he worked with people from Special Ops, intelligence, the military and constitutional law to gather information for his book. 

Which makes me wonder if MacKinnon wants to start some type of war to get his dream country of Reagan. This is where I spit out my Diet Coke, stop laughing at him and get my little chill.

Have you read Margaret Atwood's scary 1998 novel "The Handmaid's Tale"? It's about a future ultra conservative nation carved out from America through a civil war. In it, women are used just as vessels to create children, and to serve the household. The book explores all kinds of other extreme right wing fantasies, kind of like MacKinnon's dreaming up.

So yea, MacKinnon is a lunatic, and his proposal won't go anywhere. But to think there are quite a few people out there who agree with him is unsettling to say the least. 

Predictable: Whackadoodle Conspiracists Say Newtown Was a Hoax

Once again I delve into the inevitable, in which the fringes inform us the awful stuff we've been seeing and reading about out of the Newtown, Connecticut school massacre was all a hoax.

Apparently, the government, or the United Nations, or I don't know, space aliens from Neptune orchestrated a fake school shooting so they can take all our guns away. Or so the UN can take over the world, or something.

Like all weird conspiracies, the hoax promoters going to great lengths to link vaguely similar, but mostly unrelated situations.  The fathers of both the Newtown shooter and the person responsible for the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado earlier this year are sort of, kinda working in the financial sector.

Neither man is the top dog in these businesses, but somehow, both were going to testify to the U.S. Senate on some weird financial scandal involving something called LIBOR.

The U.S. Senate was planning on no hearings regarding the matter, and nobody had heard either guy was going to testify for anything.  But of course we're not supposed to believe that.

All those newscasters, traumatized families, grim rescuers and police you saw on TV? All actors hired by the government. The proof? The father of one dead girl briefly laughed nervously before a press conference at which he tearfully rememebered his daughter

That brief nervous laugh proves he was an inept actor hired by the government, supposedly.

Another wacko site, Infosalvo, says Newtown was a "staged false flag attack" whatever that is, but it's some sort of plot to take away everybody's guns. 

Atlantic Wire sums up the conspiracy theories this way:

Depending on who you believe, it's the global banking industry, the Freemasons, and Barack Obama (who is also the anti-christ) acting on behalf of "his Illuminati Jewish handlers like Mayor Bloomberg of NY and Dianne Feinstein."

The conspiracy theories aren't all homegrown. According to AtlanticWire, Iran says the massacre was a hit by Israeli officials to punish President Obama for not being loyal enough to Israel, and Obama covered all this up, in order to take the punishment rather than retaliating.

I read these off the wall conspiracy sites every once in awhile because I get a strange jolt of entertainment reading stuff from people who have really gone off the rails.

But maybe I shouldn't read this stuff. Maybe when I do, I'm contributing to the problem. I give them all a Web hit, which in this day the more web hits somebody gets, the more "legitimate" they are, even if everything there is nonsense.

I'd hate to live the life of one of these conspiracy nuts. The paranoia!  So many people, lurking around the corner, trying to take your liberty, your rights, your life away. It could be anyone! And the web of conspiracy is so extensive! It's tentacles are everywhere! Everyone is suspect!

Can you imagine living in fear like this instead of seeing things logically. They've watched too many bad TV movies growing up, and now their life is now one big, awful, preposterous, cheap TV movie.

The conspiracists also have a caustic effect on society overall.  Few people believe these nutcases, of course. But does exposing ourselves to their delusions nudge us just a bit toward a bit of increased paranoia.

I hope not. We sure don't need it.

Small Town Vt. Election Shows What's Right, Wrong About Politics

Like almost every journalist in the nation, I spent election day covering the outcome of the balloting.

The back bumper of a truck parked at a polling place,
Milton, Vermont election day 11/6/12

I stopped in the relatively small town of Milton, Vermont to check in on things there. I got a lesson on everything that's both wrong and right with the nation's political climate.

