Okay, can we call call them facists now?
Digby turns over a rock and shines a light on the brownshirts of the group Family Security Matters. As the blogosphere has started to notice their lunacy, a number articles from their site have popped down the memory hole according to Digby. But this one on how George W. Bush has a duty to the American People, God and Righteousness to declare himself President for Life and stage a military coup and how the right thing to do would have been to pre-emptively nuke Iraq in the first place. I kid you not. And this is not the Birchers or the Mayberry Militia, this is clearly a well organized group with some money behind it that is going to transmit this kind of stuff until it enters the mainstream to the point that someday soon you'll see Katie Couric asking on the nightly news "Would it be so wrong if George Bush declared himself President for Life and used the Army to round up the terrorists and dirty hippie dissenters and anarchists in America? He'd be just like the great Julius Caesar! Hail Dubya!"

Giving crazy a bad name

"With God's help, the countdown button for the destruction of the Zionist regime has been pushed by the hands of the children of Lebanon and Palestine. By God's will, we will witness the destruction of this regime in the near future."

-- Iran president Ahmadinejad, on Israel

Because the—all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases.
There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those—changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be—or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the—like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate—the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those—if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.
---U.S. President Bush, trying to explaining his plan to save Social Security,
Tampa, Fla., Feb. 4, 2005

Shouldn't these guys be out on a street corner in tinfoil headgear, shouting at traffic?


We have suffered a bit of computer meltdown at home so posting will be light for the next few weeks, but stay tuned -- once we get things up and running again, I have a huge multipart post on race and immigration in Canada planned, and my new shipmate over at the good ship Galloping Beaver, Alison, wants me to finished the Execution sketch.

The devil made him do it

A male comedian dressed up like a woman saying "the devil made me do it" in a comedy routine is funny.

A fundamentalist Christian teenage mother using it to defend her teenage would-be preacher's attempt to roast their toddler alive-- ehhh, not so much.

More progressive parenting in Jebusland:

Woman blames devil, not husband for burning daughter in microwave
May 20, 2007, 12:45PM

© 2007 The Associated Press

GALVESTON, Texas — A woman blames the devil and not her husband for severely burning their infant daughter after the 2-month-old was put in a microwave, a Houston television station reported.

Eva Marie Mauldin said Satan compelled her 19-year-old husband, Joshua Royce Mauldin, to microwave their daughter May 10 because the devil disapproved of Joshua's efforts to become a preacher.

"Satan saw my husband as a threat. Satan attacked him because he saw (Joshua) as a threat," Eva Mauldin told Houston television station KHOU-TV.

A Galveston County grand jury indicted Joshua Mauldin last week on child injury charges after hearing evidence that he placed his daughter in a motel microwave for 10 to 20 seconds.
The infant, Ana Marie, remains hospitalized. She suffered burns on the left side of her face and to her left hand, police said.

Eva Marie Mauldin, the girl's 20-year-old mother, told the television station that her husband is "not the monster people are making him out to be."

And he's killed few people than Charlie Manson

Note to Conrad Black: If you want to stay out of jail, you may not want to compare yourself to the only man ever driven from the White House for his criminality.

The Money Quote:

His book, Richard Nixon: The Invincible Quest, is largely an attempt at rehabilitating the president brought down by Watergate. Had it not been for his "legal and ethical shortcomings," he writes, Nixon would now be ranked alongside Reagan andFDR as one of America's greatest presidents.

Yeah, and aside from that brief bit of unpleasantness in front of the Book Depository, the future Mrs. Onasis quite enjoyed the drive through Dallas.

On what basis can Nixon be considered a great president? His prolongation of the Vietnam war? His secret and illegal wars against Cambodia and Laos? His backing of Pinochet's coup in Chile? His backing of Indonesia's bloody invasion of Timor?

"Oh, but he went to China!" the conservatives always say. He was hardly the first to recognize that the communist regime there formed a legitimate government -- and it only happened 30 years after they had chased Chang-kai Shek off the mainland.

Yes, he ended the draft and started the EPA, but that hardly makes up for using the constitution as toilet paper.

And let's be clear: Reagan was a disaster as president. He tripled the national debt, sparked the homeless problem by emptying the mental hospitals, was a union-buster, sold arms to Saddam Hussien, gave the religious right the undue influence in U.S. politics that it weilds to this day, got rid of the FCC's fairness doctrine thereby allowing evil, lying bags of pus like Rush Limbaugh to abuse the public airwaves, contributed to international tensions and instability by heating up the cold war until it threatened to turn hot, ignored AIDS until it reached epidemic proportions and made George Bush his vice president, thus leading to the coronation of the current dolt in the White House.

