Rush Limbaugh's ongoing assault on family values continues.

This ugly excuse for a human being actually went on the radio and went off on hungry children in the US. Whether he likes it or not, hunger becomes a real problem when children don't have even a school lunch because many children rely upon the federal school lunch program to get their one decent meal a day.

Here's what Limbaugh said:

God, this is just -- we can't escape these people. We just can't escape them. They live in the utter deniability of basic human nature. They actually have it in their heads somehow that parents are so rotten that they will let their kids go hungry and starve, unless the schools take care of it

Sometimes it's not a question of "let". Sometimes it just "IS".

There's more:

I think, you know what we're going to do here, we're going to start a feature on this program: "Where to find food." For young demographics, where to find food. Now that school is out, where to find food. We can have a daily feature on this. And this will take us all the way through the summer. Where to find food. And, of course, the first will be: "Try your house." It's a thing called the refrigerator. You probably already know about it. Try looking there. There are also things in what's called the kitchen of your house called cupboards. And in those cupboards, most likely you're going to find Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, Lays ridgy potato chips, all kinds of dips and maybe a can of corn that you don't want, but it will be there. If that doesn't work, try a Happy Meal at McDonald's. You know where McDonald's is. There's the Dollar Menu at McDonald's and if they don't have Chicken McNuggets, dial 911 and ask for Obama.

There's another place if none of these options work to find food; there's always the neighborhood dumpster. Now, you might find competition with homeless people there, but there are videos that have been produced to show you how to healthfully dine and how to dumpster dive and survive until school kicks back up in August. Can you imagine the benefit we would provide people?

The idea of this fat bastard SOB ridiculing hungry children by telling them if they just look in the kitchen cupboards they'll find Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, Lays ridgy potato chips and all kinds of dip just makes me sick. It makes me want to deface his pudgy ugly picture.

Let's look at what it's like to be a child whose only reliable meal is a hot lunch. This was written by a friend of mine. I keep it bookmarked and read it weekly to remind myself to have gratitude that my children aren't hungry, aren't cold, have a home and their basic needs met.

Continue reading »

Forgive the cheap riff on Olbermann's Worst Person in the World designation, but if the epithet fits, no one wears it better than Glenn Beck.

All that apologizing for racist comments he did last year? Yeah, not so much. Now listen to the clip at the top and try to count how many dog whistles he jammed into 64 seconds.

With regard to President Obama:

BECK: When you see a typical person like the president of BP, he [Obama] has a reaction that has been bred into him.

Now that actually kind of works. It does, if you understand who his parents were, and who his grandparents were. Because they're not really the typical white people.

His mother wasn't. His mother was a revolutionary.

His father wasn't. A revolutionary.

His grandparents, they went to the communist Little Red Church just outside Seattle. They had communist friends.

So it's almost like Marxism has been bred into him.

Yep, piling scum on scum: Beck is once again viciously and falsely smearing Obama's parents. Doesn't he claim to have a rule that "you leave the families alone"?

I really hate writing about Glenn Beck because I'd like to make him a footnote on the back end of history. He's the equivalent of a two-bit carnival barker with a shape-shifting magical box, where he can put facts in and pull them out as bull.

But after reading Over the Cliff and previewing Bill Press' new book, the emerging trend is too scary to ignore.

With each passing day the rhetoric gets more violent, more ridiculous, loaded with even more hyperbole and scary images, with the sole intention of stoking fear, anger, and loathing into those with ears to hear.

If they win the propaganda war, it will be because we didn't call it out when we saw it and call it what it is: bare, naked racism blended with a scary witches' brew of long-standing key terms, fears, and biases.

This is why law student Angelo Carusone listens to four hours of Glenn Beck every day and then pushes advertisers to drop their ads from his show. It's his mission: to make it more and more difficult for Beck to have a platform to spew this nonsense.

He's successful, too. He's gotten hundreds of advertisers to drop their sponsorship. In the UK, Beck's show has NO advertisers. None. While this might not cause Fox to drop his show entirely, it does expose the Murdoch agenda quite clearly. After all, any businessman without an agenda would have dropped him like a hot potato when the revenue to support the show dried up.

But no. Beck is such a lowlife scumbag that he just ramps up the nasty a few more notches and carries on, while all the time claiming to be a patriot.

What he is is a whore. Plain and simple.

