Leaving the Polar Vortex and the Climate Change 'Skepticism' Cult Behind

Somewhere between 11 AM to 2 PM today, I can expect to leave the dreaded polar vortex. We expect a balmy high temperature of 18 degrees Fahrenheit today. This would still seem frigid on any other day, but given the previous few days, it's a heat wave. What follows will be a more actual heat wave --  a January thaw, with above freezing temperatures through the weekend. Believe it or not, this is also dangerous weather, as melting ice and snow freeze at night and into the morning, creating hazardous driving conditions. A lot of salt is going to be sold to keep people's sidewalks clear of ice.

Meanwhile, the vortex drifts east. Meaning that Washington will still be very cold while Wisconsin is very warm. And the people up here in the normally frozen wastes will be treated to DC loudmouths saying that cold weather in the nation's capital means global warming is a hoax -- meanwhile, we'll be watching the snow melt off our roofs in the dead of January. The contrast will be stunning and the climate change deniers will once again look like morons. DC is not the entire world. The "global" in global warming means something; it's not a synonym for "local."

And of course, once the vortex moves on from DC, we won't hear a peep about how the current weather proves global warming wrong, since the east coast gets our weather systems eventually. The weather will seem very much like what you'd expect from global warming, at which point the moron chorus of deniers will fall silent -- just as they do during summer droughts and heat waves. For them, a cold few days proves global warming is a hoax, but a decades-long warming trend is just natural variation in global temperature that real scientists (i.e., Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly) are smart enough to ignore and "fake" scientists (AKA actual scientists) attach way too much significance to.

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The Latest Anti-Science from the Conservative Flat Earth Society

In order to be a global warming denying wingnut, you have to leave logic at the door. This is why climate-deniers crawl out of the woodwork whenever there's a blizzard someplace and laugh at this whole crazy global warming idea. Remember how scientists said that global warming meant it would never snow anywhere ever again? Ha! Libtards...

Never mind that blizzards aren't usually accompanied by especially cold weather and that winter storms, like all storms, are driven by heat energy. Let's all laugh and laugh and laugh. And let's look out for stories like this one, so we can proudly parade our scientific ignorance around.

Telegraph: There has been a 60 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, they equivalent of almost a million square miles.

In a rebound from 2012's record low an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin.

The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes.

A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century.

According to climate-deniers, decades of data showing a warming planet can be safely ignored, but one season of ice recovery proves beyond all doubt that the planet isn't warming, but cooling. Because that's how rightwing science woks -- you cherrypick the data that seems to back up your argument and ignore the mountains of evidence that don't. And even that cherrypicked data is presented dishonestly.

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Rush Limbaugh, McCommie

As you most likely know, fast food workers in several cities staged a strike yesterday. The main demand: a rate of pay of $15 an hour -- a little more than double the federal minimum of $7.25. "When they work hard every day for all day long and they don't get paid enough wages to put food on the table and to support their families, then we as a community suffer," explained  Fran Quigley, a clinical professor at Indiana University McKinney School of Law, who joined workers on the picket line.

But why should Quigley care? After all, you have to assume he makes a bit more than the average fast food worker. If we rule out the fact that he's just a good person and assume he's motivated only by self-interest, he still has a compelling reason to support higher wages for these workers, as USA Today reports:

Taxpayers subsidize workers who earn too little, he said, by paying for food stamps and other entitlement programs in which many low-wage workers participate. Profitable corporations employing such workers often make enough money to increase those workers' wages, Quigley said.

This is the conservative case for raising the minimum wage. And it's a case that conservative blowhard Rush Limbaugh doesn't seem to understand.

