Racist elements? What racist elements?

This photo is from a great new blog, TeaPartyTracker.org, by the NAACP.

My friend Omar took this pic.

The English language seems to be very elusive to these people.

This is one of my favorites.  The redneck do-rag is a nice touch.

This classic is from a Pat Buchanan “English-only” “conferenece.”  I think if one advocates monoglotism, one should at least master one language.  Monoglotism is so boring, don’t you think?

Following the hellenistic pattern, I coined a word for these English-monoglotists who seem to lack mastery of one language, hemiglots.

To wit:

Polyglot - speaker of multiple languages
Monoglot - speaker of one language
Hemiglot - speaker of half a language

More…

Let’s conclude with a shout out to the dumb-down filter from which most of these people get their “information.” Of course, it’s misspelled.

Many progressive bloggers who use Google AdSense to monetize their blogs have to constantly deal with the hassle of preventing Republican and right-wing ads from serving on their sites.  By using Competitive Ad Filters, bloggers can go far in mitigating these ads from serving.

Here is a simple description on how to filter your ads and a way we can share domains to keep on top of what would be an overwhelming project for one person.

To get going, in the “Ad Sense Setup” tab go to “Competitive Ad Filter.”

You will see two tabs in the lower part of the screen, “Ad Sense for Content” and “AdSense for Feeds,” in which you can enter advertiser domains to exclude.  Be sure to enter all blocked domains in both if you serve ads to RSS feeds via FeedBurner. In most cases you will simply enter the domain without the www, i.e. “gop.com” and not “www.gop.com.” This is important in the event any of your blocked advertisers should serve ads linking to other sub-domains of which you may be unaware.

Building a list of blocked domains can take some time.  It would be nice if there was a simple setting like “Block Republican Advertisers” or something but alas there isn’t.  For the most part you would just have to just wait for a “bad” ad to serve, note the domain and add it to our list.

This method, however, has a critical shortcoming.  Most campaigns will geo-target their ads, that is limit their ads to serve only within a specific geographic area. For example, John McCain’s senate campaign in Arizona would likely only book ads to serve to users in Arizona.  If you are a blogger in Colorado, you would be unaware of the fact that McCain ads are serving to your visitors in Arizona.  I have build a list of Republican and right-wing domains that I know remains very incomplete, however I’ll share it with you here and if you know of other domains, please add them to the comment thread.  I’ll verify the domain and update the list. This way, I figure we progressive bloggers can help each other out.

As a final note, when testing ads do not click on AdSense ads on your own site.  This is a violation of the AdSense program policies as it creates an invalid click and inflates advertiser costs and your earnings as a publisher. It can also get you banned from the AdSense program and make you susceptible to legal action.  In most cases the domain will display under the ad or  you can use the AdSense Preview Tool to get the destination domain without clicking the ad.  The AdSense Preview Tool will also let you impersonate different locations to test for geo-targeted ad.  It’s a must for any AdSense publisher.

Here is the link to my list again.

This comment made me laugh from user BaScOmBe on CrooksandLiars…

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

“She rolled her eyes and said, “You must be an Obama Democrat.”

“I am,” replied the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help to me.”

The man smiled and responded, “You must be a Republican.”

“I am,” replied the balloonist. “How did you know?”

“Well,” said the man, “you don’t know where you are or where you are going. You’ve risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it’s my fault.”

Greg Sargent posits…

A question for fellow reporters and editors: At what point do Sarah Palin’s attacks and smears become so vile and absurd that they no longer merit attention? Is there such a point?

Palin, who has broken the mold in so many ways, has defied the laws of political and media gravity in another fashion: Despite the ever-mounting ridiculousness of her claims, she continues to get attention. This isn’t so with other figures. Frequently those who traffic in absurdity and smears to get media attention keep upping the ante until their assertions become so grotesque and self-parodic that they are no longer newsworthy.

It’s kind of like inflation: Keep printing more money and the value of it keeps dropping. That hasn’t happened with Palin.

