Sheriff Joe: Racist Asshole

"Legitimate complaints" my ass:

Infamous Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio does -- which is why he announced a five-person "Cold Case Posse" that will delve into the issue of President Obama's birth certificate.
The posse follows a request by the Surprise, Arizona Tea Party, who Arpaio met with on August 17. The Surprise Tea Party believes that the long-form birth certificate released by President Obama in April -- which put the issue to rest for pretty much everyone -- could be a forgery. 

"The Surprise Tea Party is concerned," they wrote, "that no law enforcement agency or other duly constituted government agency has conducted an investigation into the Obama birth certificate to determine if it is in fact an authentic copy of 1961 birth records on file for Barack Obama at the Hawaii Department of Health in Honolulu, or whether it, or they are forgeries." 

[...] 

"This investigation does not involve politics," Arpaio told WND. "I listen to all the residents of Maricopa County who come to my office with complaints, regardless what their politics are. 

"My door is open to everyone, and I don't kick them out. If a complaint is legitimate, I don't dump it into the wastebasket," he continued. "When I get allegations brought to me by the citizens of Maricopa County, I look into the allegations, just like I am doing here."

Uh-huh. So if myself and a bunch of other ignorant mouth breather types demand that Sheriff Joe investigate Gov. Jan Brewer's and the private prison industry's suspicious connection to the drafting and passage of immigration bill SB1070, I am sure he will jump right on it, because after all, this is not about politics! His door is open and actions will be taken if a complaint is legitimate!

Fuck this guy and the people who keep putting him into office. He is a disgrace, a complete failure at his job, and uses his office and badge for little more than to wage political wars against brown people and anyone else he deems an enemy. 

Freedom of Coercing Small Children to Work for Shit Wages

Media Matters is on a roll lately, or maybe it's just the stupid people that feed them their material. At any rate, since the Republicans and Tea Baggers are such huge fans of third world policies and third world standards of living, I for one welcome them to just shut the fuck up and collectively move themselves to a true third world nation (remember, we're only aspiring to be one at this point) and see how much they love the awesomeness and freedom and stuff.

And for all you "But Fox is fair and balanced!" types, I think it's just adorable how they are barnstorming  wall-to-wall coverage of the exact same agenda that Republicans in Congress settled on coming out of the August recess.

Time For Obesity, Early Onset Diabetes Protests

It's my inalienable, Jebus given right to be a slovenly fat ass! Keep Michelle Obama's Kenyan socialism out of my bucket of KFC...that happens to be sitting on the other side of the room, that I can't reach, and I'm too fat to walk over there to get it, so I'll just wallow for a while because Medicare hasn't yet approved my claim for a Rascal from the Scooter Store.

The High Cost of Overreacting

I've said it before, but there is never any cost/benefit analysis to Absolute Safety. Ever. Why? Because freedom isn't free. And because shut up, that's why! And you don't want to get snuffed out in your bed at 3:00 am by a terrorist do you?!

I think someone once said something about all of this, years ago:

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.
He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, "using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers."
"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.
He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.

We may have had Navy SEALs swoop in and shoot him in the face, but you can't argue that he didn't ultimately accomplish his goal. I know I'm not the first freedom hating, anti-American liberal to point this out, but it bears repeating as the ten year anniversary of September 11th nears tomorrow. We allowed two terrorists armed with box cutters and a plot that cost $500,000 to fundamentally alter the fabric of America and by extension, the world. We essentially reacted like Gotham City did in The Dark Knight at the hands of the Joker: "Look at what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets." We played right into their hands, launching two endless wars, one of which was completely unrelated to the attack on our soil, and spent billions and trillions of dollars in the pursuit of the laughable ideal of Absolute Safety. We circumvented civil liberties long enshrined by our Founding Fathers in the Constitution, to the extent that many who have grown up during the time of 9/11 now view this as normal. Even when bin Laden came out and publicly stated that this was his end game, we kept right at it anyway. And we continue to do so, and these same policies will continue into perpetuity. He got in our heads, altered our psyche, altered who we are as a people, even going so far as to justify torture as a means to an end, and gave birth to the insanity of the national security apparatus that has its tentacles firmly wrapped about America, ever wooing citizens to forego their civil liberties and basic governmental services commonly offered by other Western democracies so that we can plow billions into defense and security spending in pursuit of the specious goal of wholly preventing all future and potential terror attacks. All of this despite the overwhelming volumes of evidence that show that more Americans die in car accidents than they do as a result of terror attacks. Maybe it is time for no-drive lists and screening shoes and liquids before people get behind the wheel!

