Trump White Hood & Rubber Sheets.

I maybe ruined this, but for a brief moment there were KKK hoods & piss proof sheets in the trump tower gift shop.

Hee. Some artists had fun in the Trump Tower gift shop.

Shoppers looking for MAGA hats at Trump Tower this week may have encountered a Ku Klux Klan hood or a photo of President Putin, and asked themselves whether what they were seeing was real merchandise.

On Monday afternoon, two NYC-based artists secretly slipped some items inside the merchandising outpost of the Trump Tower’s lower lobby. Among them: A Trump-emblazoned KKK hood “for fine people,” sealed packages of pee-proof rubber sheets, and a Russian flag. In the front of the store, a postcard display featured the 45th President of the United States, Vladimir Putin, along with cards paying tribute to First Lady Ivanka Trump, and the flap of flesh near the president’s throat area, known as a Wattle.

Artists are the best! And a massive Well Done! in this case.

“We thought the tourists coming in to buy some stuff, especially people from other countries, should get the whole story of who the president is, because the items in the Trump store don’t accurately reflect the person,” one of the two artists, who asked that we not reveal his name, told Gothamist.

Those actual items in the restroom-adjacent newsstand include an oddly-muscular bobblehead of the president ($40), a “Melania Trump First Lady License” ($4), and a mousepad featuring all 45 presidents.

Next door, a kiosk sells Official merchandise, including the Trump Signature Collection cufflinks ($45), a painted gold coin bank ($20), and Trump golf towels and putter covers ($30).

[…]

Asked if he was concerned that the current administration might be too absurd to satirize, our underground source admitted that was a possibility. “My partner was in the back putting in some of the items and he said to someone, ‘Oh did you see this?’ and they didn’t even bat an eye.”

Neither did the people who work in the store, at least for a little while. As of Tuesday morning, the Putin/Ivanka/Wattle postcards were still on display—though the shopkeeper did notice when we attempted to buy one of the cards, and quickly ordered us out of the store while calling security. Upon returning an hour later, all of the items appeared to be gone.

“Every time you think you’re going to get Trump on something, he outdoes the parody,” explained the tipster. “He hasn’t started selling white hoods yet, but after that batshit speech he gave two floors up—well if there’s enough money to be made, he’d probably start.”

The Gothamist has the full story.

Fox News Britain Dies.

Fox News host Steve Doocy (screen grab).

Fox News Britain has died, the plug pulled by Murdoch. Now, if only it would die here.

RIP Fox News Britain. The end has come to the conservative network in Great Britain after failing to garner viewers.

CNN reported Tuesday that Rupert Murdoch and his sons have decided to pull the network rather than to trying to continue to attract an audience. The network also caused a major problem as the Murdoch family tried to conduct a $15 billion takeover of Sky News.

“Fox News is focused on the U.S. market and designed for a U.S. audience and, accordingly, it averages only a few thousand viewers across the day in the U.K.,” 21st Century Fox said in a statement.

“We have concluded that it is not in our commercial interest to continue providing Fox News in the U.K.,” it added.

Designed for a U.S. audience. That it is, and it’s a right pity it’s designed for dumbfucks.

Via Raw Story.

Peering Down Trump’s Lie Hole.

Kate Kretz, “Lie Hole IV” (2017), colored pencil on black Rives BFK paper, 10 x 8 inches, from the “Lie Hole” series.

This mouth has bullied and cheated its way through the world.

This mouth has claimed self-invention, but was born gnawing a silver spoon.

This mouth blusters and brags.

This mouth promises to pay the builders of its empire; then refuses, counter-sues, and laughs.

This mouth can’t suppress its instinctive, arrogant sneer.

This mouth incites hatred and violence, spreading intolerant aggression like a cancer.

This mouth expresses glee at its own retaliatory cruelty.

This mouth will say and do anything to win.

This mouth is oblivious to its own stupefying ignorance.

This mouth, wet with slime, has forced open countless unwilling lips.

This mouth degrades the women he can’t manage to get  his tiny, swollen hands on.

This mouth has a predatory predilection for young girls (daughter included).

