Headlines you don't expect

Now *this* is a story from from World Nut Daily that I didn't expect to see:

Ann Coulter has been dropped as a keynote speaker for WND's "Taking America Back National Conference" next month because of her plan to address an event titled "HOMOCON" sponsored by the homosexual Republican group GOProud that promotes same-sex marriage and military service for open homosexuals.

Wow, the wingnuts really *are* into purity testing, eh, when even Ann Coulter isn't conservative enough for them? Pretty sure the only people pure enough to be a real conservative will all be able to fit into a Volkswagen Beetle...

-- Badtux the Wingnut-observin' Penguin

Illinois

In honor of the Quincy Massacre, where four Teabagger Grannies had their feelings hurt by being asked to step out of the street back onto the sidewalk so that Obama's motorcade could drive by:

Bwahahah!

-- Badtux the Musical Penguin

Note: This is the microphone and webcam on my Macbook, along with the iMovie software that shipped with it. No professional recording gear or software was involved in the recording of this video. Also, I'm usually a flatpicker, not a fingerpicker. But this song wanted to be fingerpicked, so I did my best, given that I'd never played Neil Young's "Ohio" before...

Four feelings hurt in Illinois

Yessiree, the right wing has their own Kent State Massacre in Quincy, Illinois, where jackbooted goons of the Obama Socialist Conspiracy viciously attacked Tea Party grannies. Here's the video:

WTF? A handful of awkward Midwestern cops doing the worst job of marching I've ever seen, and a polite request of "Move back, please?" Where's the tear gas? Where's the billy clubs? Where's the dogs and horses and blood spilled on the street? This is the lamest oppression I've ever seen, dammit!

In honor of the Tea Party's "Quincy Massacre", where four teabaggers had their feelings irreparably hurt by a polite request to "Move back, please", here is a song in their honor:

Ten cops and Obama's comin,'
We're finally on our own,
This summer I hear the drummin'
Four feelings hurt in Illinois

Got to get down to it.
Policemen are staring us down.
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And her feelings were hurt on the ground?
How can you run when you know?

La, la, la, la

Got to get down to it.
Cops are being mean to us now.
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And her feelings were hurt on the ground?
How can you run when you know?

Ten cops and Obama's comin'
We're finally on our own
This summer I hear the drummin'
Four feelings hurt in Illinois, four feelings hurt in Illinois
Four feelings hurt in Illinois, four feelings hurt in Illinois
Four feelings hurt in Illinois, four feelings hurt in Illinois
Four feelings hurt in Illinois, four feelings hurt in Illinois

And let us not forget this top-secret video of Obama's stormtroopers torturing a teabagger granny:

No! Not the comfy chair!

-- Badtux the Oppression Penguin

Fact vs. opinion

Water is wet. That is a fact. There is no arguing about this fact, it simply is.

Getting wet with water is good. This is an opinion. It's an opinion I agree with when I take a shower in the morning. It's an opinion my cats vehemently disagree with, to the point where attempting to get them into the shower enclosure in order to clean them up makes for a blood-curdling (and blood-letting) experience.

In short, reasonable men, women, and kittehs can have different opinions about whether a fact about reality is good or bad. But reality simply is, it isn't a matter of opinion. Water is wet regardless of whether you or I like that reality.

One of the things I liked about Barry Goldwater was that he didn't try to just make shit up. He didn't try to say that water was dry or that the sky was purple at mid-day on a sunny summer day. He was, in short, in touch with reality.

Today's Republicans, however, will argue with a straight face that water is not, in fact, wet, and that the sky at mid-day on a sunny summer day is a fine color of grass-green. It's as if they do not live in the same reality as the rest of us. A discussion with someone who states with a straight face that water is dry, and who refuses to believe the fact that water is wet even when you splash his face with a glass of water, is akin to having a discussion with a kitchen table. It is futile.

So it goes with HR3200. Sensible people can have differing opinions about whether particular provisions of the bill are good or bad, but the actual content of the bill is presented in clear legal language about which there can be no factual argument. The nonsense about "death panels", "tax money to illegals", "tax subsidies for public option", blah blah blah is like discussing whether water is wet -- it has absolutely no connection to reality. The clear legal text of the bill explicitly disallows any of those to happen -- the Medicare end-of-life counseling would be done by private doctors employed by patients, not by the federal government, the law explicitly disallows illegals from receiving subsidies to buy health insurance, and the law explicitly disallows using tax money to subsidize the public option. Arguing with people who insist that these three things are real even after you point out the parts of the law that says they're not real is like arguing with people who insist that the sky is green and water is dry. The only argument that should be involved is how quickly such people could be committed to an insane asylum as delusional schizophrenics with no conception of reality. Yet sadly, this is to what we've come: Arguments about whether water is wet. GAH! The crazy! It burns, it burns!