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No, MLK Didn't Want a 'Colorblind' Society

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Martin Luther King Jr's "I have a dream" speech is considered one of the greatest speeches in American political rhetoric, yet conservatives tend to abridge it down to that one sentence. Charlie Pierce explains why:

There it is. That's the great loophole. It is an otherwise unremarkable sentiment given the context of the entire address, but, for the people who almost certainly would have lined up on the other side of the movement in 1963, it subsequently has been used as an opening through which all manner of historically backsliding mischief has come a'wandering in, from "reverse discrimination" to Allan Bakke, to what is going on today with the franchise in too many places, to the reaction to the killing of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Modern conservatives have used that line to conscript Dr. King into their ideology, now that he's dead and unable to speak for himself. It's the only line in the speech that they remember.

Conservatives have in recent years taken to trying to coopt King as one of their own and that one sentence is pretty much the whole of the evidence for their case. Conservatives see him through the lens of what Cornell West calls "the Santa Clausification" of Dr. King -- i.e., King was a magical figure who came one day and ended racism, then was tragically taken from us by someone who didn't understand. Never mind that King advocated for a minimum guaranteed income for all Americans. Never mind that he died supporting the collective bargaining rights of striking sanitation workers. Never mind that he opposed the Vietnam War and supported the Voting Rights Act. Ignore all that and concentrate only one that one short sentence from one speech and, if you squint and cock your head just right, you can almost believe King was as conservative as your average teabagging frootloop.

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Marking 50 Years of Conservative Near Non-Progress on Race

This weekend "tens of thousands" of people gathered in the nation's capital to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the civil rights movement's 1963 March on Washington. The occasion of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream speech," the march is a touchstone in the civil rights movement.

For those on the right, the anniversary creates a bit of a PR problem, with conservatives currently indulging in a racial freak out over "young black thugs" in hoodies. After George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, the stage was set. Republicans overwhelmingly came out in favor of racial profiling and the sort of street "justice" made legal by "stand you ground" laws.

Then a court knocked the legs out from under NYC's stop-and-frisk policy, ruling that the racial profiling involved was unconstitutional. The right reacted as if rape, murder, and various and sundry species of mayhem had all been declared legal, when all the court really did was rule that skin color didn't constitute probable cause.

Finally, they've managed to work themselves up into hysteria over the random murder of white Australian Chris Lane by three "black" teenagers (one of which happens not to be black). The right moves in fads, going from eye-clawing outrage to eye-clawing outrage until they get tired of being in a blind panic over things no one else really cares about. Right now, the flavor of the month is "scary black people."

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The Pointlessness of Spinning an Event Like the Boston Bombings

I saw the article yesterday, but I kind of set it aside. In it, the Boston Globe reported that the Boston Marathon bombing has all the earmarks of a domestic terror attack.  I bookmarked it and tagged it for later, thinking that maybe it would be better reference from a historical standpoint than from a predictive one. After all, rightwing bloggers have been using baseless speculation to cover themselves in clown paint and I wasn't eager to emulate their failures. I thought the article would better serve as a "clues were there" reference (or "clues were misleading," as the case might be). The article describes the bombs as "crudely made" and suggest that the death toll indicates they weren't as effective as the bomber would've hoped, "making it unlikely that they were the work of a foreign government or global terrorist group, such as Al ­Qaeda." Besides, Islamic terrorist organizations always claim credit for bombings -- that is, after all, the point: to spread terror -- and we're now approaching the end of the 72 hour window in which those claims usually are issued. In incidents of attacks by lone domestic terrorists, it's generally the case that no one takes credit, because the perpetrator doesn't want to risk providing more evidence. In these cases, the purpose of the attack isn't to spread terror, but to "strike a blow" against a perceived enemy from the perspective of their own lives (i.e., the DC Sniper, the Olympic Park bombing, or Oklahoma City). Sophisticated terrorists try to perceive their attacks from the eyes of the media and the populace. From the Globe article:

Juliette N. Kayyem, a Globe columnist and lecturer at ­Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who has spent years working on counter­terrorism and homeland security, said she thought the bombing was probably the work of a terrorist in the ­Boston area who would appreciate the race’s importance to the local culture.

“It is probably home-grown, someone with a political cause from the right or the left,” said Kayyem, “someone who knows how appealing the Boston ­Marathon is to citizens here.”