Most of it scene in Milton was standard issue election fare. Candidates stood next to the parking lot, holding campaign signs and greeting voters. Town residents said hi to each other as they came in and out of the municipal building, where the election was being held. A bake sale benefitted the town's upcoming 250th birthday celebration.

But in the middle of the parking lot was a jarring scene. A guy had parked his truck there, it's back bumper festooned with virulently anti-Obama stickers. Signs with grammatical and spelling errors also pointed out the man's hatred of Obama.

"Obama: Why Stupid People Shouldn't Vote," read one bumper sticker. A hand made sign read: "Warning: Obama may win the election but Americans will loose (sic) it all. Our country is being stolen."

The man put flyers under the windshield wipers of the voters' cars as they were inside casting ballot. The paper listed a lot of reasons why he thought we shouldn't have voted for Obama: "Deminished (sic) America's strengths. To make America more Acceptable to his Muslum (sic) brothers.

This man represents what's wrong with American politics. No, there was nothing wrong with people supporting Romney or Obama.  Many perfectly reasonable people thought Romney would make the best president, and many perfectly reasonable people thought Obama would be best.

The election turned out to be Obama's.

The problem came when all too often, the political discussion was hijacked by people like the angry man in the Milton, Vermont parking lot. There's people like him lurking on both the political right and left.

Rather than have a somewhat intelligent debate on whether Obama or Romney's approach was best, some people resort to these wild attacks not based on reality.

For the record: No, Obama is not some communist dictator set to completely control our lives. No, Romney was not some capitalist  gone amok intent on impoverishing us all so he could rake in billions. Both are smart guys with flaws like we all have, both sometimes self-serving, who had two starkly different visions of how America should move forward.

The Loopy Lous I guess have the right to spout their idiocy. But really, they're not helping. That's what's wrong with American politics. It just makes everybody angry. And until this election, I thought it maybe would turn people away from engaging in voting, in politics, in the country's future

But here's what's right with the way the election system: Almost everybody who came to vote in Milton either ignored the guy with the whacked out signs, or engaged in brief conversations with him, just to be polite.

Those voters calmly walked into the municipal building, calmly cast ballots and calmly walked out to go on with their days.

A Republican candidate for representative in the Vermont House campaigning at the Milton municipal building who wanted Romney to win made it clear to whoever would listen that he had no affiliation with the guy and all those weird signs.

John Cushing, the Milton Town Clerk, shrugged his shoulders and said the scene in the parking lot was just American free speech at work.

Maybe some of the wackos thought they would demoralize those they hated, and they wouldnt turn out to vote, and that would help them win.

Instead, there might have been a backlash. A small part of the reason many people voted, weighed in, was because they wanted their rational voices heard above the din of political insanity.

I took comfort that, despite all the attention paid to the loopy reactionaries, it turns out the vast majority of Americans, Democrats, Republicans and Independents, quietly made up their own minds, stayed away from the fireworks, soberly voted and hoped for the best.

The Hurricane Sandy Wacko Brigade

Last week,  I mentioned those weird conspiracy theories about President Obama and how he somehow controlled the path of Hurricane Sandy.

This destruction in New Jersey was caused by gay people,
evidently. Photo by Tim Larsen, N.J. Governor's office

Huge storms like Sandy always bring out the wackiest of the wackos, saying the wackiest things to distract us from our worries about the storm, and more importantly, gain a tidy profit for themselves.

Now that the storm has passed, the blame game has begun.  Mostly gay people and those who insufficiently support Isreal caused all this death and destruction, we're told.

The always helpful Joe Jervis at the Joe.My.God blog has been cataloging some of the people who don't offer us some creative theories as to why Sandy caused such heartache and destruction and how we can prevent this in the future.

I'm sure storm victims are thinking the same thing I am: If these losers really want to help, they should just shut up. But, of course they won't.

We begin our exploration of our Hurricane Sandy wacko brigade with Cindy Jacobs, who instructed us before Sandy hit  on how to pray the storm away from the East Coast.