-- Badtux the "Arguing w/a table is futile" Penguin

Will Obama seize Republican babies for Marxist re-education?

That appears to be the general gist of a new Republican survey. It implies that HR3200 will deny health care based on party affiliation.

Which brings up the question: In order to keep the government mind control rays out, do Republicans make their pets wear tin foil hats too?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

And for entertainment... this Fox News re-enactment is fail all the way. Cardboard cutout of bear?!

And the latest wingnuttery is...

HEALTHCARE IS SLAVERY! Yes, that's right -- if all Americans are required to participate in a universal healthcare system like EVERY OTHER SINGLE ADVANCED NATION ON THE PLANET HAS, then it's SLAVERY!

Uhm, no, you stupid motherfuckers. French people are not slaves, they are free citizens of a social democracy, with full control over their government. Swedish people are not slaves, they are free citizens of a social democracy, with full control over their government. Jesus fucking Great Penguin, how motherfucking stupid do you have to be to think that EVERY OTHER SINGLE ADVANCED NATION is a nation of slaves?

Not only is it stupidity to the point of making anybody wonder whether these mouth-breathing cretins are operating on even half a deck, it's utterly and completely demeaning of the sufferings of those who DID suffer from slavery. You want to know what slavery is, you stupid motherfucking right wing cretins? Here's your motherfucking slavery for you: You see that? This poor sod got whipped to within an inch of his life because he was PROPERTY. He was OWNED. He had a MASTER who could do anything he wanted to him, and DID. Now *THAT* is slavery -- not being citizens of a free democracy who vote to give themselves universal healthcare. This motherfucker SUFFERED. How the fuck can these right wing cretins even CONSIDER healthcare to be the same motherfucking thing as being FLOGGED?!

You want some more slavery, you stupid right-wing motherfuckers? Here's some slavery for you: This is one of Stalin's gulags. Millions of people were enslaved at gunpoint and put to work on vast public works, and millions of them died. This is what slavery looks like -- you're motherfucking OWNED, and you do what you're told or the guards shoot your ass. Only the stupidest blindest most ignorant motherfuckers on this whole goddamned PLANET can say that healthcare is the same thing as the gulags. I'm not aware that anybody ever died because they received healthcare! Cretins!

I mean, look: here is slavery up close and personal: Being ripped from your home at gunpoint, and sold as PROPERTY... now *that* is slavery. Healthcare... not so. Anybody who thinks that HEALTHCARE is the same thing as that is demeaning the suffering of all the REAL victims of slavery and needs to be slapped across the face and whipped across the back like that first poor sod so he has some idea of what slavery REALLY is. And even then these right-wing motherfuckers are so goddamned stupid and so motherfucking EVIL that they STILL wouldn't get the goddamned point of just how stupid, how callous, how goddamned WRONG they are.

-- Badtux the Irate Penguin

Wingnut fail

So my iPhone dings to indicate that I got mail, and I open it up and find an email from... World Nut Daily ("We're batshit crazy and so are our readers!"). Which proudly proclaims a historic news item that I'm sure will be touted on all the news shows this evening, a news item so shocking in its implications that surely nobody could ignore it. And that news item is...

The Antichrist has been revealed.

Seriously. No, I'm not joking. That's exactly what the headline said!

I pine for the days of conservatives like Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and William Safire. They were smart, intelligent men who could argue their points with precision and logic and did not engage in flights of fancy just to engage in flights of fancy. Unfortunately, today's Republican Party is the Party of Reagan -- the party of shallow actors pretending to be conservatives as they rabble-rouse what H.L. Mencken called the boobery in exchange for fame and power. They are quite content to cynically throw out just any BS if they think it can rouse some furor amongst their followers that can in turn be channeled into yet further fame, power, and/or money. Unfortunately they lack even the barest semblance of the mental fortitude of a Goldwater or Buckley, and the results are often... laughable. Which is nice and all, except for the fact that these men still have some power, even if they've been temporarily shoved to the sidelines for a while...

-- Badtux the "You gotta be kiddin' me!" Penguin

And today on World Nut Daily...