“Even though it’s an international event, it is still a local event,” she said.

Of course, none of this is to say it isn't an Islamic terror attack -- which was why I approached the piece with a healthy amount of caution and a grain of salt. What people surmise and what people know are two entirely different things.

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Tea Party Bloggers, the Boston Bombing, and the Cult of Perpetual Victimhood

It's a shocking and terrible crime. A blast that was almost certainly terrorism (run of the mill mass murder can't be ruled out yet) rocked the finish line at the Boston Marathon, followed quickly by another. The brutal carnage has resulted in the death of three, with the real possibility of that number rising still -- many of the injuries were horrific.

The smoke had barely cleared before the speculation began -- and with it, the idiocy. Reports were confused, unclear, sometimes contradictory. But one group of Americans felt they had a firm grasp one the true story in Boston. And that story was that they -- the rightwing, Tea Party, wingnut bloggers -- were the real victims in the day's tragedy.

Leading the charge was the blog "Fire Andrea Mitchell," claiming that CNN's Wolf Blitzer had blamed the Tea Party for the bombing. The right went insane on Twitter, which is where the right goes to go insane these days, and the story spread like widlfire. "CNN's Wolf Blitzer just speculated if anti-tax groups were behind the bombing WITH ZERO EVIDENCE," one tweeted -- which turned out to be a massively hypocritical statement.

Blitzer's supposed "blaming" of the Tea Party right consisted of one sentence, "It is a state holiday in Massachusetts today called Patriots' Day and, uh, who knows if that had anything at all to do with these explosions." The only way you to take that as an attack on the right is if you wanted so badly to wear the mantle of victimhood that you'd twist anything anyone said in order to take offense. If you were so self-absorbed as to be able to do that, then the victims weren't those people bleeding on the streets of Boston, the real victims were the wingnut bloggers and their audience.

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Putting Bigotry Before Healthy Families

Same-sex relationships make for good families. It's science.

Huffington Post:

With the Supreme Court poised to hear arguments on same-sex marriage next week, a top pediatricians' group has issued a statement supporting marriage equality for all consenting couples, as well as full adoption and foster-care rights for parents regardless of sexual orientation.

"There is a lot of research to back up this policy," said Dr. Ellen C. Perrin, a professor of pediatrics at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center in Boston and one of the lead authors. "If a child has two parents that are dedicated and willing to provide a permanent, secure family, why would we not support that family? It's clearly in the best interest of children."

This is not the first time the American Academy of Pediatrics, or AAP, has publicly addressed same-sex parenting. In 2002, the organization, which represents more than 60,000 pediatricians, issued a policy statement supporting second-parent adoption by partners of the same sex -- a stance it reaffirmed in 2010. In 2006, the group also published an article exploring the legal, financial and "psychosocial" ramifications of civil marriage. It concluded that more than 25 years of research have found no link between parents' sexual orientation, and their children's emotional well being.

Marriage confers many benefits that a more informal relationship does not. There are insurance issues, legal issues, issues at school, issues about emergency medical decisions, etc. Legally speaking, an unmarried parent is an only parent, with any support from a same-sex partner being limited by law. While single parents are more than capable of raising healthy families, laws barring marriage equality ban parents who want them from these extra benefits and privileges from access to them. as a result, children suffer.

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Rightwing Media's Distant Relationship with Truth

If you take a swing through the rightwing news media, one thing jumps out at you immediately -- what you find there is virtually indistinguishable from what you find on talk radio. It's a collection of scandal pimps, outrage manufacturers, spinmeisters, and out-and-out propagandists. What you won't find is a lot of factual reporting.

And this leaves conservative news consumers open to a lot of big surprises. Conor Friedersdorf uses the Hagel confirmation to illustrate the problem.