This mouth…

Head on over to Hyperallergic to read the rest of Kate Kretz’s piece. Blunt, and brilliantly done.

In other Trump-based artwork, check out ‘As a satirist, I can barely keep up’: the stories behind the Trump magazine covers.

The Mass Produced Civil War Monuments…

The soldier page of Monumental Bronze Co.’s 1882 catalog, completed with drawings and testimonials. Internet Archive/Public Domain.

Most people are aware that most of the civil war monuments which went up were a blatant product of later propaganda, and a convenient way to oppress and terrorize those not white enough. Atlas Obscura has a look at the company that had a lock on so many of these “bronze monuments”, the Monumental Bronze Co., who had discovered white bronze, which is actually zinc, and started mass producing monuments of all kinds. Described as the Wal-Mart of monuments.

White bronze isn’t white. It’s more of a chromy gray that, over time, gets progressively blue. It isn’t bronze, either: it’s zinc, cast into shape in a mold, and blasted with sand to add a rough, stony texture. But “bluish-gray sand-blasted zinc” doesn’t sound that appealing, and the company trafficking in this material, Monumental Bronze Co., of Bridgeport, Connecticut, was focused hard on selling it. From 1879 until 1914, Monumental Bronze Co. offered statues, grave markers and monuments that were, in their words, “beautiful in appearance and unequaled for durability.”

…They also had a whole muster of Civil War statues in various designs, the parts of which could also be easily interchanged, Mr. Potato Head-style. “Statue of American Soldier” was a man with a mustache and a billed cap, holding his gun in both hands. “Colorbearer” had a flag draped over his shoulder. “Confederate Soldier,” introduced in 1889, wore a broad-brimmed hat and carried a bedroll. You could also get your soldiers custom-made: the Confederate Monument in Portsmouth, Virginia has four Monumental Bronze Co. statues on it, each fashioned after a local man.

Another of their selling points was price: thanks to their choice of material (as well as their distribution model, which relied on independent “agents” and eliminated the need for storerooms) they could easily undersell stone-based companies.

The cover of this 1885 issue of Scientific American was dedicated entirely to “The White Bronze Monument Industry”—aka Monumental Bronze Co. Internet Archive/Public Domain.

A fascinating glimpse into the not so distant past. You can read and see much more at Atlas Obscura, and browse a Monumental Bronze Co. catalogue here.

Sunday Facepalm.

The immaturity of so many conservative, christian white males is, at times, unbelievable. Like so many toddlers who never saw a reason to mature emotionally or intellectually, too many of them are in seats of power, or close to them, and happily enable swathes of equally immature assholes to continue in asshole behaviour and rhetoric. One leading the pack in the immaturity stakes is the ever noisy Wayne Allyn Root. Once again, he’s spitting and frothing about women, but specifically, liberal women. And liberal men, just the worst y’know.

On his Wednesday radio program, right-wing commentator, conspiracy theorist and Donald Trump–obsessed sycophant Wayne Allyn Root gushed about President Trump’s rally in Arizona the night before, rejoicing that Trump is “a real man” to whom liberals just don’t know how to respond.

Root said that he, like Trump, is also “a real guy’s guy” and was treated the same way by all the “liberal, spoiled brat, lucky sperm club pussycat” wussies he encountered while attending Columbia University.

Mr. Root never stays quiet over just how much he’s a “real man”, a “real man’s man”, and a “real guy’s guy”. Honestly, if he got himself a neon suit advertising his base insecurity, it would be more subtle. He makes sure to tell people, frequently, how efficiently he can beat people up, because that’s one of those markers of a real man. He makes sure to mention, often, that “locker room talk and vulgarity towards women is real man stuff, too. Now, those one the liberal and humanitarian side of life are assigned to people who can’t cope with a “real man.” I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, most of us know exactly how to deal with such types. They are commonly known as assholes.

“Liberal, spoiled brat, lucky sperm club pussycat” wussies. :Laughs: Sometimes, I really do think it’s a pity such men can’t genuinely hear themselves. This is almost painfully pitiful, and an old, old song.

Root said that liberal men “don’t know how to fight and they don’t know how to argue” and only pretend to care about issues “because you’re a guy and there are women in the room and you want to have sex.”