• WND proudly announces their support for disgraced / impeached "Judge" Roy Moore, who is running for governor of Alabama *again*. Dead Gus Hall is proud of Roy for upholding the nutty tradition of fringe candidates running every four years!
• WND throws temper tantrum, whines "It's not fair, wah!" and stomps their widdle feets because Lamar Outdoor won't run their nutty Birther billboard. Lamar made decision that Birther stuff is crazy shit that would lose them more business than World Nut Daily and its tiny contingent of crazies would ever give them. WND blows fuse. Remember, folks, freedom is only when the other guy does what you want him to do!
• WND ("we're even crazier than Glenn Beck!") admits: "We are losing America." Proposes more crazy as solution. Yeah, that'll work :-).
• And finally, Shep Smith is a vewy bad man for calling the Birthers "nuts", so World Nut Daily ("We have a dozen Birther stories on our front page just to prove we're nuts too!") orders its readership to send Shep yet more nutty emails to make sure that Shep not only calls them nuts, but *knows* they're nuts. Yay World Nut Daily! Thanks for helping Shep figure these things out!

And now I need to go wash my eyeballs off...

-- Badtux the Nut-appreciatin' Penguin

Things are getting scary out there

By now you've heard of the attack upon the Holocaust Museum by a crazed right-wing Freeper.

The problem is one that David Neiwert has been sounding the alarm about for over eight years now -- right-wing extremists pumped up by demagogues on the right, who, when fed untruths by people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and etc., go even further unhinged until they crack and do bad things like attack the Holocaust Museum, kill an abortion doctor, make two different attempts upon President Obama's life (it has now been revealed), etc. Even Shepherd Smith at Fox (soon to be unemployed) is now sounding the alarm about the craziness out there, even though he doesn't point fingers at his own employer's contributions to it.

The level of rhetoric, of outright hatred, is reaching a level that even the Clinton Derangement Syndrome of the 1990's never reached. Like Neiwert, I've been following this for years, and the failure of all their nutty ideas during the Bush Administration has sent the extremists on the right completely off the ranch to the point where their connection with reality is absolutely non-existent. They really *do* believe that the guy in the phone company van below their tenement window is a FBI agent come to take their guns away on behalf of that Communist Nigerian Muslim secret Soviet mole, Obama Hussein. They've lost it, entirely. And you wonder why I blog as a penguin? Open your eyes, the friggin' crazies are out there and they're scary as hell and I like my fine feathered plumpness far too much to risk getting a beakfull of birdshot when I walk out of church one day!

-- Badtux the "The DHS was right" Penguin

And today on World Nut Daily...

We find out that the right-wing hate radio hosts are wetting their pants over the possibility of having to give equal time to the targets of their hate. Note that you do *not* find any left-wing talk show hosts (the few who exist) ranting over the possibility of giving equal time to the targets of their shows... indeed, most go ahead and do so as a matter of course. Rather, it's the right-wingers who are peeing their pants over the possibility that if they, say, bash gay people, they might be required to give equal time to someone from the Human Rights Campaign...

Of course, this just goes to show the whole intellectual bankruptcy of right-wing hate radio in the first place. They can only exist because their wealthy patrons have purchased the public airwaves and will not allow other voices on those airwaves, because if there were other voices on those airwaves, then their message of hate would not work. Remember, you can only hate that which you do not know. If you interact with a gay person on a daily basis, it is hard to hate gays. Hate radio's scream-mongers can operate only because they can keep their audience ignorant. If their audience actually got to hear a real-life Muslim or gay or Mexican immigrant or whatever talking about their life, why, their audience might decide not to hate those people. Gasp! No wonder the right-wing hate-mongers are wetting their pants so much about that possibility!

-- Badtux the "Right wing intellectually bankrupt?" Penguin

Talk about flogging a dead horse...

This morning, World Nut Daily sent me not, one, not two, but three of their insane conspiracy theory emails claiming that President Obama isn't really President because he is an alien space lizard rather than a natural-born American. Or somethin' like that. Yet more of their insistance that judges, not voters, should choose who leads the country. How... Iranian... of them. (In Iran, judges must rule that you are "ideologically correct" before you're allowed to run for office).

Dudes. The man was democratically elected by over 50% of the public. It's called democracy. Look it up in the dictionary, okay? Sigh!

Badtux the "Why do wingnuts hate democracy?" Penguin

Tea bagging

Tomorrow, a lot of the tighty righties are going to get together to tea-bag Obama to celebrate the fact that the top 5% saw its share of national income grow from 15 to 21 percent between 1970-2006 as their effective income tax rate declined from 17.4% to 16.0%. So they're going to have a teabagging party. Talk about kinky. Ugh. These dudes are sick! And I thought the allegations in the Jeri Ryan divorce were kinky...

Hopefully the Secret Service is on top of this. I doubt President Obama is going to lower his pants and undies for them anyhow. He seems far too dignified for that sort of thing. A straight missionary position guy, if ya know what I mean.