Jacobs had a lot of prayers up her sleeves that she thought would work, as quoted by Jervis:

"Rebuke this storm in Jesus' name. The authority of the believer is powerful enough to shift weather patterns! (Matthew 17:20). Declare that the Prince of Peace reigns over this hurricane, and that His peace will cause the storm to diminish. (Isaiah 9:6).  Pray that this storm will not disrupt our Reformation Day prayer initiatives in the eastern states. (Isaiah 54:17).  Pray that the Lord would protect every person on the eastern coast, and that there would be no fatalities or serious injuries. (Psalm 91; It would also be good to declare this passage of scripture over the eastern states.)  Worship God for his provision, protection, and peace in the midst of storms. (Psalm 59:16)."

Somehow, as we know now, her prayers didn't work. Maybe her prayer recipe went bad. Or she was praying to the wrong god. Or God was so annoyed by her he made the storm worse to spite her. I guess we'll never know.

Big storms are always gay peoples' fault.  Every time there's a bad storm, The Gays did it. As if God was going to kill perfectly nice and heterosexual people because other people on the other side of the country are minding their own business, but are gay.  Because the straight people should have worked harder to convert gay people to straight? Even though that's not even possible?

Predictably, a virulently anti-gay rabbi in New York, surrounded by residents of a city stunned and mourning over the damage to their area, said of course it was The Gays fault that the city and the surrounding region were trashed, Jervis noted yesterday.

Of course, the guy who was helping the rabbi perhaps the most in his efforts to overturn gay marriage in New York was a guy named Michael Long. Long's home was destroyed in the hurricane. It's terrible that happened, and I feel bad for the guy, but if God was mad at The Gays for everything, why did the hurricane destroy a home of sonebody who was supposedly on his side?

Another guy, somebody named Pastor John McTernan, really throws the kitchen sink at this issue and blames The Gays, and people who don't like Israel, or something in this incredibly dense  blog post he wrote

"Just last August, Hurricane Isaac hit New Orleans seven years later, on the exact day of Hurricane Katrina. Both hit during the week of the homosexual event called Southern Decadence in New Orleans! Hurricane Sandy is hitting 21 years to the day of the Perfect Storm of October 20, 1991.  America has been under God’s judgment since this event. Both of these hurricanes were cause by freakish weather patterns that came together to create. Twenty-one years breaks down to 7 x 3, which is a significant number with God. Three is perfection as the Godhead is three in one while seven is perfection. It appears that God gave America 21 years to repent of interfering with His prophetic plan for Israel; however, it has gotten worse under all the presidents and especially Obama. Obama is 100 percent behind the Muslim Brotherhood which has vowed to destroy Israel and take Jerusalem. Both candidates are pro-homosexual and are behind the homosexual agenda. America is under political judgment and the church does not know it!"

Whew! That's quite a spew of words, isn't it?   I can't follow it, either.

I love how he came up with those random numbers to explain why God wrought Hurricane Sandy on us  But anybody can make up their own number system. Here, I'll try:

My birth date is 9/9/62.  Hurricane Sandy hit on 10/29/12. There's two nines in my birth date, so the storm hit on the 29th, see, two nines. There's two twos in the date 10/29/12,  so that proves that I'm the one who created Hurricane Sandy and steered it into the East Coast.

Or not.

As it turns out, every hurricane to affect the United States apparently comes at moments when we are insufficiently pro-Israel, according to a lot of these wackos. They explain it all to us at World Net Daily:

The "Long Island Express" Hurricane of 1938 came as the Nazis were consolidating power and we should have stopped them then.

"The Perfect Storm" of 1991 came when then President George H.W Bush was at some conference at Madrid where he was being insufficiently pro-Israel, according to WND

Katrina in 2005 came for the same reason. Apparently, the president was congratulating Israel for evacuating Gaza or something.  So a minor day politically pissed off God so much he trashed an American city unrelated to Israeli politics. Makes perfect sense.