The Atlantic:

...Americans who get their news from anti-Hagel conservatives discovered Tuesday that much of the analysis they've long been fed on this subject left them as misinformed about the likely course of events as they were about Mitt Romney's prospects for victory during Election 2012. Of course, a single nomination battle isn't nearly so consequential as a presidential election. This is nevertheless another reminder for the rank-and-file on the right: Demand better from the journalists whose work you patronize, or remain at an information disadvantage relative to consumers of a "mainstream media" that is regularly outperforming conservative journalists.

Rightwing punditry and blogs lost it when Hagel was confirmed and twitter lit up with condemnations of Sen. Rand Paul, who cast a surprise vote for Hagel. But Hagel didn't win by one vote. He cruised to easy confirmation with eight votes to spare. The small, hundred vote electorate that is the Senate makes the math very easy -- Hagel was confirmed in an 58% landslide. Instead of blaming the media sources that had steered them so wrong, conservative news consumers blamed Paul.

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A Serious Blow to the GOP's Rebranding Effort

After months of soul-searching and wandering the wilderness, the Republican Party has decided it needs to change. Well, not change really, so much as rebrand. After losing every minority group -- plus women as a whole -- to the Democratic Party in their quest to unseat Barack Obama, it's become clear that the infamous, racist "southern strategy" is finally dead, dead, dead. No longer are the votes of white Christian males alone enough to elect anyone to national office. It's now clear that "angry white guy vs. the world" is a fight in which the world will now come out on top, every time. Unfortunately for the GOP, that rebranding effort is scheduled to unravel in the middle of March. Then it will become clear (probably to everyone but the Republican faithful) that rebranding is a hopeless effort -- as is real change. In fact, the great unraveling has already begun.

NationalJournal:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was not invited to speak at the annual CPAC conference this year because he broke with conservatives on key issues over the past year, according to American Conservative Union Chairman Al Cardenas.

Cardenas, whose group organizes the conference, wrote in an e-mail to National Journal that while CPAC was “proud” to invite Christie last year based on his record of balancing the budget and taking on teachers unions, Christie’s record over the past year is far less conservative.

“CPAC is like the all-star game for professional athletes; you get invited when you have had an outstanding year,” Cardenas said. “Hopefully he will have another all-star year in the future, at which time we will be happy to extend an invitation. This is a conservative conference, not a Republican Party event.”

For those new to all this, CPAC is the Conservative Political Action Conference, a yearly convention that basically serves as the rightwing crackpot prom. It's a big, boiling pot of extremists of every stripe -- racists, anti-abortion zealots, homophobes, talk radio hosts, birthers, people who see Communists behind every potted palm, gun nuts, Islamophobes, etc. For obvious reasons, I tend to refer to it as the Crazy People's Action Conference -- and it is poised to set the effort to paint a kinder, friendlier face on the GOP back to square one, if not into negative territory.

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Hillary Clinton and Republicans' Post-Logical Worldview

Today is the day that Hillary Clinton will no longer be Secretary of State. No more globehopping behind a desk bolted to the deck of a C-17. That's all John Kerry's job now. He'll probably do the job just as ably, but frankly, I don't see him wearing it as well.

But we tend to be remembered best for the last time someone saw us, which means that Clinton's name will most likely bring to mind her final appearance before the senate, where she slapped back grandstanding Republican know-nothings intent on cashing in on a tragedy in Benghazi, Libya. Many of those Republicans probably wish that memory would fade into history, but Clinton's not done with them quite yet.

In an interview with the Associated Press (her final interview as Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton revisited the Benghazi hearing and had unkind things to say -- not only about those she put in their place, but of Republicans in general.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is leaving office with a slap at critics of the Obama administration's handling of the September attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya. She told The Associated Press that critics of the administration's handling of the attack don't live in an "evidence-based world" and their refusal to "accept the facts" is unfortunate and regrettable for the political system.

[...]

"I was so unhappy with the way that some people refused to accept the facts, refused to accept the findings of an independent Accountability Review Board, politicized everything about this terrible attack," she said. "My job is to admit that we have to make improvements and we're going to."