Badtux the Buggery Penguin

A post in which I link to Satan

The Great Orange Satan, that is. Which I try not to link to, since it has become such a hotbed of gratuitous liberal self-congratulation and smug ideological partisanship, but this was such a great take-down of the Tighty Righties and their elevation of an obscure and geeky group of affordable housing advocates to Obama Storm Troopers Come To Take Away Your Guns that I've ever seen.

Let's not forget the Official Conservative Headgear: Apparently their tin foil has been slipping, between their ACORN Storm Troopers Are Coming To Take Your Guns Away bit, and their Obama Is A Secret Muslim Who Isn't Really American And Is Going To Turn America Into A Fascist/Socialist State bit. Gah. Conservatives. What a buncha scaredy-cat bed-wetters they be.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

The world according to World Nut Daily

• Obama is foreign-born and has not provided his birth certificate.
• Obama is a socialist dictator who is imposing Cuban-style Communism upon America
• Vitamins, like flouride, actually poison you.
• Obama is working on a merger of the United States, Mexico, and Canada into a North American Union where martial law is going to be declared in the USA and enforced via Canadian and Mexican troops.
• Because Obama is not a natural-born American citizen (see #1), and indeed is a foreign Muslim plot to destroy America (see #2, #4), U.S. troops are legally justified to rebel against his command and arrest and imprison him.
• Liberals want to take your children away and raise them in fascist camps to be perfect fascist soldiers.
• Obama's budget steals money from working Americans and gives it to shiftless Negros (well, he doesn't use the words shiftless Negros, but that's what he means).
• The average American, struggling daily to survive in a shitty economy, actually cares about any of the above.

Here is a video of World Nut Daily's editor, Joseph "Batshit Crazy" Farrah, explaining all of this to a concerned British citizen:

It's a very scary world these guys live in. I'm glad it's not the world the rest of us live in, or we'd all be f*cked!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Ah yes, the nuttiness continues...

In our last recap, World Nut Daily claimed that judges, not the voters, should choose who is President, and that President Obama's birth certificate was not President Obama's birth certificate and in fact was something else entirely that wasn't a birth certificate despite the fact that the Hawaii State Department of Vital Records and journalists who examined it say it's a birth certificate. Except it's not, because it doesn't have all the information that some birth certificates have on them, so it's not really a birth certificate and thus Obama is a Soviet agent planted on U.S. soil in 1991 in order to bring Communism to America. Or something like that.

And I just went over to World Nut Daily and... err... they're still at it. They even got Rep. Bill Posey (R-Tinfoilhat) to attempt to introduce a bill calling for only those candidates approved by the Guardian Council as meeting all requirements for the Presidency be allowed to run for President. Oh wait, sorry, that was the Iranian Constitution that set out that requirement, nevermind, but Bill Posey did try to bring the Iranian Constitution's requirement into U.S. law. Can't have anybody run who is not properly vetted, after all. Why, such an person might even decide to let women wear pants and flaunt their hair openly, or even expose a little thigh or something! And then the whole Iranian Revolution will collapse in an orgy of lust! Oh wait, I'm getting Rep. Posey confused with the Iranian Parliament again, oops, sorry. It's just so hard to tell the difference between them sometimes!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

PS: I don't have an original copy of my birth certificate, and the original on file with the state got destroyed when the Federal Flood after Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, which is where the Louisiana Department of Vital Records was located. However, all that information was entered into computers long ago and the backup tapes were *not* lost in the flood, thus they will happily issue me a Certification of Live Birth "certifying information on file with the Louisiana Department of Vital Records", hot off their laser printers. Every single person born in Louisiana apparently is not eligible for President according to the wingnuts. Wow!

Creating a story

So let's say that you're a reporter and you have nothing to report on because nothing is happening (for a change) in the Middle East hot spot where you're stationed. So what do you do?

Last week I reported on how Wing Nut Daily reported liberals censoring Wikipedia when Wikipedia editors scrubbed nutcase conspiracy theories from Wikipedia's entry on Obama. Now we find out that... hold your breath people... the nutcase conspiracy theories were being posted to Wikipedia by WND's Jerusalem bureau, which then used the inevitable reversions of the nutcase conspiracy theories as "does not meet Wikipedia standards for inclusion" as the "proof" for a story on how Wikipedia was run by rabid left-wing socialists or something.

Wow. That's like a garbage man going out and strewing garbage around, then using that to justify the need for more garbage men. Or a debater publishing an article under a straw name, then using that article to support his debate point. Or... oh what the hell. Let's just call it "dishonest hackery" and be done with it.

-- Badtux the Wingnut-spottin' Penguin

The conspiracy deepens...