And all that is in addition to the crimes he commited gassing students as Gov. of California, rushing to eagerly name names for Joesph McCarthy and making the Bonzo movies.

That Black believes Nixon and Reagan were great presidents on par with FDR tells you all you need to know about his lunatic, aristocratic Tory view of history, but if you need other reasons to dislike him look let us judge him by his actions and his words rather than his reputation as a ruthless robber baron who gutted the Canadian newspaper industry.

He also responds to the repeated attempts by the prosecution to portray him not just as a thief but prone to an over-the-top lifestyle. "It is a total fraud that I lived with any particular extravagance," he complains. "I had certain ideas about how the chairman of a big newspaper should behave. So I tried to conform to that. But I was not a vulgar person."

Contrast that with:

They also allege Black used shareholder money to partly fund a US$54,114 birthday
party for his wife at La Grenouille, an upscale New York restaurant, and charged shareholders when he took the company's jet on a personal vacation to the South Pacific island of Bora Bora.

Nothing over the top about that at all, nor his $9,000 gardening bill, although many people live on less than $200,000 a month

While he admits that there have been some "scary moments", he goes on to insist: "The game is won. I'm on an inexorable march to victory."

That is going to look so good after Lady Babs has one of the servants embroider it on a sampler for his lordship to hang in his cell.

Addendum
Commenter John M. Miller correctly points out that Ford and not Nixon was the president during the invasion of East Timor. However, I would argue that as Ford and Kissinger were both Nixon appointees, Nixon still bears some degree of responsibility for what happened on their watch. The same goes for ending the draft - it was Ford that signed the papers in 1975, but the original groundwork had already been laid by Nixon, who ended active conscription in 1973.
There is one other nail that should be driven into Nixon's coffin; He brought Donald Rumsfeld (whom he admiringly called a "ruthless little bastard") into the executive branch, and thus Dick Cheney, both of whom clearly took to heart the boss's arguments about executive privilege and the right of the president to do anything he wants.

Ding Dong


I've been trying very hard all day to take the high road and not to gloat, cheer or pile-on. It should always be a sad occasion when someone dies, but in the case of Jerry Falwell I'll make an exception. I'll also admit to having cracked a smile when they hung Saddam and when I heard Nixon and Reagan had finally croaked. Evil crap-sacks, each and every one. The ad is from Hustler --Jerry famously sued them and lost. He is the bastard who got the burgeoning fundementalist Christian movement tied in with the Republican party with his Moral Majority (all together now: "it was neither") movement starting in 1979. He got St. Ronnie of Raygun elected, he got Bush senior elected, he had a lot to do with getting Clinton impeached by the House of Representatives (though not as much as Clinton did, let's be fair). Without him there would be no politically active fundementalist movement -- no Ralph Reed, no James Dobson, probably no abortion clinic bombers either. He blamed 9/11 on homosexuals, the ACLU, abortion-providers and People for the American Way. He was a hate-spewing homophobic, racist, sexist bigot and if there is a hell, he is smoking a turd in it right now. And I for one, am glad.
That's right blogging Tories, CNN and conservatard everywhere, my name is Rev.Paperboy and I'm an angry, intolerant, godless, anti-Christian, liberal blogger. SFW?

first against the wall when the revolution comes
Chris Matthew, Ann Coulter, Pat Caddell, Wolf Blitzer, Brian Williams, Jon Scott, Wendell Goler, David E. Sanger, Karen DeYoung, Bob Schieffer, Joe Klein, Brit Hume, Margaret Carlson and Laura Ingraham all just made the list

And Gordon Liddy's review of the presidential package might be the creepiest homoerotica I've ever seen.

That was the week that was...
Not a great seven days for the Gnu Gummint of Kanada, at least according the punditry, and especially to Scott Feschuk.
But you would have thought that Stephen Harper's new psychic beautician would have seen all this coming and warned him. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig...

Don't mention the war
"I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it"
Continued employment precludes my commenting at length in the manner I would like to, but suffice to say those of you reading the Times, the Post and the Globe and Mail will read much more about these controversies than anyone in Tokyo will.

Gov. Shintaro Ishihara pens script on Kamakazi pilots -- just google his name to see whether this is likely to be a good idea.

Abe says "comfort women" weren't coerced -- Yeah, those 14 year olds were just asking for it, the trollops.

Education minister claims too many human rights are like too much butter and could soil Japanese purity, proposes stressing patriotic education in school system.

War crimes still coming to light