BLACK-BROWN TENSIONS IN LA

DAVEY D, FNV NEWSLETTER - For those of you reading this who live outside of Los Angeles you should note the that folks are on edge cause of increasing racial tension between blacks and Mexicans. Over the past month there have been a few brawls at local high schools which were widely reported on the news down here.

Now the tensions have been inflamed by a letter that has been circulating around the city claiming that in retaliation for some beef between black and latino gangs, 500 black kids wearing white t-shirts would be targeted and killed by Mexican gangs on Cinco de Mayo which is today. For the most part, the letter appears to be a hoax. Folks who work closely with the gangs down here have not heard of any craziness jumping off, but because the letter has been so widely circulated, it has led to some town hall meetings and increased police presence on all the high school campuses down here. A lot of parents are refusing to let their kids come to school...read on

T

The Simpsons/There's Something About Marrying

Video

There's something that's been kind of weird since the airing of the Simpsons last Sunday. The relative silence. With all the hullabaloo surrounding SpongeBob, Buster the Bunny, and even Shrek 2, The lack of complaining about a primetime show that depicts gay marriage in any form from the likes of the PTC. Pat Robertson, and the TVC has been quite unusual. I haven't heard the trumpets of doom and gloom really that's usually associated to this kind of display. The only negative mention that I found after googling the episode came from the NYTimes(maybe you can find a few more):

"L. Brent Bozell III, president of the Parents Television Council, criticized “The Simpsons” for addressing the issue of gay marriage, though he said that he had not seen the episode.

“At a time when the public mood is overwhelmingly against gay marriage, any show that promotes gay marriage is deliberately bucking the public mood,” he said."

That's an erroneous statement of course, and I find it disingenuous when he said he hasn't seen it when I'm sure his denizens have watched it many times. Why the silence? Are the Simpsons too powerful a show to try and demonize? A reader sugests that because it's on FOX, the evangelicals have backed off. Silence on the Jeff/Jim senario as well.

PTC has nothing on their homepage. Focus on the Family has nothing either.

Talking Points Memo

The key passage in the Wehner Memo (the leaked memo written by Karl Rove's deputy, Peter H. Wehner and reported this evening in various news outlets).

Let me tell you first what our plans are in terms of sequencing and political strategy. We will focus on Social Security immediately in this new year. Our strategy will probably include speeches early this month to establish an important premise: the current system is heading for an iceberg. The notion that younger workers will receive anything like the benefits they have been promised is fiction, unless significant reforms are undertaken. We need to establish in the public mind a key fiscal fact: right now we are on an unsustainable course. That reality needs to be seared into the public consciousness; it is the pre-condition to authentic reform.

Remind you of anything?

Also included is a nice encapsulated history lesson: "For the first time in six decades, the Social Security   battle is one we can win -- and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of the country."

In other words, this isn't about the fiscal soundness of Social Security or the babyboomers moving toward retirement or anything else. As Wehner himself says, this is the best chance the opponents of Social Security have had in six decades of trying to phase-out the program.

And this allows us to see the whole matter clearly. Social Security has been around for seventy years. How many people do you know who really don't like Social Security? Back when I was younger I'd go spend part of my summer at the subsidized retirement community where my grandparents lived. And I don't remember many people who lived there bad-mouthing Social Security. And those folks had lived under the program for pretty much all of their adults lives.

Let me tell you first what our plans are in terms of sequencing and political strategy. We will focus on Social Security immediately in this new year. Our strategy will probably include speeches early this month to establish an important premise: the current system is heading for an iceberg. The notion that younger workers will receive anything like the benefits they have been promised is fiction, unless significant reforms are undertaken. We need to establish in the public mind a key fiscal fact: right now we are on an unsustainable course. That reality needs to be seared into the public consciousness; it is the pre-condition to authentic reform.

Remind you of anything?

Also included is a nice encapsulated history lesson: "For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win -- and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of the country."

In other words, this isn't about the fiscal soundness of Social Security or the babyboomers moving toward retirement or anything else. As Wehner himself says, this is the best chance the opponents of Social Security have had in six decades of trying to phase-out the program.

And I Say It Began In The Garden Of Eden...Our New Issue from Hullabaloo

This could be the one, folks, where we prove our bona fides to the red states:

A suburban American school board found itself in court Monday after it tried to placate Christian fundamentalist parents by placing a sticker on its science textbooks saying evolution was "a theory, not a fact."