Contrast this with how Norway's prime minister reacted when recently confronted with a violent attack on his nation by an unhinged extremist:

Earlier Mr. Stoltenberg said the attacks were directed at Norway's "fundamental values" - democracy and openness - and that the response would be "more democracy, more openness." He said he expected people to participate more broadly in politics.
He added it was too early to consider new security laws.
"Now is the time for comfort for those who have lost family members [and] friends, and to help those who are still wounded," he said.
"Then afterwards, and especially after the investigation is finished, there will be a time for going through all the experiences, learning from what happened and then draw the conclusions regarding, for instance, security measures."
But the prime minister said the time would come when it was necessary to move on.
"We have to, at some stage, move back to some kind of normality, and also to convey the message of sadness with a message of something positive - and that is that we have seen a very united Norwegian people."

Any American politician uttering these words would be labeled a dirty hippie, pussy-ass coward and Unserious.

I'm not even going to go into the opportunity cost of $3 trillion dollars and what we could have done with that money. Just remember during all the flag waving and high-minded, freedom loving, America #1 speechifying that will take place tomorrow, it didn't have to be this way. We voluntarily embarked on a lifelong, national policy of absolute insanity in the wake of the death of 3,000 of our fellow citizens, co-opting their deaths and memories to subvert the rest of the nation into accepting endless wars and the perpetual empowerment of the security state. Their lives and legacies deserve better than this. 

UPDATE: ThinkProgress gives the thrust of my post a leg up, noting that in the ten years since 9/11, only 33 Americans have been killed as a result of terror attacks, while 150,000 Americans have been slain in murders.

That Didn't Take Long

Remember what I said the other day?

In the meantime, we will be stuck with Fox News and the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of this world completely losing their shit, spewing hate speech as they watch their precious grip on America continue to unravel as a new generation rises up and rejects their ignorant worldview.

Well, that was fast. Good ol' GB just couldn't help himself:

On his radio show today, Glenn Beck tackled a particularly sticky issue when it comes to race. How does it make any sort of sense, he wanted to know, to refer to all black persons as "African American," particularly when so many black individuals don't live in the U.S.? 

[...] 

So is the term "colored," Beck and co. wondered, really such a "bad thing" as we're lead to believe? "Only here," he lamented, referring to the U.S. "Why are we made to feel bad?"

Yeah, it's so tough being a white man in America, because we are guilted into not calling people "colored" anymore. I mean, why is the n-word such a bad thing either? Black people say it right? Why can't we? Why are we made to feel so bad?

Don't worry, it gets better:

"African American" was not made to do anything except try to create a super man. "Oh don't you dare feel bad about yourself! You're African American!" No. You're an American. Instead of building the country up and saying, "Lookit. We all have the right, here in this country... Look at what happened with Martin Luther King. That makes you an American. 'Judge not by the color of your skin.'" And you weren't over in Africa! Your great-great-great grandfather was, your great-great-great-great grandfather may have been, but you weren't!And sure this country sucked for blacks. Sucked. Beyond sucked, for a long time. But it doesn't now. It doesn't now. Be proud to be an American.I am sure that Glenn Beck knows firsthand just how bad the country "sucked" for African Americans. He emphasized it twice, just to show how empathetic and understanding he is. And it doesn't anymore! Racism is over because of Obama's election! Just be proud and wave the flag!

Fuck that guy. I don't really know what else to say. It's appalling that he has a national audience of millions of people.

Also too, meanwhile:

Minorities accounted for 98 percent of the population growth in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas over the past decade, according to a new report, as the country’s white population continued to stagnate, and in many places, decline.
Hispanics and Asians led population growth in the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas over the past decade, growing by 41 percent and 43 percent respectively. The population of blacks grew by 12 percent, and the aging white population was largely flat, increasing by less than 1 percent.
William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution and the author of the report, also said the United States had reached a demographic milestone: About half of all recent births were to minority parents, a shift that will have broad policy implications in the years to come.
The country’s largest cities are changing the fastest, Dr. Frey said, and provide a snapshot of what the country might look like in the future. 

[...] 