As long as Palin isn’t an actual candidate for public office, at what point do we stop rewarding every statement from Palin, no matter how vicious or mendacious, with attention? Should there be such a point?

I say no.  The fact that we give attention to people like Sarah Palin and pretend that she is actually engaging in serious discourse says more about us as a people than it does about her.  We are a shallow and simple minded people with ADD.

Couldn’t have put it better myself…

The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the undereducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all reactionary, all backward —there-is-no-global-warming— rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated classes, have long since fled.

— Frank Schaeffer

Fearing nothing but fear itself, the teabaggers endlessly rant about taxes being too high. Remember, irrational fear is a defining characteristic of the right-wing mind.

According to this story taxes are currently at a their lowest levels since 1950.

Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8.% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.

Three reasons are given for the reduction of taxes,

• Stimulus law. One-third of last year’s $862 billion economic stimulus went for tax cuts. Biggest reduction: The Making Work Pay tax credit reduced income taxes $800 for married couples earning up to $150,000.

• Progressive tax rates. Presidents Clinton and Bush pushed through a series of tax changes — credits, lower rates, higher exemptions — that slashed income taxes for poor and middle-class families. A drop in income now can trigger big tax breaks and sharply lower rates, sometimes falling to zero.

• Sales tax. Consumers cut spending sharply in this downturn, thereby paying less in sales taxes.

I often say, if you know anyone who is vehemently anti-gay, he is probably gay himself. We find story after story of these anti-gay creeps lurking about in the gay shadows, if you will.

Well here is another one. The Miami New Times reports Family Research Council co-founder and anti-gay activist George Alan Rekers was spotted leaving Miami International Airport on April 13 with a 20-year-old he met on a gay escort site.  Am I surprised by this story? If you could see me right now you would see my shocked face.

The pictures on the Rentboy.com profile show a shirtless young man with delicate features, guileless eyes, and sun-kissed, hairless skin. The profile touts his “smooth, sweet, tight ass” and “perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)” and explains he is “sensual,” “wild,” and “up for anything” — as long you ask first. And as long as you pay.

On April 13, the “rent boy” (whom we’ll call Lucien) arrived at Miami International Airport on Iberian Airlines Flight 6123, after a ten-day, fully subsidized trip to Europe. He was soon followed out of customs by an old man with an atavistic mustache and a desperate blond comb-over, pushing an overburdened baggage cart.

That man was George Alan Rekers, of North Miami — the callboy’s client and, as it happens, one of America’s most prominent anti-gay activists. Rekers, a Baptist minister who is a leading scholar for the Christian right, left the terminal with his gay escort, looking a bit discomfited when a picture of the two was snapped with a hot-pink digital camera.

Reached by New Times before a trip to Bermuda, Rekers said he learned Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation. “I had surgery,” Rekers said, “and I can’t lift luggage. That’s why I hired him.” (Medical problems didn’t stop him from pushing the tottering baggage cart through MIA.) /* who sincerely buys this? */

Yet Rekers wouldn’t deny he met his slender, blond escort at Rentboy.com — which features homepage images of men in bondage and grainy videos of crotch-rubbing twinks — and Lucien confirmed it. /* so this slimy hypocrite he goes to a site called Rentboys.com with a splash page featuring a cut young body and claims that he only discovered he as a ‘prostitute only midway through their vacation’?  Yeah OK. */

At the small western Miami townhome he shares with a roommate, a nervous Lucien expressed surprise when we told him that Rekers denied knowing about his line of work from the beginning. “He should’ve been able to tell you that,” he said, fidgeting and fixing his eyes on his knees. “But that’s up to him.”

For decades, George Alan Rekers has been a general in the culture wars, though his work has often been behind the scenes. In 1983, he and James Dobson, America’s best-known homophobe, formed the Family Research Council, a D.C.-based, rabidly Christian, and vehemently anti-gay lobbying group that has become a standard-bearer of the nation’s extreme right wing. Its annual Values Summit is considered a litmus test for Republican presidential hopefuls, and Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter have spoken there. (The Family Research Council would not comment about Rekers’s Euro-trip.)

