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POPSSane Republican Hunt John Quiggin asks if there are any Republicans who reject all forms of delusion propounded by that party: delusionism... Birtherism Creationism... 9/11 Trutherism (not, in most cases, the “Bush knew” version, but the “Saddam organised it, via meetings in Prague” version) Crank medical theories: on passive smoking, the Terri Schiavo case, abortion-breast cancer link, AIDS reappraisal, claims about stem cells (to make it easy, getting any of these right will suffice) Rejection of plate tectonics... Bonus points if we can find one who’s not from Maine.
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POPSAre Republicans More Likely to Have Affairs and Get Divorces? No. We see the ecological fallacy appear here on Clipmarks all the time 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ] usually by people who want to say "conservatives are more/less _____ because red states are ______, liberals are less/more_______ because blue states are ________." Here is an example of how that logic can result in the WRONG conclusion.
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POPSMatthew Yglesias: Conservatives Against Being Against Racism And it’s not just a quirk of Beck’s. This attitude goes deep in the DNA of the modern conservative movement. National Review’s position on Civil Rights was that segregation was bad, but the cure of the civil rights movement was worse than the disease of white supremacy. Barry Goldwater campaigned for president on the proposition that Jim Crow might be bad, but not nearly so bad as the Civil Rights Act. As the policy status quo shifted, the precise nature of the conservative position changed with it so that now affirmative action is worse than discrimination against minorities and “political correctness” is worse than racism, but the basic spirit is the same.
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POPSSarah Palin on Censorship Sarah Palin has the frightening quality of many who believe they are in possession of revealed, absolute truth: viz. that evidence is irrelevant when it contradicts revealed "truth." New evidence need not be considered, and toleration of it is a fault and temptation that needs to be eradicated. That's why she need not read a book she wants to ban.
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POPSFrom the horse's mouth: McCain's health-care advisor's personal blog McCain's health-care advisor, John Goodman, thinks we should deal with the problem of uninsured Americans by ordering the Census Bureau to stop calling people "uninsured." I kid you not. He says that since pretty much everyone ends up getting the medical care they need somehow or other, no one's really uninsured. If you read the whole post, you'll also see that Goodman is a little confused about how employer-provided health plans work in real life. This is also the same guy who recently said, commenting on health disparities between whites and nonwhites in the U.S., that "doctors just don’t control our over-eating, over-smoking, over-drinking, and shoot-outs in the hood." (http://snipr.com/3kuaa) Nice, dude. Nice.
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POPSThe true heart of the conservative movement Of course as tends to be the case with Helms' most repugnantly racist bile, he said that a good ways back in the past. But even at that time, most Americans managed not to be repugnant racists. But not Helms. And unlike a lot of people who did take the white supremacist line in the 1950s and 60s, Helms never apologized and, indeed, never backed down doing things like mounting a filibuster against making Martin Luther King Day into a federal holiday. Remarkably, mainstream American conservatives are eager to tell us that this man is their hero. Even more remarkably, you sometimes hear conservatives talk about reaching out to black voters.
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POPSDeficiencies in right-wing patriotism The last example is especially strange -- despairing about the political culture of the South in the 1920's, where disenfranchisement, lynching, and even slavery were routine practices, is a sign of insufficent patriotism? If that doesn't show the deficiencies of the right's style of patriotism, nothing does. Via Matt Yglesias
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POPSConservative whining about appeasement has long history Conservatives even applied this critique to one of the most dangerous moments in human history: the Cuban missile crisis, during which the United States and the Soviet Union nearly came to nuclear blows over Moscow's deployment of missiles 90 miles off the American coast. When President Kennedy successfully negotiated a peaceful conclusion to the crisis, conservative icon Barry Goldwater protested that he had appeased the Soviets by promising not to invade Cuba if they backed down. Via Matt Yglesias .