Lots of people want to have sex, it’s fun. Now, I’m privileged to know a whole lot of liberal people, many men among them, and they are excellent at argument, but I expect that wouldn’t meet Root’s definition, whatever it might be. Arguing is not compulsory in a relationship, which does or does not include sex. Lots of people don’t argue much, others do. I rather suspect that “argue” in Root’s lexicon means ‘be an obstinate asshole’. As for caring about issues, I imagine that matters on the other side of the camp, too, does it not? Those things tend to matter in whether or not people get together.

“It’s all B.S, is what it is,” he said. “All these liberal guys, they just want to win over women and look like a proud peacock in front of women because they know that liberal women want to hear this nonsense; ‘Oh my God, all I care about is poor people, that’s all I care about is poor people.’ And then they know, tonight they’re going to have sex with some stupid liberal woman who is ugly in the first place, because all liberal women are.”

:Laughs: I have never once, in all my long Hippie days, known a man who has said ‘Oh my God, all I care about is poor people, that’s all I care about is poor people.’ I have known men who do care about poor people, and that’s shown in their work and their actions, but they don’t pace a room packed with women, wringing their hands in refrain about the poor. That sort of idiocy seems to be the reserve of conservative christians, who are looking to make themselves rich while their flock gets poorer.

As for looking the proud peacock, I’d think the constant claims of being a “real man’s man, lookit my fists” and all that might just qualify, Mr. Root.

Via RWW.

The Violet Sister.

Louise Michel pictured at home in her later years, around the time she is presumed to have penned the piece translated below — Source.

A husky voice barked: “Entrez!”

Through a long, dim hallway, I followed the voice, until I reached a spare, curtained room. One empty chair stood near the entrance. Another, across the darkened space, was occupied by a slender, shadowed figure with erect posture, white hair long and flowing as in the fashion of the 1840s, in an elegant black suit, immaculate linens, a neckcloth of Persian design. A bright gaze set into a finely featured face pierced the gloom.

“Sit”, the figure commanded. As if under the influence of a powerful magnetizer, I sat without pause.

My host spoke sharply, gruffly. “Welcome, Mademoiselle. You have come to meet me, no? You wish to learn of my ideas, my thoughts. But should you not first know to whom you speak?” I nodded.

The figure straightened. “You wrote to Octave Obdurant. This is the name with which the person before you entered the Ecole Polytechnique. It is the name on my entrance papers to the Ecole de Ponts et Chaussées. It is the name with which I signed my first articles in geometry, my first statistical tables, as well as Free the Earth, which you were kind enough to notice.”

The voice was clear and occasionally guttural; there was a warmth beneath its unyielding syllables.

“But as you have certainly realized, this is not my true name.”

I felt my mind begin to spin. I was unsure of where I was, what I was doing here, in these isolated rooms. I stammered out:

“Excuse me, Monsieur. What, then, is your name?”

“I was baptized Tranchot.” Despite the pause which followed, the name meant nothing to me until it was repeated, with its prenames before it.

“Marie Violette Tranchot.”

I was moved by an emotion of shock and recognition at once. Some part of me had already realized that I was not in the presence of a great man, but rather a great woman — no wizened brother of the struggle, but a sister. Instantly, I felt myself uncannily at home, safe at last in a place I’d never been — truly at home, perhaps, for the first time in my life. This hero, epitome of the courage and intelligence the world saw as masculine, was a woman like myself.

Fascinating reading, from Louise Michel, in Le Libertaire, iii, 1895. She writes about the Scoundrel Laws, and the paucity of an overly-praised history, and her meeting with Octave Obdurant.

You can read the whole thing at The Public Domain. Highly recommended.

White Supremacy: Just Background Noise.

Tucker Viemeister.

It’s a forlorn hope, that republicans might stumble over a conscience, discover their humanity and embrace that of others. It really does not seem to matter what the Tiny Tyrant does, there are those who will squink all over, in an attempt to cover over the massive piles of shit left in the wake of the Tiny Tyrant. As we have all been witness to, Trump gets worse, week by week, day by day.