Now that we've established that The Gays and the not supportive enough of Isreal are causing bad weather, who's causing good weather?

Slavery and Death Penalty: What is UP with Crazy Arkansas Politicians?

Slavery wasn't such a bad thing. It wouldn't be such a bad idea to impose the death penalty on rebellious children.

These sure as hell aren't my opinions. They are the wisdom, so to speak, of recent statements by Arkansas policititians that came to light recently.

The Arkansas Times is having a field day with all this. First they reported on Rep. Jon  Hubbard, the guy who said slavery might have actually been a good thing.

Jon Hubbard of Arkansas says slavery might
not have been such a bad idea.

Said Hubbard: “… the institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise. The blacks who could endure those conditions and circumstances would someday be rewarded with citizenship in the greatest nation ever established upon the face of the Earth.”

Hubbard also opines: “Wouldn’t life for blacks in America today be more enjoyable and successful if they would only learn to appreciate the value of a good education?”

Actually, he's partly got a point there. Only the blacks in question don't need to learn to appreciate the value of a good education. They just need to have access to such education. You know, in buildings that aren't crumbling, with up to date technology and textbooks, and teachers who know what they're doing. Something new like that, not the substandard schools many minorities are subject to.

Hubbard has thoughts on other subjects as well, oh yes he does. Take immigration. He doesn't like it. He says: .."the immigration issue, both legal and illegal... will lead to planned wars or extermination. Although now this seems to be barbaric and uncivilized, it will at some point become as necessary as eating and breathing."

The Arkansas Times article doubtless leaves some details out. Or Hubbard is. Who's idea is it to have these planned wars and exterminations? And why? I don't know, Hubbard seems a bit pessimitic to me.

This all gets better when you check out the writings of Charles Fuqua, a Republican running for a seat in the Arkansas legislature. Fuqua says,  that several things, including the entire U.S. economy,.violate the 10 Commandments. I'm not sure how, but I'm not an expert like Fuqua.

Charles Fuqua says a viable option for parents of
rebellious kids is to kill the little brats

A major highlight of Fuqua's philosophy is his idea that imposing the death penalty on rebellious children isn't such a bad idea.

"The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellioius children is not something to be taken lightly."

Of course, a parent can't just off his kid the first time the little brat mouths off.  The courts should carefully decide which rebellious kid should die, and which should not, which adds a welcome sense of orderliness and legal heft to the pratice of getting rid of annoying kids.

And happily, parents wouldn't be compelled to kill their rebellious kids. It's just an option.

Fuqua is certainly not afraid of using death in other instances. For instance, he notes it's so expensive to keep prisoners in jail for a long time. Needless to say, Fuqua's got an elegant solution:

"We cannot continue to sustain the percentage of our population that is in prison. No prison term should be longer than two years. Prison should be unpleasant and rehabilitative. Anyone that cannot be rehabilitated in two years should be executed."   

So even if you're jailed for two years on a nonviolent crime, they can say "off with your head" in Fuqua's world. I guess that goes along with keeping rebellious kids in check.
Other thoughts from Fuqua:
"The minimum wage should be set at zero. It is simply a lie that raising the minimum wage helps people at the low end of the pay scale."

Yeah, make them work for free. Kind of like they did in the days of slavery. Which means Fuqua would find kindred spirits in Hubbard, the first guy in this post, and another Arkansas pol, Roy Mauch.

Mauch doesn't have much of a problem with slavery, either.

".. If slavery were so God-awful, why didn’t Jesus or Paul condemn it, why was it in the Constitution and why wasn’t there a war before 1861?
The South has always stood by the Constitution and limited government. When one attacks the Confederate Battle Flag, he is certainly denouncing these principles of government as well as Christianity."

I guess the civil war continues to rage, at least in Mauch's mind.