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Assault Rifles are Different in More Than Just Appearance

If the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer serves any useful purpose at all, it's to prove conclusively that the American Family Association is a hate group. His views on the subject of homosexuality are pretty much identical to those of Fred Phelps and Phelps' thankfully small hate cult, the Westboro Baptist Church. The only real difference between Phelps and Fischer is that Phelps is willing to use the word "fag" and to protest funerals. They disagree on method and there the difference ends.

But Fischer's opinions aren't limited to criticisms of the Homosexual Menace. He believes he's Big King Expert on just about any subject under the sun, so long as there's a conservative take on it. Like his criticisms of the LGBT community, these other opinions are completely ridiculous. When it comes to identifying idiotic conservative opinion, Bryan Fischer is the low-hanging fruit. The worst of the religious right, he makes Pat Robertson look like a hippy.

I point all of this out because Fischer said something stupid yesterday. This should come as no surprise. But, as so often the case, Fischer's simply repeating a conservative talking point he'd likely heard from someone else. The reason Fischer's such an easy target is because he doesn't waste a lot of time dressing up conservative arguments to make them more palatable. He puts them bluntly, offering right wing talking points up in all their naked stupidity. I'm not picking on Fischer specifically, but rather the argument he so helpfully distills.

Raw Story:

“Whoever controls the language is going to control the debate,” Fischer explained in a recent radio broadcast obtained by Right Wing Watch on Monday. “They picked the word ‘assault weapon’ to make it sound bad, to make it sound mean. They’re trying to say the Second Amendment does not protect assault weapons.”

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Reality Does Not Care for Your 'Momentum' Narrative

I guess my physics are a little rusty. Can momentum be the same as downward velocity? If so, Mitt Romney has plenty of momentum. It's just not the kind I'd spend a lot of time bragging about, if I were a Romney-ite. Because that red line in the FiveThirtyEight forecast? That's Mitt. And you'll notice that the trend there isn't the sort of momentum that screams, "Behold our coming electoral triumph!"

Yet "momentum" is the newest aspect of poll trutherism. I've already written about Silver trutherism, which would demand you deny that FiveThirtyEight graphic's validity. Now we have backers of what Ed Kilgore calls "the Big Mo" claiming -- without any evidence whatsoever -- that Mitt Romney has momentum and is poised to crush Barack Obama any minute now. And it's that lack of evidence that I find most disturbing.

Poll trutherism at least has some tether to reality. If you'll recall, poll truthers look at polling that shows Mitt Romney down, assume the demographics are way off, then "fix" the sampling to favor Romney. Presto-chango, Mitt's winning by huge margins. Backers of the Big Mo narrative aren't even doing that. They're looking at polling that under the most charitable interpretation shows Mitt Romney's numbers flattening out and they're declare a long rise in his numbers that simply is not there.

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Ignorance Becomes a Political Tactic

The Republican break with reality is nearly complete. From the historic failure if trickle-down economics to global warming to evolution to the fact you don't choose to be gay, conservatives have been waging a War with Reality for years. And it's the nature of that war that the believe they're winning, despite the fact that they can't possibly. I wrote about an aspect of it yesterday, but that was before this story broke on Buzzfeed:

Republicans have taken their complaints about media polls allegedly favoring Democrats a step further this morning, embracing an obscure new polling website that re-engineers public polls to add more Republicans to their samples, and which gives Republican Mitt Romney a wide lead.

Some Romney supporters have long complained that public polls suggest higher Democratic turnout, and lower Republican turnout, than they think is likely this year. Pollsters have replied that their samples are dictated by what poll respondents themselves say. (This exchange between Hugh Hewitt and Lee Miringoff is illustrative of the argument.)

Dean Chambers, a blogger on Examiner.com who writes from his home in Duffield, Virginia, took that complaint a step further — producing wide Romney leads far beyond what the Republican's campaign or Republican pollsters have suggested is the case.