As CNN noted on Friday, in the last four weeks alone, President Trump has fired chief strategist Steve Bannon, fired Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, hired and fired communications director Anthony Scaramucci, publicly shamed his own attorney general and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, banned transgender troops via twitter, made up two phone calls, thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for expelling American diplomats from the country, threatened nuclear war with North Korea, and defended attendees of a white supremacy rally.

And that’s not even half of it.

But Steve Cortes, a member of Trump’s Hispanic Advisory Council, said on Fox News Sunday morning that if Republicans just cut taxes, all of that will be background noise.

“Clearly, he had a tough week. There’s no way around that,” Cortes said.

“All presidents have tough weeks,” Cortes said Sunday. “I believe that will become background noise once we get taxes done, and once this economy starts growing the way it’s capable of.”

Yes, a tough week, brought on by the defense of fucking nazis being “fine people”. You opened your mouth, and Trump obligingly shit in it, and you decided to swallow it. Nice.

[…]

“The economy’s already accelerating. There’s a lot of optimism out there in the country,” Cortes said. “If we can throw tax cuts into the mix, I think this economy can absolutely take off, and then I think we’d see those poll numbers rebound very, very quickly for the president.”

There’s a lot of optimism out and about? Where? Oh, yes, in the crowds of nazis, sure. Everywhere else, not so much. Perhaps you should get outside once in a while. People are not optimistic about an idiotic, ignorant, maniacal bigot being in control of things, for a given value of control. People are not optimistic about not being nuked. People are not optimistic about not getting into yet another fucking war. People are not optimistic about bigotry being elevated to “great america” status. People are not optimistic about the blatant slaughter of all things which could help us avoid the worst disasters of climate change. People are not optimistic about the economy. The list goes on and on.

Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL) made similar comments last week, telling Bloomberg that Trump’s comments about white supremacists were “frustrating” because he wanted to start focusing on tax reform.

“[It’s] very frustrating for those of us who want to start focusing on the issues ahead—tax reform, infrastructure, the debt ceiling,” Ross said. “I wished we would start focusing on those issues, and we need to start healing and bringing people together—instead of peeling back the scabs.”

Right. Your idea of tax reform is handing tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires, and you’ve made sure there are zero safety nets for everyone else. That will cheer everyone up for sure. You don’t start healing and bringing people together by announcing that nazis are “fine people” and everything was really the fault of those filthy liberals. The reason those scabs peel back so easily is that there is a massive wound underneath, still oozing blood, covered over, but certainly not healed. Healing does not take place by ignoring a wound. Now the Tiny Tyrant and his henchidiots, like you, Rep. Ross, have dumped toxic wasted in the wound, and you want to talk healing. Isolation, genocide, and subjugation are not things which heal. They do not unite. And those things are what you stand for, handwaving reality, because those people, they don’t actually matter to you.

Think Progress has the full story.

The Tiny Tyrant: Sucking Marrow from Bones.

The Secret Service has a problem – they can’t pay their employees. The Tiny Tyrant’s profligate habits, and those of his family have sucked the bones dry. While there is an obligation on the part of the service to protect key people, the sheer amount of money wasted by the Tiny Tyrant is overwhelming. Three million dollars for every weekend jaunt. Millions more for every vacation the Kushners take, and they seem to take a lot of vacations every year. Millions more for overseas coverage. Millions more for Ms. Trump and the kid to stay in NYC for months on end. Then there are the little things, like $60,000 in golf cart rentals. This from the idiot who could not stop talking about President Obama golfing now and then. Sixty Fucking Thousand Dollars. And since the Chief Idiot won’t golf anywhere except his properties, guess where the money is going? Quite the fucking racket.

WASHINGTON — The Secret Service can no longer pay hundreds of agents it needs to carry out an expanded protective mission – in large part due to the sheer size of President Trump’s family and efforts necessary to secure their multiple residences up and down the East Coast.

Secret Service Director Randolph “Tex” Alles, in an interview with USA TODAY, said more than 1,000 agents have already hit the federally mandated caps for salary and overtime allowances that were meant to last the entire year.

The agency has faced a crushing workload since the height of the contentious election season, and it has not relented in the first seven months of the administration. Agents must protect Trump – who has traveled almost every weekend to his properties in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia – and his adult children whose business trips and vacations have taken them across the country and overseas.