And Mauch had this to say about the 14th amendment, which among other things, granted U.S. citizenship to recently released slaves after the Civil War:

Says Mauch:  "The 14th Amendment completely destroyed the Founders’ concept of limited government and was coerced on this nation by radical people and in my opinion was never legally ratified as required by Article V of the Constitution. It was essentially a Karl Marx concept and would have never come from the pen of Madison or any of the patriots from Virginia."

Who knew Karl Marx was so interested in former slaves and freeing slaves would unleash the scourge of worldwide socialism?   Gee, what right does the government have to say slavery is a bad thing.

All these wacko viewpoints from Arkansas pols are funny, but there's a serious undercurrent. The Arkansas Times notes Fuqua is running for office with help from the Arkansas Republican Party. All of them have supporters in the Republican Party, and in some circles among the Arkansas electorate. And from people in other states as well.

The weird Arkansas politicians seem really into the Constitution, which is nice. In that spirit, I will say they have the First Amendment right to spout their stupidity. But it's still shocking that in this day in age, people in (minor) positions of power could be so ignorant, so bigoted, so whacked out.

Disturbing Man Wants to Rape Protestor

A disturbing video surfaced last week of a demonstration in support of the LGBT community in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

A counter protester, from what to me is a weird group called Black Hebrew Israelites, threatened to rape a woman who was among the LGBT supporters.

 The guy wanted to teach the woman a lesson, to make her learn the proper role, the proper place for women, at least in his mind.

I'm all for free speech, but the threat seemed real.  If we're going to talk about the proper place for people, a good place for this scary guy is in jail.

Grand Rapids Police said they didn't make an arrest because there was no specific complaint against the guy or guys threatening to rape. And they had the right to protest against the LGBT demonstrators.

And that's true, people have the right to say just about anything out on the street that they want to. But I wonder if that extends to making threats. I do hope the Grand Rapids police still have an active investigation on this.

Watch the video for yourself, but be warned, it's NSFW due to bad language, and it is rather disturbing:






There seems to be a lot of this women bashing going on by the fundementalists wackos. A guy named the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson in a  lengthy diatribe of how women should never have gotten the right to vote.

Said he:  "The one thing I know for sure without a doubt (is that) women cannot handle power...It's not real power anyway. Power that the world give you is not power. It's all ego-building"

Then there's the video from this guy, below, who says essentially that maybe good Christian woman shouldn't go to college but should make babies instead. You know to increase the population Evangelicals.

Just seems odd, that it seems more and more people want women to go back to the dark ages or something. What's the problem, afraid that women are running things better than you are, bud>

49s Fumbler Death Threats, Cat Murder and Lack of Perspective

In the continuing annals of people in this country who have no sense of perspective at all, I give you two new exhibits.

First we go to San Francisco 49s wide receiver Kyle Williams, who, during the NFL playoffs over the weekend, made some mistakes and help cost his team a place in the Super Bowl.

San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Kyle Williams shown here either
expressing his disappointment in his game performance, or
trying to drown out the yahoos who issued death threats againts him.

Williams feels bad, takes ownership of the mistakes, and I know he will keep plugging. That should be the end of the story. He's not exactly a mass murderer, right? Just a bloke who had an iffy day that had no bearing on the fate of the world.

Well, a lot of people would disagree. Williams has gotten a ton of death threats for his less than stellar performance on the field. People want his wife and kids killed for this too. Seriously. (That Williams does not have a wife and kids apparently is beside the point.)

Here's one typical example, cited by bleacherreport.com who found this charming message about Williams on Facebook from some yahoo identified as Cole Matthew Mitguard:

"Kyle Williams... you need to leave San Francisco forever, you should never be allowed to play in the NFL ever again... Your play and ypur post game comments should be enough to earn yourself a spot in 49ers history's... As the biggest POS to ever wear the red and gold. Lots of hope for next year, let's just hope that KW gets hit by a bus, eaten by a lion, or dies in some other terrible way so he can't ruin the 49ers season again... What a terrible piece of garbage you are KW, you ruined the game I have been waiting for over 10 years..