“Where these large metro areas are now is where the rest of America is headed,” he said. “The old image of the white and black American population is obsolete.”

You could say maybe this is why the redneck tea bagger white fringe of the Republican party is so unhinged and why they want their country back. They are losing it to an increasingly tolerant, multi-cultural, and diverse America. They could welcome it, but they choose not to because they are scary, other, not like them, not white, and not real murkins.

"God's Man For President"

I spent some time reading a lengthy piece in the Texas Observer this morning about recently announced GOP presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. It's a well written and thorough article, the kind of reporting that makes me feel like the Observer might become the next Anchorage Daily News of sorts as it serves up informative local reporting on a wingnut governor while the national media swoons.

Thus far, the GOP presidential field is pretty uninspiring. Some are taken more seriously than others, but in general I don't think anyone (their base included), expects any of the current crop of candidates to mount a realistic challenge to President Obama's reelection prospects. For that same reason, none of the current candidates really scare me. President Bachmann or President Palin would be categorically awful, but the chances of that ever happening are so incredibly remote that it's not really worth fretting over. 

I don't think you can say the same for Perry. I would still place his chances of beating Obama as something of an uphill climb at this point, but the thing he has that the other candidates do not are those certain unique qualities that make him "serious" and leave the national media waxing poetic to the point of breathlessness.  He talks in a folksy, southern drawl, he has deeply held religious beliefs, he straps on a laser sighted gun when he jogs, etc. The media eats that shit up. That and we are a profoundly stupid country, and just because we elected a know-nothing, Bible-thumping, dumb fuck Texan once doesn't mean that we won't do it again. His potential electability, coupled with the fact that the media at large will largely paper over or ignore his extremist religion and just what that would mean were he elected, are what scares me. He's the first candidate of the field about which I can make that statement. 

That being said, let's have a look at Perry's unique brand of the love of Jebus:

Schlueter, Long and other prayer warriors in a little-known but increasingly influential movement at the periphery of American Christianity seem to think so. The movement is called the New Apostolic Reformation. Believers fashion themselves modern-day prophets and apostles. They have taken Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on ecstatic worship and the supernatural, and given it an adrenaline shot. 

The movement’s top prophets and apostles believe they have a direct line to God. Through them, they say, He communicates specific instructions and warnings. When mankind fails to heed the prophecies, the results can be catastrophic: earthquakes in Japan, terrorist attacks in New York, and economic collapse. On the other hand, they believe their God-given decrees have ended mad cow disease in Germany and produced rain in drought-stricken Texas.
Their beliefs can tend toward the bizarre. Some consider Freemasonry a “demonic stronghold” tantamount to witchcraft. The Democratic Party, one prominent member believes, is controlled by Jezebel and three lesser demons. Some prophets even claim to have seen demons at public meetings. They’ve taken biblical literalism to an extreme. In Texas, they engage in elaborate ceremonies involving branding irons, plumb lines and stakes inscribed with biblical passages driven into the earth of every Texas county. 

If they simply professed unusual beliefs, movement leaders wouldn’t be remarkable. But what makes the New Apostolic Reformation movement so potent is its growing fascination with infiltrating politics and government. The new prophets and apostles believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take “dominion” over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the “Seven Mountains” of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world. They believe they’re intended to lord over it all. As a first step, they’re leading an “army of God” to commandeer civilian government. 

In Rick Perry, they may have found their vessel. And the interest appears to be mutual.

Umm, yeah. If that doesn't frighten you, it should. Perry finds himself at the head of an enormous shadow group formed for the sole purpose of subtly establishing a permanent theocracy in America. And these lunatics believe ancient demons control the Democratic party, which more or less already fits in with the standard GOP position. I've written here many times about how Obama cares little for liberals or true progressive policies, simply because they will always come home to roost and vote for him. And in the face of zealots like these, that's certainly true. But it also works on the other side of the aisle as well. They've spent so much time propping up Obama as the most evil Satanic Hitler since the original Hitler that it doesn't matter how your average conservative voter feels about Perry's extremist religion or affiliations, they're going to pull the lever for him anyway because the alternative is Satanic Hitler.

Lucky for us in these savage times, they have a unique solution to all that ails the country:

“With the economy in trouble, communities in crisis and people adrift in a sea of moral relativism, we need God's help,” Perry says in a video message on The Response website. “That's why I'm calling on Americans to pray and fast like Jesus did and as God called the Israelites to do in the Book of Joel.” 