“The president has a large family, and our responsibility is required in law,” Alles said. “I can’t change that. I have no flexibility.”

Alles said the service is grappling with an unprecedented number of White House protectees. Under Trump, 42 people have protection, a number that includes 18 members of his family. That’s up from 31 during the Obama administration.

Overwork and constant travel have also been driving a recent exodus from the Secret Service ranks, yet without congressional intervention to provide additional funding, Alles will not even be able to pay agents for the work they have already done.

The compensation crunch is so serious that the director has begun discussions with key lawmakers to raise the combined salary and overtime cap for agents, from $160,000 per year to $187,000 for at least the duration of Trump’s first term.

But even if such a proposal was approved, about 130 veteran agents would not be fully compensated for hundreds of hours already amassed, according to the agency.

“I don’t see this changing in the near term,” Alles said.

USA Today has the full story.

Sunday Facepalm.

Wallnau, again. Lance is the gift of never-ending eyerolls. Now it’s Jehovah playing with the stock market, just to fuck about with a few people.

Wallnau was outraged by the fact that several business leaders had resigned from presidential advisory councils in protest of Trump’s comments in the wake of the violence that had occurred at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend, which ultimately forced Trump to disband the councils entirely.

“They insulted the president and his base,” Wallnau declared. “It doesn’t surprise me [that] the stock market had its first setback today. That’s not a coincidence. That’s not a coincidence, that’s a prophetic response to the uprising and insult that came from these CEOs.”

Uprising? Really? I wouldn’t characterize resigning as an uprising, those are different things, Lance. How is this a prophetic response? Has someone had a nifty prophecy about this, and what, just forgot to say? If there’s insult to be had, it’s on the part of the Tiny Tyrant and his base, asshole bigots, nazis, and your garden variety evil fuckers. Every single one of you is an insult to humanity, and to anyone with actual morals. You have all the benefit of a boil on the arse.

“When those CEOs mocked Trump and made this a political issue, the judgment would come where their pocketbooks are,” he continued. “How fast does God sometimes settle accounts.”

They didn’t make this a political issue, Lance. They simply could not walk past the “presidential” standard of hey, nazis are fine people! Naturally, the Tiny Tyrant could have kept his mouth shut, but no, he had come out with just how awful all those people of colour and their allies are, persecuting those poor nazis. I expect the stock market will be fine, it’s the nature of the beast to fluctuate. As for Jehovah being all speedy and stuff, I guess you don’t subscribe to The Mills of God. That, and the very old concept of ancestral sin is more Jehovah’s thing, y’know, just read your book of psychopathy. Not that any of it originated with your particular god, but it was certainly adopted with enthusiasm.

There’s video at RWW.

Squinkery.

I fell in love with a new word: Squink. It’s onomatopoeically delicious! I had expressed a desire to use this wonderful word, and PZ provided:

Here’s another good use that you’ll find opportunities for all the time: when someone throws out a cloud of incoherent obfuscations for something stupid they’ve just said, they’re squinking. Creationists, MRAs, and Republicans do it all the time — Just watch Jack Kingston or Jeffrey Lord or Kellyann Conway sometime. Nonstop squinking.

The conservative christians propping up the Tiny Tyrant are still busy squinking over the Charlottesville statement:

“I do not believe he was speaking of people giving a Nazi salute or giving racist chants,” Suarez, who is also an advocate for immigration reform, said. “I believe he was speaking of a few who sincerely would not like to see a monument removed, and were not participating in racist activities.”

[…]

Robert Jeffress — who made waves last week by making the highly disputed claim that God has given Trump the authority to “take out” North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — told the Christian Broadcasting Network that Trump “doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” and that the uproar over his press conference is “just more a style issue.”

Ah, a style issue. Right. It seems that the Tiny Tyrant’s style is to have a few Nazi uniforms hiding in his closet. You can read the full article at Think Progress.

Don Boys at Barbwire is squinking so hard you could hear him a mile away:

…I understand that sensitive Blacks might be offended at Confederate monuments; however, many of us are often offended by many things including their apparent desire to be offended, but we always get over it. They will too. However, they are being encouraged in their insanity by local and federal officials.