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POPSLiberals Want To Increase Your Gasoline And Heating Bills! t's clear the Liberals in Congress are never going to take "no" for an answer when it comes to higher taxes. They will keep trying, pretending that the burden will be on "someone else"—the "rich," the "wealthy corporations." But in the end, it always comes back to the same failed "tax and spend" policy they have pushed for decades. It's up to conservatives to let them know we are not fooled—that we will never "tax our way to prosperity." http://capwiz.com/acu/issues/alert/?alertid=11051601&type=CO
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POPSLiberal Hatemongers In 1998, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were hardly popular among conservatives. Still, in the 1998 ANES survey, Messrs. Clinton and Gore both received a perfectly-respectable average temperature of 45 from those who called themselves extremely conservative. While 28% of the far right gave Clinton a temperature of zero, Gore got a zero from just 10%. The bottom line is that there is simply no comparison between the current hatred the extreme left has for Messrs. Bush and Cheney, and the hostility the extreme right had for Messrs. Clinton and Gore in the late 1990s.
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POPSU.S. Military and Iraqis Agree: Blackwater unprovoked, Fired on Fleeing Citizens and Cars
More: U.S. soldiers did not find any bullets that came from AK-47 assault rifles or BKC machine guns used by Iraqi policemen and soldiers. They found evidence of ammunition used in American-made weapons, including M4 rifle 5.56mm brass casings, M240B machine gun 7.62mm casings, M203 40mm grenade launcher casings, and stun-grenade dunnage, or packing. At least two cars, a black four-door taxi and a blue Volkswagen sedan, had their back windshields shot out, but their front windshields were intact, indicating they were shot while driving away from the square, according to the photos and soldiers An Iraqi colonel walked up to Tarsa and described the Blackwater shooters as men in "tan uniforms, black helmets, and that flag," pointing at the U.S. flag on Tarsa's sleeve. Their actions underscore the long-standing tensions between the U.S. military and private security companies -- and the military's concerns that such shootings could undermine U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq.
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POPSBush loses Kristol Check out Kristol's editorial where he turns on Bush: I FEEL TERRIBLE for Scooter Libby's family. Millions of Americans feel terrible for Scooter Libby's family. Millions? *snort* Via Mark Thoma at Economist's View
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POPSWhere Were Vocal Conservatives When It Mattered? Rod Dreher is a conservative writer for Beliefnet. Few of us stood up to Bush when he took us to this disastrous war in Iraq. Few, if any, stood up to him over his foolish support for Rumsfeld, long after it became obvious what a disaster Rumsfeld was. Few, if any, stood up to him over his amassing of power in the executive branch. Few, if any, stood up to him on the spending....
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POPSSupreme Court defends crooked employers, gender discrimination On Tuesday, in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority of the court that an employer who shortchanged a female employee for years, up until she retired, discriminated on the basis of sex only the first time this happened. Because she didn't sue right away—she probably didn't know she was being shortchanged until later—the court barred her claim as untimely, even though her employer continued to pay her less than men doing the same work until she left. Jesus.
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POPSConservapedia: Jesus Never Condemned Stoning Adultress An essay in Conservapedia which argues that the bleeding-heart liberal Jesus depicted in John 7:53-8:11 (where he tells a mob about to stone an adulteress "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her) is a fabrication. The Wikipedia entry on the Pericope Adulterae agrees that this story was a late addition to the Bible. I do find it interesting how people will use textual analysis to dismiss those parts of scripture they find inconvenient. I am sure this tendency is not limited to conservatives (but this example, where it blatantly anchors textual analysis to ideology, strikes me as especially funny). It does make me skeptical of arguments that Christianity (as well as any other religion) should be a source of wisdom for moral questions that confound us today. Via John Quiggin .
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POPSWho Voted for Sarkozy In sociological terms, the vote was relatively predictable. Mme Royal won among students, public-sector employees, blue-collar workers and the unemployed. M. Sarkozy won among private-sector employees, small businessmen, professionals, farmers and the managerial classes. He won an absolute landslide - 82 per cent - among shop-keepers and small tradespeople who suffer from the highly-taxed and bureaucratic French economy. Via Max Sawicky
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POPSEmbarrassing Michelle Malkin video Michelle Malkin dons a cheerleader outfit to chant L-O-S-E-R to describe Democratic opposition to the Iraq war. If this is the best argument she can muster for the Iraq war, then the cause truly is dead.
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POPSThe American Conservative Crackup A former assistant editor to The American Conservative explains why he left the magazine after it published a disingenuous (and racist) attack on Barak Obama.
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