The reference to Joel likely wasn’t lost on Perry’s target audience. Prominent movement leaders strike the same note. Lou Engle, who runs TheCall, told a Dallas-area Assemblies of God congregation in April that “His answer in times of crisis is Joel 2.” 

[...] 

The Book of Joel describes a crippling drought and economic crisis—sound familiar?—in the land of Judah. The calamities, in Joel’s time and ours, are “sent by God to cause a wicked, oppressive, and rebellious nation to repent,” Bickle told his students. 

To secure God's blessing, Joel commands the people to gather in “sacred assembly” to pray, fast, and repent.

As Perry showed recently in the face of a historic drought in Texas, one of his preferred solutions to unprecedented crises is...prayer. Because that is definitely what our country needs now. Sadly, in a way, it may not be that different from what's already going on - send confidence boner signals to the market, and otherwise sit on our hands and just hope and wait for the worst economy in decades to pull itself up by its bootstraps. 

These people are sick, and Perry is their golden boy. A standard bearer to carry their dogma and champion their cause all the way to the highest echelons of the halls of power in America. Their perverse brand of religion includes standard brain washing operating procedures - prey on peoples hopes and fears in the midst of pervasive national instability, predict catastrophe and doom if their tenets are not strictly observed, and finally, sell themselves as the only solution to prosperity and righteousness in an increasingly evil world.

Call me an unhinged dirty hippie, but these people scare me far more than Islamic extremists:

The New Apostles talk about taking dominion over American society in pastoral terms. They refer to the “Seven Mountains” of society: family, religion, arts and entertainment, media, government, education, and business. These are the nerve centers of society that God (or his people) must control. 

Asked about the meaning of the Seven Mountains, Schlueter says, “God's kingdom just can’t be expressed on Sunday morning for two hours. God’s kingdom has to be expressed in media and government and education. It’s not like our goal is to have a Bible on every child’s desk. That’s not the goal. The goal is to hopefully have everyone acknowledge that God’s in charge of us regardless.” 

[...] 

“We’re going to influence it,” Schlueter told his congregation. “We’re going to infiltrate it, not run from it. I know why God’s doing what he’s doing...He’s just simply saying, ‘Tom I’ve given you authority in a governmental authority, and I need you to infiltrate the governmental mountain. Just do it, it’s no big deal.’ I was talking with [a member of the congregation] the other day. She’s going to start infiltrating. A very simple process. She’s going to join the Republican Party, start going to all their meetings. Some [members] are already doing that.

Isn't that cute? They don't want Bibles on every desk in America (yet). They just want us to, you know, be lovers of Christ. I'm sure.

In any other country in the developed world, a Perry candidacy would be laughed off the national stage. But here in America, it is heralded and embraced, you know, because we are a center right nation and the Founding Fathers were huge Bible thumpers and Jebus lovers and all that. I think the GOP field is going to come down to a pitched battle between Romney and Perry, but in my opinion, Perry stands a much better chance to become the nominee. Unlike the Democrats, the Republican brand cares very little for the center of the electorate or the political whims of independents. The only sort of outreach they do to these demographics is their endless vomit cyclone of misinformation and propaganda on the off chance that they can convince a few centrist morons that their policies aren't as ludicrous and misguided in theory as they are in practice. Outside of that, their primary goal is to roil their base into a feverish and energized froth and to maintain that pitch through Election Day by means of a persistent stream of red meat and hyper polarized media. And a Perry candidacy is the perfect foil for just that. Perry's brand of religious extremism and Texan macho real murkin swagger will crystallize the Republican base and tea baggers alike, as if these two things were mutually exclusive to begin with. Perry's special love of Jebus will coalesce the anti-gay/anti-Muslim/anti-anything-not-white-and-Christian/pro-life social conservatives, while his deregulatory, free-market-knows-best, low-tax love of plutocracy will almost certainly deliver the mouth breathing tea bagger vote. That's a feature, not a bug. They don't want or need independents when they have a firebrand candidate around which their most ignorant and staunchest supporters can rally, emboldened by their efforts at the state level to disenfranchise or otherwise bar reliably Democratic constituents from ever making it to the polls. 

And he must never be allowed to take the White House. If flagging Dems needed a rallying cause for 2012, it has just arrived. 