[…]

And once again, I will remind everyone that Lincoln’s War of Northern Aggression against the genteel southland was not to free the slaves as Lincoln admitted, but he used it later as a “sales job” to prosecute the war. Taxes, tariffs, and states’ rights to nullification were the original reasons brother fought brother with over 600,000 dead. However, uninformed or dishonest people keep saying otherwise.

Hmmm, from where I sit, I see a white man with an acute sensitivity problem. No worries, Don, you’ll get over it. If you can stomach it, the full column is here.

Guerilla-style spiritual warfare.

Self-styled “prophet” Mark Taylor is at it again, this time loaded with all kinds of war vernacular, made to appeal to asshole christians. This time, it’s the, um, tactic of stealth prayer, which is rather like the texting version of prayer. Shorthand prayer, mumbled here, there, and everywhere. Christians seem to be under the impressing this idiocy works, and stealth prayer is often combined with war terms, like bombing and bombers. Or one could say its often combined with the vocabulary of terrorism.

Taylor revealed that God had recently given him a prayer that allows him to “jam the enemy’s radar” so that the prayer campaign being waged by his team of spiritual warriors cannot be detected while they repent on behalf off all the states that voted for Hillary Clinton in the last election.

“We want to ambush the enemy,” he said. “We’re trying to do guerilla-style spiritual warfare.”

Y’know, there are actual wars going on, if you want to be a patriot warrior so badly, Mr. Taylor. Perhaps you should pitch your idea to the pentagon, and they could send you and your crack team of prayer bombers to a strategic place in an ongoing war zone. Best to be where the action is, right? You’d get cool costumes and everything!

Trump’s election was the result of a national prayer and repentance effort, Taylor said,

Oh the fuck it was. It was the result of meddling in the election by interested parties, you dipshit doucheweasel.

but now God has given him a “blueprint” to guide the effort to remove the demonic “territorial spirits” that control all the states that voted for Clinton.

I really have to wonder if idiots like Mr. Taylor think the blue/red business means that actual states voted, or that every single inhabitant of any given state voted exactly the same way.

“If you want to know the territories where you can go after the enemy, get the electoral map,” he said, explaining that the states that voted for Trump in 2016 had repented but those that went for Clinton had not and are therefore still being controlled by demonic spirits.

Uh huh. Going by that, I’m safe from you idiots because I live in a red state. That did not stop me from voting blue. Bluuuuue.

“This is not about Republican or Democrat,” Taylor claimed, “this is about globalism versus patriotism, it’s about stopping the New World Order, this is about stopping the Enemy’s timeline. That’s why the Enemy is so angry right now, because his timeline has been stopped. God is saying, ‘No, I’m denying the Enemy’s timeline and we’re going by my timeline.’ And right now, it’s time for us to push back the Enemy through this generational repentance on the land, on the people and you will see, as we push the Enemy back, the Gospel will go forth.”

Repentance on the land, eh? Here’s a thought, Mr. Taylor: how about you dumbfucks repent enough to get the hell out of Turtle Island, and give it back to its rightful people? I’m good with that one.

“The blue zones represent depressed areas, the red zones represent the blood of Jesus,” he concluded. “So what we want to do is take those depressed areas, so to speak, and turn them into the blood of Christ.”

:Snort: Boy, do you ever have that one wrong. It’s most of the red states which are seriously depressed economically, and in most other ways, too. Living in a lake of blood sounds messy. And sticky. I’ll pass.

Via RWW.

Michele Bachmann, Pastor to United Nations.

Screengrab.

The Jefferson Gathering, a group of fanatical, conservative christians who have a lock on a good portion of Congress, have decided in their compleat lack of wisdom to “appoint” Michele Bachmann as the new pastor to The United Nations. I imagine this is basically more the ‘aimed prayer’ crap they have going now, or at least I hope so. I can’t imagine Ms. Bachmann being welcomed with open arms by the UN, especially in light of her feelings about that organisation.

The Jefferson Gathering, a project of right-wing pastor Jim Garlow’s Skyline Church through which Pastor Dan Cummings regularly preaches to members of Congress in an effort to drive Satan out of the Capitol.