He has also influenced American government, serving in advisory roles with Congress, the White House, and the Department of Health and Human Services and testifying as a state’s witness in favor of Florida’s gay adoption ban. A former research fellow at Harvard University and a distinguished professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of South Carolina, Rekers has published papers and books by the hundreds, with titles like Who Am I? Lord and Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know About Homosexuality.

“While he keeps a low public profile, his fingerprints are on almost every anti-gay effort to demean and dehumanize LGBT people,” says Wayne Besen, a gay rights advocate in New York City and the executive director of Truth Wins Out, which investigates the anti-gay movement. “His work is ubiquitously cited by lobby groups that work to deny equality to LGBT Americans. Rekers has caused a great deal of harm to gay and lesbian individuals.”

Rekers is a board member of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), an organization that systematically attempts to turn gay people straight. And the Huffington Post recently singled out Rekers as a member of the American College of Pediatricians — an official-sounding outfit in Gainesville that purveys lurid, youth-directed literature accusing gays of en masse coprophilia. (In an email, the college’s Lisa Hawkins wrote, “ACPeds feels privileged to have a scholar of Dr. Rekers’ stature affiliated with our organization. I am sure you will find Prof. Rekers to be an immaculate clinician/scholar, and a warm human being.”)

Rekers lectures worldwide, from Europe to the Middle East, on teen sexuality. Yet during his ten-day sojourn with Lucien to London and Madrid, he had no lectures scheduled. Both men deny having sex on the trip, and emails exchanged between the two before their jaunt are cautiously worded.

“I’d like to propose another trip to Rome, Italy, for a week or more,” Rekers wrote in an email dated March 21 obtained by New Times. “This is so exciting to have a nice Travel Assistant and traveling companion! Wow! I’m so glad I met you.” /* yeah I bet */

“I called and talked to the reservation guy in London and reserved a room with two twin beds,” Rekers wrote on March 26.

“Now that I’m packed, tomorrow I’ll work on completing my income tax return,” Rekers wrote two days later. “Not fun… But I’ll just remind myself that the fun trip is coming soon.”

In his interview with New Times, Lucien didn’t want to impugn his client, but he made it clear they met through Rentboy.com, which is the only website on which he advertises his services. Neither Google nor any other search engine picks up individual Rentboy.com profiles, any more than they pick up individual profiles on eHarmony or Match.com. You cannot just happen upon one.

Prepare for your dinner to force its way back up.  The Bible isn’t a science book.  Religious fundamentalism of any sort is a plague on the mind.  Again, capricious regard for facts and reality are characteristic of the right.

Leave it to the right-wing to conclude that the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion is the result of environmentalist sabotage. This was first thrown out there by Rush Limbaugh, based upon absolutely no evidence whatsoever but his own drug-induced disillusions.  Now the mind-numbed bobble-headed right-wing is in agreement.

Limbaugh said,

Lest we forget … the cap and trade bill was strongly criticized by hardcore environmentalist whackos because it supposedly allowed more offshore drilling and nuclear plants… [W]hat better way to head off more oil drilling and nuclear plants then by blowing up a rig? I’m just, I’m just noting the timing here.

I bring this up because this is the typical way “information” flows in right-wing circles. A Limbaugh, a Beck or whoever proffers what is the the result of their own mental pathology (I honestly think Limbaugh and Beck are clinically insane à la Dale Gribble).  This diarrhea of the mind is totally detached from any empirical evidence or facts of reality.   The lemming-like “dittohead” listeners, who are typically fearful, superstitious and capricious about facts by nature, then absorb and agree.

When asked if the explosion was deliberate, former Bush press secretary Dana Perino chimed in with this beaut on Fox News Channel,

I’m not trying to introduce a conspiracy theory, but was this deliberate? You have to wonder…if there was sabotage involved.

Remember this is the same woman who had no clue what the Cuban Missile Crisis was when it came up during a press conference. Perino is a real brain trust, huh?