Wing Nut Daily ("we're batshit crazy and so are you if you read us daily!") has been covering the vast liberal conspiracy in the media to cover up Obama Birth-Gate, the notion that Obama isn't really President because he isn't American despite the Hawaiian birth certificate validated by the Hawaii birth registry. Now Wing Nut Daily has found yet another part of the vast liberal conspiracy that is conspiring to deprive America of the truth that John McCain is President of the United States of America: Wikipedia.

Yes, Wikipedia. why, those dastardly Wikipedia editors keep reverting right-wing vandalism to the Obama pages as "not compliant with Wikipedia standards"! How dare they! Don't they know that standards are, like, a liberal conspiracy?! That is just utterly appalling, requiring all submissions to meet some basic quality standards, and un-American and elitist! But never fear, real conservatives know the truth about Obama -- that he's a foreigner who uses mind control on the American people! Woot!

Heh. Wingnuts. The only people who could make the shambolic mess that is the current Democratic Party look better than the Republican Party. And as long as the Republican Party embraces their wingnuts rather than exile them to the nether regions, they'll be just another has-been party incapable of electing people to national office. So keep it up, guys! We Democrats appreciate your efforts to improve our electoral chances :-).

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Another heretic found!

Yes, another heretic Republican has been located by the enterprising investigators at World Nut Daily ("we're batshit crazy and so are you if you read us!"). This heretical RINO (Republican In Name Only) is Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.,who has referred constituents raising concerns over President Obama's eligibility to occupy the Oval Office to Snopes.com's debunking of the Obama Birth-Certificate-Gate conspiracy theory.

But of course, for sufferers of Obama Derangement Syndrome, mere evidence is something to be waved off as incidental, and World Nut Daily swiftly does so, noting that Snopes.com "relies for its answer partly on information from the Obama campaign", which of course renders the answer invalid, nevermind the birth announcement from a Hawaii newspaper or the statements by Hawaii state government officials or the statements by others who have directly handled the birth certificate! And nevermind that Sen. Kyl is ranked as one of the most conservative members of the Senate and is a personal friend of John McCain who both endorsed McCain and has been floated by McCain as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012 and thus would have every reason to pump up Certificate-gate if there were any truth to the matter. He is diverging from Republican heterodoxy, and thus must be punished.

And this penguin applauds the efforts of World Nut Daily and other nutty birthers. They make the Republican Party look batshit crazy, and given how much Republican rule of the US ruined things over the past 8 years, the loonier the Republicans look, the better for the nation. So go ahead, World Nut Daily! Pump out the conspiracy theories, one two three, give us more, give us more, give us more nuttiness! We Democrats thank you for your insanity. You make us look good, which is hard to do given the shambolic nature of the Democratic Party, but you guys are doing it, yessiree!

-- Badtux the Appreciative Penguin

Republicans fomenting military coup

Headline news from World Nut Daily this morning is that a bunch of military officers are being incited to overthrow President Obama in a military coup under the feeble justification that being born in Hawaii makes him ineligible for the Presidency. World Nut Daily ("We're batshit crazy and so are you, our readers!") views a military coup against "evil socialist Obama" as a GOOD thing, in case you're wondering. Even though it would mean crossing the Rubicon and the end of American democracy, apparently the batshit crazy wing of the Republican Party believes that democracy is overrated, at least when democracy elects someone they don't like, such as anybody to the left of Caribou Barbie and John McInsane.

Well, at least these lunatics are letting the world see exactly what kind of people are running the Republican Party today -- complete nut-cases who hate democracy. I suppose that's better than the alternative, the Republican Party of the 1968-1992 timeframe, which was run by people who were Evil with a capital E but at least gave lip-service to democracy (in America, not elsewhere -- they loved overthrowing democracies elsewhere and replacing them with military dictatorships). I suppose dumb stupid crazy evil is preferable to smart wily sane evil any time of day because dumb, stupid, and crazy never wins elections while smart evil like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan did, but sheesh. Republicans keep going this way, and we're going to have one-party rule for the rest of my life, assuming they don't succeed in overthrowing the government in a military coup anyhow.

-- Badtux the "Better evil, please?" Penguin

Oh yeah, a video of one of Wing Nut Daily's generals in action:

Wingnuttery in action

So I find out from Wing Nut Daily ("An Insane Press for an Insane People") that Obama is a "Communist usurper" who "must be stopped", and that soldiers are being urged to refuse to obey the orders of their constitutionally-mandated Commander-in-Chief. WTF? Treason? Death threats? Encouraging a coup against the lawful government of the land? Have the Wingnuts gone completely insane?

Oh wait, I forgot. They can't go insane if they already were insane.

Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Insanity-spottin' Penguin