The site -- unskewedpolls.com -- is of course made entirely of the purest, most highly refined BS. Basically, he takes polling samples that are the most favorable to Republicans, then applies those percentages to other polls. In other words, if he believes the poll oversamples Democrats, he subtracts a percentage of dem respondents and adds a percentage of GOP ones. As you can imagine, this changes everything radically. Buzzfeed posted a Chambers chart from yesterday and Romney leads in a spread of +3 to +10.

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No Conservatives, That's Not The Good News You Think It Is

Anyone who thinks the Romney campaign isn't in trouble just hasn't been paying attention. While Mitt's 47-percent controversy is the first thing to come to mind, this is the old one-two -- one disaster following another. His comments on the unrest in Libya that claimed the lives of US personnel have caused four in ten voters to think worse of him, according to one poll. So he was still recovering from one blow when the second landed. The past seven days have not been kind to the Republican nominee.

The New York Times' Michael Barbaro writes that a "palpably gloomy and openly frustrated mood has begun to creep into Mr. Romney’s campaign for president." Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan calls the Romney campaign "incompetent" and calls on "activists, party supporters and big donors" to pressure them to make radical changes to their approach. And remember, this all comes after a "reboot" that was supposed to reinvigorate an election campaign that seemed to be running out of steam. After the reboot, things are actually worse. Much worse.

So any not-so-bad news is excellent news. The problem is that, from where conservatives stand right now, pretty much everything looks like not-so-bad news, even when it's not. The desperate wanderer in a desert might be more likely to see a mirage and the desperate partisan may be more likely to spot good news. So it is with Mother Jones' release of the full video of Mitt's 47-percent controversy.

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In Any Mass Shooting, the 'Real Victims' are Always Conservatives

It wasn't long after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was critically wounded and six people were killed in Tucson that we learned that the real victim of gunman Jared Lee Loughner was Sarah Palin. People were being mean to Sarah, just because she'd run an ad putting Giffords in crosshairs. It was terrible.

Now that a racist nutjob killed six people in a Milwaukee Sikh temple, we're slowly learning the most important aspect of that crime -- that the real victim is Michele Bachmann. Turns out some random people on Twitter thought her bigoted anti-Muslim witchhunt might've had something to do with all this (Sikhs are often confused with Muslims) and that means everyone on the left is after Shelly -- because random people on Twitter speak for every liberal.

And of course, this all traces back to the source of all conservative victimhood: an unreleased Department of Homeland Security report saying that "right wing extremists" posed a greater danger after the economic downturn and the election of America's first black president. Despite the fact that "right wing extremist" means people like racist nuts who might shoot up places of worship, the right took up the mantle of "right wing extremist" -- I guess because playing the victim card is so important that you'd actually identify with neo-Nazis and survivalists to play it.

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Birth of a Conspiracy Theory

Monday, a pipe bomb was discovered in a backpack left along the route of a Martin Luther King Day unity march in Spokane, Washington. The bomb was described by the FBI as a case of "domestic terrorism."

MSNBC:

In an interview on MSNBC cable's The Rachel Maddow Show, Spokesman-Review reporter Thomas Clouse said confidential sources told him that the device was equipped with a remote control detonator and contained shrapnel.

A bomb disposal unit was called in and neutralized the device with a robot. The FBI said in a statement on Tuesday that "the backpack contained a potentially deadly destructive device, likely capable of inflicting multiple casualties."

"You could describe it as an improvised destructive device... or improvised explosive device," Frank Harrill of the Spokane FBI office said. "...the timing and placement of the backpack [along the march route] is inescapable."