Really. So Cole, you've been waiting for the 49ers to win for a decade, you think Williams took it away from you and so he must die. Oh, you poor, poor victim.  Enduring your football team's loss has to be so much worse than minor inconveniences like terminal cancer, homelessness, rape, or all kinds of awful things decent people are forced to face.

Cole, I think you're being just a tiny bit melodramatic, no?

Williams is worse than a serial killer because he fumbled a football?f  I would love to confront the people who made the threats to find out what they were thinking. What other mistakes deserve the death penalty? Do I deserve to die because I wasn't paying attention this morning while walking along a sidewalk and almost bumped into someone?

Mitguard's Facebook post and the response it got is fascinating, as it presents a window onto the psyche of people who make these weird threats.  When confronted, they do back down, in kind of a sniveling way.   At first Cole says, petulantly, "Why is it that I should restrain myself from expressing myself."

Well, because you sound like a moron.

Mitguard goes on to concede that maybe, just maybe, the death threat was a little over the top. But he goes on and on about his anguish that Williams blew two plays. The horror! "Every 49ers fan is entitled to at least 24 hours of unmitigated rage," he writes.

True, sports fans are entitled to being annoyed by a losing team. And sure, if your friendly neighborhood NFL wide receiver does a crappy job, why not publicly complain and criticize? But unmitigated rage? So you're going to start a riot or something too? I guess that's whats behind those riots you get after a team loses a big game. Right, fine folks of Vancouver?

Further responding to being confronted, our buddy Cole writes this:

"Please do not try and take the moral high ground on someone in my position who is both drunk and frustrated at this evenings events. But at the same time, I find it infanelty (sic) more embarrasing that their (sic) are fans out there who don't put their beliefs out there."



Oh, OK. You're drunk and frustrated, so that gives you the right to offer threats, even if they're not serious. And you're saying that if your team disappoints you, you're supposed to go apeshit because a real person doesn't have a temper tantrum when the home team loses?

Like I said, disappointment and frustration among fans is perfectly fine when the team loses. But again I have to ask the question:  How is this melodrama a sign of being a real man, a real team player?

Toward the end, Cole's Facebook friends talk him down. He even finds it in his heart to see some  sunshine.   "Next year is going to be an awesome year to be a 49ers fan."

Atta boy, Cole!

I don't mean to pick exclusively on this one poor soul, but his Facebook post was so readily accessible that I couldn't resist analyzing it as a textbook example of being a little over the top.

It looks like Cole has calmed down, but what about the rest of those members of the wacko death threat brigade?  Maybe killing a whole town of people is OK, but screwing up a football game is grounds for swift capital punishment?

Somebody please explain this to me.

Next we go to Arkansas, where the campaign manager for a Congressional candidate came home and found somebody killed his cat and scrawled "liberal" on the cat's corpse.

Apparently, if you're a liberal, your cat needs to die.  Because it's the cat's fault your liberal. Or something.  And which animals should die if somebody is deemed too conservative?

Ken Aden, the Congressional candidate whose campaign manager had to deal with this, naturally condemned this and said he knows that his opponent, Steve Womack, and Womack's campaign, had absolutely nothing to do with the disgusting incident.

Womack for his part, said in no uncertain terms that the idea of brutalizing an animal to make a political statement is beyond any standard of decency.

So at least the political candidates are behaving like sane adults here.

But still, some loser is out there, thinking the logical thing to do with a political candidate you don't like is torture and kill his pets.

I guess in the name of being an "American" the torturer decided to instill fear in a legitimate political campaign. Being a terrorist is OK if it fits your own political views?

Oooh, I hope they catch more of the people who did this, and the people who made death threats against the football player, and make their names public. Not because I want any physical harm to come to them. But because they need to be publicly embarrassed all to hell.

But these miscreants are probably too stupid to learn anything from this.
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