Category Archives: Politics: US

NAACP Report on Tea Parties

Crooks and Liars predicts the trolls will be out in force on this one:

Cue the right-wing wailing and gnashing of teeth: The NAACP has now fully backed up its accusations of racism within the Tea Party movement with a meticulously documented report on the Tea parties' multifarious connections to racists and various far-right extremists.

The report, “Tea Party Nationalism,” looks at the relationships and differences between the six major Tea Party organizations — FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and Tea Party Express — and the various ways that each group has established connections with, and empowers, outright racists and white supremacists, as well we far-right “Patriot” extremists of various stripes.

“In these ranks, an abiding obsession with Barack Obama's birth certificate is often a stand-in for the belief that the first black president of the United States is not a 'real American.' Rather than strict adherence to the Constitution, many Tea Partiers are challenging the provision for birthright citizenship found in the Fourteenth Amendment,” write authors Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, which produced the report for the NAACP.

The heart of the report is the section titled “Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Militia Impulse, which includes some previously overlooked facets of the movement and revealing details:

(There's lots more where that came from.)

Posted in Politics: US | 3 Comments

Firefight Over Firefighting

If, like most people who read this blog, you get the entry feed but not the comments feed, you might want to head over to the comments on The Burning Question.

They're heating up.

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The Burning Question

One of the most disturbing things I've seen online is this report, via Think Progress, Tennessee County’s Subscription-Based Firefighters Watch As Family Home Burns Down:

[7/6/2012: links re-insterted into post — something seems to have eaten them. Here’s a direct link to the video.]

Posted in Politics: US | 43 Comments

Vanity Fair Does Palin

A very good read: Sarah Palin the Sound and the Fury.

Full of creepy personal details. And this:

For messaging strategy, Palin relies on William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, and Fred Malek, who was an aide to Presidents Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush.

It is actually hard to imagine a worse combination (although I will admit preemptively that it is undoubtedly possible): one stupid and venal, the other evil. Yes, it's that Fred Malek.

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How Did It Happen?

A friend who just spent six months abroad concentrating on his work asks in bemused wonderment, “What happened to the US while I was away? How did it lose 15 IQ points and lurch to the right?”

Posted in Politics: US | 3 Comments

Please Tell Me He’s Wrong

Glenn Greenwald has some gloomy thoughts in What collapsing empire looks like.

Please tell me why he's wrong.

Posted in Politics: US | 4 Comments