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Poor, Poor Sarah Palin

One thing I've believed for a long time is something I believe is obvious -- you don't get to decide what other people find offensive. If you say something and someone is insulted by it, then the wisest thing to do is explain that you didn't put that very well, apologize, and move on. It's a pretty simple concept. Even in cases where you believe you're right, just drop it and move on. Maybe you didn't mean it the way it was taken, maybe you meant it exactly that way, but are surprised the other person found it so offensive, maybe they're completely misunderstanding what you said -- whatever, doesn't matter. Apologize and move on. If you get bogged down in an argument over whether there's any cause for offense, you're going to lose the thread of your conversation and get stuck arguing about an issue that simply isn't the point. Needless to say, this is less than constructive. If you unintentionally hurt someone's feelings, apologize and let it go, because -- no matter what it was you meant to say -- those hurt feelings are real.

The right has never gotten this. When they say something that's offensive, they often stick to their guns and argue that you have no right to take offense. You see it all the time. What should've been a simple, momentary distraction becomes an issue all its own. And, as all of these tertiary distractions snowball, Republicans suddenly find themselves on the defensive, fighting battles that have absolutely nothing to do with the original point. No wonder conservatives make a deliberate effort to stay on message and all recite exactly the same words -- get them to wing it for a second and everything goes spiraling completely out of control, as they skirmish over idiotic trivia like word-choice. It's like a political version of adult ADD.

The latest example of this is Sarah Palin's use of the term "blood libel" to explain that she's been the real victim in the Tucson shooting incident. When some took offense at the term, the smart thing to do would have been to say, "Blogger Glenn Reynolds used that term and I thought it sounded nifty! That's what it means? Yikes! I sure didn't mean that!"

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The Right, Ayn Rand, and Dr. King

Martin Luther King was a Republican. This statement was all the rage a year ago, when it was extremely important to remember that Tea Partiers marching around with racist signs were most definitely not racist. In fact, when Glenn Beck announced his big rally on the anniversary of King's "I Have a Dream Speech," he said it was to "reclaim" the civil rights movement -- as if King and his followers braved dogs and batons and jail to protect the downtrodden, oppressed rich white guy from tax increases. But it pays to remember where King was and what he was doing when he died.

John Nichols, The Nation:

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was not assassinated at a rally organized by a right-wing talk radio host, or at the inauguration of a conservative Republican governor.

King, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning campaigner for economic and social justice whose legacy we celebrate with a holiday that falls on Jan. 17 this year, died while supporting the right of public employees to organize labor unions and to fight for the preservation of public services.

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Moving Toward a More Pleasant Lie

Civility is all the rage in Washington. At least, for now. Not surprisingly, the voices speaking most about civility equate it with a failed centrism. Apparently, being civil while sticking to your guns is completely impossible. Somewhere along the line, "civility" and "compromise" became synonymous. I guess because it's completely impossible to disagree respectfully. Frankly, I don't see Washington suddenly catching the "middle-of-the-road" bug. Further, I don't think it should. Democracy is competitive by design and for a purpose.

But will a more respectful tone in Washington and in the media really change anything? Sure, you could argue that the right's Second Amendment fetish (along with their misinterpretation of that amendment) makes for some pretty scary talk of "Second Amendment remedies" and "ballot or bullet" signs, but the fact remains that the people with the guns and the signs are angry -- in many cases panic-stricken -- about things that just aren't happening. There are no "death panels," Socialism isn't the same thing as Communism or Fascism, Barack Obama isn't a foreigner bent on destroying America, all Muslims aren't terrorists, people's taxes have gone down, and George W. Bush is responsible for a lion's share of the deficit. Without scarecrows to be afraid of, no one would be freaked out to the point that they begin to babble about a second revolution.

This isn't to say that a little more respect wouldn't be nice in political rhetoric, it just wouldn't accomplish much. What America needs is a push toward truth in political rhetoric and, sadly, no one seems to be talking about that. If there were truth in politics, not only wouldn't we have to worry about some 'bagger practicing his Second Amendment remedies against elected officials, but there probably wouldn't even be a Tea Party to begin with. It's a "movement" funded by billionaires and Washington insiders, driven by propaganda that convinces people to be afraid of non-existent plots. Without the lies, there would be no fear. And without the fear, there would be no danger.

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