Todd Starnes, Fox News’ Executive Vice President for Pearl Clutching, is having one of his usual tantrums about HGTV offering a tip to use a nylon American flag as a tablecloth for 4th of July picnics and celebrations. ZOMG! That’s a violation of the flag code!
Jun 17 2013
Starnes Freaks Out About Flag Tablecloth
Jun 17 2013
Racists Explode at Latino Singing National Anthem
Before game three of the NBA finals between San Antonio and Miami, the national anthem was sung by Sebastian De La Cruz, an 11 year old San Antonio native with a spectacular voice. Naturally, a bunch of racist assholes went ballistic over it on Twitter, spewing bigotry like a fountain.
Jun 17 2013
Justice Kennedy and Gender Discrimination
Sonja West has an article at Slate about one intriguing possibility for how the two marriage equality cases could turn out. She points to a key question asked by Justice Kennedy, who will almost certainly be the swing vote as usual, during the oral argument in the Prop 8 case.
Jun 17 2013
Nance: Christians Should Focus on Gay Marriage, not Sex Trafficking
Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America has a column in the Christian Post claiming that Christian ministers have their priorities wrong if they focus more on sex trafficking than on stopping gay marriage. But she only says this because she loves gay people so much:
Jun 16 2013
That’s My Father
It’s Father’s Day, so I’d like to reprint something I wrote when my father turned 70 years old. He’s about to turn 78 and he is still the best man I know. Everything good that I am came from him, though unfortunately I failed to follow his good example in far too many ways. This was originally written as a toast that I gave at his birthday party.
Jun 16 2013
Hannity’s Convenient Flip Flop on NSA Surveillance
Like Bill O’Reilly and many others, including many liberals unfortunately, Sean Hannity’s position on government surveillance has taken a mighty swing in the other direction now that Obama is in office instead of Bush. When Bush was in office, questioning NSA data mining makes one “weak on national security.” Now that Obama is in office, NSA data mining is a tyrannical outrage. He couldn’t believe anyone would even debate such techniques then. Now he’s furious about them.
Jun 16 2013
Pat Robertson’s Staggering Lack of Irony
Bill Hicks once said, “That’s what fundamentalism breeds — no irony.” Not that they don’t generate a great deal of it, but that they seem completely oblivious to it. Pat Robertson is a textbook example, telling his followers to beware of false prophets while making dozens of false predictions himself. Now he’s told a reader who wrote in to the 700 Club that “predictive prophecy about disaster is almost always something from the psychic world, it’s not something from God” and that people who predict disasters are “nutty.”
Jun 16 2013
Beck: Cruz Thinks I Could Be Imprisoned
Glenn Beck had a powwow with some of the crazier far-right members of Congress recently, including Sen. Ted Cruz. And he says Cruz told him that he could envision him someday becoming a political prisoner to prevent him from speaking out. Seriously, the paranoid persecution complex of the right simply knows no bounds.
Jun 16 2013
Why Illegal Surveillance Matters
Chris Hayes has been doing an excellent job of examining the recent revelations about illegal government spying, including this segment explaining why history teaches that we should be very concerned about the abuses of government surveillance, especially when it’s done without serious checks and balances. He makes many of the same points I’ve made about this.
Jun 15 2013
Dumbass Quote of the Day
Rep. Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma is staking a strong claim to join the Republican Crazy Caucus with this utterly moronic and hypocritical declaration on the House floor, falsely claiming that the federal government spends 30 times more on climate change research than on weather prediction — and that Obama should apologize for that.
Jun 15 2013
MA to Get Secular Recovery Program
The American Humanist Association made a great announcement the other day, that medical authorities in the state of Massachusetts are going to begin giving people the option of referral to secular recovery programs as an alternative to religious programs like AA and NA.
Jun 15 2013
Obama vs Obama
Someone put together this video contrasting candidate Obama’s hammering of the Bush administration for giving us the false choice of either fighting terrorism or upholding the Constitution with his defense of illegal surveillance on the grounds that we can’t have 100% security and 100% privacy as well (as if either of those things could possibly exist or were relevant to the situation at all).
Jun 15 2013
Bryan Fischer Explains the 4th Amendment
It’s really quite amusing to me listening to the David Barton types trying to find some connection between the Constitution and the Bible. Bryan Fischer delivered a ridiculous screed claiming that the basis of the 4th Amendment is the “inviolability of the home,” which is found in Joshua 7. Here’s the video:
Jun 15 2013
Friedersdorf: Stop Using Terrorism to Diminish Freedom, Privacy
Conor Friedersdorf expresses my own thoughts on the question of our obsessive focus on terrorism far better than I could. He points out that in the real world Americans have very little to fear from terrorists and far more to fear from other things that we would never use to justify such a massive growth in government surveillance.
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