Last weekend, Garlow announced to his congregation that Skyline will be expanding its prayer efforts to the United Nations with a ministry that will be led by former Rep. Michele Bachmann.

“What if you wanted to disciple all nations and you wanted to reach the whole world?” Garlow asked during his Sunday service. “So God did you a favor, he simply arranged so all the world came to one place at one time so you could reach them all at once. What would you call it? You’d call it the United Nations and that would be the most economical way that you could possible reach the leaders.”

Yabbut y’all think the UN is evil, but you’re gonna go with goddidit?

After discussing the assistance he had received in establishing this ministry from the Religious Right group C-Fam and revealing that Fox News reporter Jon Decker will be working pro bono as its communications director, Garlow proudly introduced “Skyline’s new pastor to the United Nations, Michele Bachmann.”

Bachmann was thrilled by her new mission and told the congregation that this “audacious step” was needed now more than ever.

I rather doubt this is limelight enough for Ms. Bachmann, but I’m sure she’ll maneuver it into something better, perhaps a spot at Fox.

“I don’t know a darker, more deceived place on earth than the U.N.,” she said. “Because as we saw at the Tower of Babel, that’s probably the last time when we saw all the nations of the earth come together in a moment of deception … Their goal has been from the very beginning, the creation of a one-world order; but not a one-world order under the umbrella of the Holy Spirit, a man’s attempt at a one-world order that only brings about chaos, confusion, deception, delusion, pain. And that’s where, rather than cursing the darkness, Skyline Church is about to light a candle.”

Ummmm, did I miss something? “As we saw at the Tower of Babel”? No, no one saw such a thing, for good reason, too. Oh, the spectre of the ecumenical church again! Gad, that was the big bogeyman back in my Jesus Freak days, and that was a long time back. I often wonder how these assholes tread such a fine mental line – they must be all enthusiastic about the apocalypse nonsense, and try to help Jehovah pull that one off, while at the same time, they want to be seen as the only people holding back Jehovah’s will in regard to the terrible apocalypse. Lots of chaos, confusion, deception, and delusion there, to be sure. It will be interesting to see if Ms. Bachmann reaches a point where she thinks it is her right to barge into a UN session and start preaching.

RWW has the story, and video.

Denouncing Nazis.

Pearce Tefft recently wrote an open letter to his son. The other day, PZ posted about the fanatical racist relative he had. I grew up with a rabid John Bircher and bigot extraordinaire. While I was not completely silent in the face of that bigotry, I certainly did not speak up as often or as loudly as I should have done. It’s past time we stop playing all these little games with ourselves, pretending that these bigots aren’t really terrible people, because they are so and so’s Auntie Martha, or Uncle John, and so forth. It’s past time to stop pretending that all the nazis aren’t a problem. They are, and they have now descended into open murder. Conservative Christians are raging in their defense of nazism, and frantically attempting to pin blame everywhere except where it belongs. It’s past time for us all to gather our courage, and speak out. And to keep on speaking out. The more of this we do, the more will join in, finding support. Siobhan has an excellent reason to start yelling at the top of your voice.

My name is Pearce Tefft, and I am writing to all, with regards to my youngest son, Peter Tefft, an avowed white nationalist who has been featured in a number of local news stories over the last several months.

On Friday night, my son traveled to Charlottesville, Va., and was interviewed by a national news outlet while marching with reported white nationalists, who allegedly went on to kill a person.

I, along with all of his siblings and his entire family, wish to loudly repudiate my son’s vile, hateful and racist rhetoric and actions. We do not know specifically where he learned these beliefs. He did not learn them at home.

I have shared my home and hearth with friends and acquaintances of every race, gender and creed. I have taught all of my children that all men and women are created equal. That we must love each other all the same.

Evidently Peter has chosen to unlearn these lessons, much to my and his family’s heartbreak and distress. We have been silent up until now, but now we see that this was a mistake. It was the silence of good people that allowed the Nazis to flourish the first time around, and it is the silence of good people that is allowing them to flourish now.

You can read the rest of Mr. Tefft’s letter here.