July 2009

Wingnuts love to attack the ‘libtards’ for not ‘supporting the troops’.

Where, pray tell, is the flood of wingnut outrage at the findings of a Defense Department Inspector General investigation that “found that at least 9 electrocution deaths of US troops in Iraq can be attributed to shoddy electrical work and failure to follow proper safety procedures, and failures on multiple layers of supposedly required military inspections which should have caught the errors”?

Here’s an example of the sort of mendacity popular on wingnut blogs, this from a particularly dimwitted specimen name of Paul Mitchell (no, not the hairdresser). He’s been busy spreading a particularly pernicious rightwing fairy tale about HR 3200, the healthcare bill now being considered by Congress:

From HR3200, page 16, Line 11-16, says that a “Grandfathered” private insurer CANNOT enroll new people into their program after year one. So, if you are NOT in a private plan before year one is over, YOU CAN NEVER GET IN ONE. So, what does that do? It makes private insurance IMPOSSIBLE because they can NEVER sign up new clients. GET IT, MORON?

Well, he used CAPITAL LETTERS. That’s undeniable proof that he’s telling us the absolute truth, right?

Of course not. Mitchell is deliberately lying when he says that “if you are NOT in a private plan before year one is over, YOU CAN NEVER GET IN ONE”. He is pretending that “grandfathered private insurer” is synonymous with “any private insurer” — which, of course, it is not.

ConWebWatch does a stellar job of debunking the numerous Obama birth certificate lies being promulgated by the lying buffoons at WorldNetDaily.

Radley Balko points out what the media is missing about the Henry Gates ballyhoo…

By any account of what happened — Gates’, Crowleys’, or some version in between — Gates should never have been arrested. “Contempt of cop,” as it’s sometimes called, isn’t a crime. Or at least it shouldn’t be. It may be impolite, but mouthing off to police is protected speech, all the more so if your anger and insults are related to a perceived violation of your rights. The “disorderly conduct” charge for which Gates was arrested was intended to prevent riots, not to prevent cops from enduring insults. Crowley is owed an apology for being portrayed as a racist, but he ought to be disciplined for making a wrongful arrest.

He won’t be, of course. And that’s ultimately the scandal that will endure long after the political furor dies down. The power to forcibly detain a citizen is an extraordinary one. It’s taken far too lightly, and is too often abused. And that abuse certainly occurs against black people, but not only against black people. American cops seem to have increasingly little tolerance for people who talk back, even merely to inquire about their rights.

…

This deference to police at the expense of the policed is misplaced. Put a government worker behind a desk and give him the power to regulate, and conservatives will wax at length about public choice theory, bureaucratic pettiness, and the trappings of power. And rightly so. But put a government worker behind a badge, strap a gun to his waist, and give him the power to detain, use force, and kill, and those lessons somehow no longer apply. 

Police officers deserve the same courtesy we afford anyone else we encounter in public life — basic respect and civility. If they’re investigating a crime, they deserve cooperation as required by law, and beyond that only to the extent to which the person with whom they’re speaking is comfortable. Verbally disrespecting a cop may well be rude, but in a free society we can’t allow it to become a crime, any more than we can criminalize criticism of the president, a senator, or the city council. There’s no excuse for the harassment or arrest of those who merely inquire about their rights, who ask for an explanation of what laws they’re breaking, or who photograph or otherwise document police officers on the job.

Gee, is anyone surprised that Cao, one of the wingnutosphere’s most prolific liars, is once again trying to gin up a phony controversy?

The serial fabulist now claims that Google is ‘censoring’ the blog of an anti-gay group calling itself “MassResistance”. And what is the evidence of this ‘censorship’? Well, there’s a warning screen (called an ‘interstitial’ by Blogger.com, which hosts the MassResistance blog and is a subsidiary of Google) that appears when one tries to access to blog for the first time. It states:

Some readers of this blog have contacted Google because they believe this blog’s content is objectionable. In general, Google does not review nor do we endorse the content of this or any blog. For more information about our content policies, please visit the Blogger Terms of Service

…and provides a button that allows the viewer to access the blog. Click the button, and the blog is displayed.

That’s it. That’s all. That’s the huge censorship campaign that the lizard bitch has fantasized. The warning screen in no way prevents any interested web user from viewing the blog. There is no censorship here — but the facts have never stopped Cao from inventing a juicy lie.

The loonisphere (hat tip: Ed Brayton) has its collective panties in a twist because the healthcare reform bill supposedly includes coverage for undocumented aliens. As usual, the wingnuts are feeding their hissy fit with 100% pure ignorance. It just ain’t so:

No Federal Payment for Undocumented Aliens. Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.” [America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, accessed 7/22/09]

Add to that the fact that President Obama is on the record as opposed to including undocumented aliens in healthcare reform:

The nutcakes being what they are, of course, this fantasy will have a long, long half-life.

Here’s a simple question for torture advocates like Derek Foley: If the Taliban decide to subject captured US soldier Bowe Bergdahl to waterboarding, will it be torture then?

Lying shitsack Porter Good is having a good laugh over a global warming challenge issued by Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight.

Of course, Porter is too mind-bogglingly stupid to realize that the laugh is on him — because he has just made it crystal clear that he lacks the balls to actually accept the challenge. If you need to see what intellectual cowardice looks like, just read any wingnut blog.

(Notice also that the very first commenter asks Porter several questions, not one of which the lying shitsack has the brains to answer.)