Not All Republicans Are Racist

But if you're racist, you're probably a Republican:

A comedian impersonating President Obama who was hired to perform here on Saturday at the Republican Leadership Conference delivered racially tinged remarks about Mr. Obama’s heritage and offered a mocking assessment of the Republican presidential candidates.

The impersonator, Reggie Brown of Chicago, opened his act by joking about Mr. Obama’s family history, referring to his white mother from Kansas and his black father from Kenya. He said that he was born in Hawaii, adding, “or as the Tea Partiers like to call it, Kenya.”

He said that Michelle Obama, the first lady, enjoys celebrating all of February, Black History Month. He said the president celebrates only half the month.

“My mother loved a black man and, no, she was not a Kardashian,” Mr. Brown said later, referring to the family that stars in reality shows. Khloe Kardashian, who is white, is married to Lamar Odom, who is black and plays for the Los Angeles Lakers.

The audience, which was nearly entirely white, watched with befuddlement as the impersonator told them to look into the future to see what the Obamas will look like when they are retired. An image of a feuding husband and wife, from the TV show “Sanford and Son,” was flashed on screens in the ballroom.

The GOP hates Obama. That much is glaringly evident. They only hired the comedian; they didn't prepare his material. But I think the fact that he instantly went to the issue of race to mock the President is pretty telling. There are countless other ways that he could have lampooned the Obamas, but he chose race. He was simply playing to his audience. 

And this quote is pretty good:

Doug Heye, a party strategist and former communications director for the Republican National Committee, criticized the hiring of Mr. Brown. As word of the performance began to spread online, he wrote in a message on Twitter: “Wonder why many minorities have problems with G.O.P.? Our own fault.”

Yes, because this incident of hiring a racist comedian for your Southern White Oligarch Conference is the primary reason why "many minorities" have problems with the GOP. It has nothing to do with the fact that since January 20, 2009 the GOP has spent every waking moment blowing racist dog whistles as they decried Obama's "otherness," that he is a Marxist socialist Kenyan secret Muslim that hates Jesus and America, that he does not believe in the same America that good ol' white folk believe in, that he has a deep seated hatred of white people, that he's secretly taking over the country through union thugs and his minority-laden election stealing army at ACORN, and the pervasive dissemination of these talking points (both explicitly and implicitly) to keep the not-at-all-racist teabaggers frothing at the mouth. But these are just principled differences! They only disagree with Obama's politics. The racially undertoned invectives being hurled at our first black president have nothing to do with his race.

There are plenty of reasons for "many minorities" to take issue with the GOP, but I would venture a guess that this barely registers as so much as a blip on how they view the GOP. This is nothing new, but rather a continuation of the modern GOP's excellent track record on race relations.

(h/t Steve Benen)

America's Gun Fetish

Guns are one of those rare things in American culture that you just can't mess with. It doesn't matter how modest or truly conservative (not in the teatard batshit context - I mean the literal sense) the policy is; the only acceptable gun policy in America is no policy at all, or that which seeks to deregulate or fundamentally loosen the already insanely lax laws we have in place. 

That being said, we now have Al Qaida cheering jihadists to exploit the aforementioned insanely lax gun laws. The same laws that have previously been proven by Michael Bloomberg to be insanely lax and dangerous and reckless. As Digby notes, gun policy was one of the few facets of American domestic policy left untouched by the collective legislative pants shitting that succeeded the days and months following 9/11. 

It's another reminder of how completely ignorant and futile are our security policies in the wake of 9/11.  We're terrified of someone sneaking a bottle of killer shampoo onto an airplane when there are a myriad of other ways in which an attack could cause widespread terror and casualties - gun violence being prime among them. We've seen the horror caused by years of innumerate school shootings, the Mumbai attacks three years ago, and even as recently as Jared Loughner's attack in Tucson earlier this year. 

But for god's sake, whatever you do - stay the fuck away from America's firearms. Real Amurikans know you need 'em for when that day comes to refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and over throwin' the tyrannical federal gubmint and not treadin' on me and stuff. And don't call them crazy either - god fearing Amurikans just really, really love Jebus, guns, and the Constitution:

h/t to Kos for the awesome pics.

Also, in true characteristic asshole fashion, the NRA opposes closing the gun show loophole, and has up until this point declined comment on the Al Qaida video.