Atlanta's Cobb County School Board, the second largest board in Georgia, added the sticker two years ago after a 2,300-strong petition attacked the presentation of "Darwinism unchallenged." Some parents wanted creationism -- the theory that God created humans as related in the Bible -- to be taught alongside evolution. The board says the stickers were motivated by a desire to establish a greater understanding of different viewpoints. "They improve the curriculum, while also promoting an attitude of tolerance for those with different religious beliefs," said Linwood Gunn, a lawyer for Cobb County schools.

The controversy began when the school board's textbook selection committee ordered $8 million worth of the science books in March 2002. Marjorie Rogers, a parent who does not believe in evolution, protested and petitioned the board to add a sticker and an insert setting out other explanations for the origins of life. "It is unconstitutional to teach only evolution," she said. "The school board must allow the teaching of both theories of origin."

Liberals bi-coastal elites once again show that they don't have proper respect for middle America by insisting that science and religion are two different subjects. Until we learn to stop condescending and quit showing this kind of contempt for heartland beliefs we will lose.

Again, I say this should be OUR issue. Let's run on a national pro-creationism ticket in 2006. Then maybe they will let us back into America. So what else is new? We are dealing with an absolutist culture that demands total capitulation or nothing. Compromise will not work and it certainly will not work on these "values" issues. (Indeed, I think it's part of what makes us look weak to some other factions who might be willing to vote for us.) This is the same old shit over and over and over again. We backed off on the death penalty, gun control, welfare, affirmative action and here we are with a new slate of issues about gays. Tomorrow it will be creationism. Until we realize that their condition is that we FULLY EMBRACE their cultural dominance in both word and deed, they will not be satisfied.

It is not enough that they be left alone to do what they choose. We must join them and do it thoroughly and with fervor. No amount of tweaking will work. Their real beef is psychological and tribal. Issues are fungible.

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OK, I know it's hard to imagine Glenn Beck getting much worse than his history-abusing eliminationist attacks on the progressive movement, or his constant smearing of anyone who works for President Obama as a likely Marxist.

But yesterday, he managed -- by unleashing an all-out attack on President Obama's family, and particularly his mother. It doesn't get much lower than that.

Of course, he opened the attack on Obama's family by saying that he was not attacking them. Really. And then he proceeded immediately to smear them:

I want you to know that I am by no means attacking his family. And in fact, I think after the first five minutes of the show tonight, you're actually going to feel sorry for the little boy, Barry Obama -- the boy, the little one. This little boy. He's so cute! I don't feel sorry for the man, but the tragedy of this kid's childhood is staggering!

Lessee ... you're not attacking his family, but then turn around and immediately claim that they abandoned the poor little kid. Come again?

His parents, seemingly, from what you can piece together, his parents seemingly placed radical politics over everything else, including their little boy!

I am not one to talk. I grew up with a Dad who worked all the time. He was a small business owner, he owned the city bakery in Mount Vernon, Washington. And, um the only time I saw him was at work. I work all the time. My kids come to work, and we spend time at my job, or we travel together. A lot of us do this. We have long hours and we support our families.

But how many of us have been abandoned for the bakery? Or my job? Or your job? Would you ever leave your kid for that?

How about -- how many of us have been abandoned for a Marxist political theory? Or politics? This didn't happen to little Barack Obama once but twice. Both parents!

Of course, Obama's father did indeed essentially abandon his family -- but it wasn't for politics, it was for personal ambition: he wanted to attend Harvard without the encumbrances of a wife and tiny son. The senior Obama was not a particularly admirable guy.

But then Beck turns to the subject of Obama's late mother, who Obama himself described as "the one who was the single constant in my life," and "that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her."

How does Beck describe her? Why, as a commie sympathizer, of course:

She was described by a friend as, quote, "a fellow traveler." If anybody who reads about progressives and Marxism, you recognize that language.

Yes indeed we do. "Fellow traveler" is what the McCarthyite Red-baiters of the 1950s liked to call liberals. Of course, the proof for Beck is that Dunham actually supported Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 election. Impressive, no?

Dunham later left to Hawaii, to travel to Indonesia for a second time, and then she left her son to move to Pakistan. She left her son with her parents. This is the second time this poor little boy was left by a parent!

This is complete and utter rubbish. Stanley Ann Dunham did not at any time "abandon" her son, and Beck's claim that she did is a filthy smear of the lowest sort.

From Wikipedia:

It was at the East-West Center that Dunham met Lolo Soetoro, a student from Indonesia. They married in 1966 or 1967 and moved with six-year-old Barack to Jakarta, Indonesia, just after the unrest surrounding the ascent of Suharto. ... In Indonesia, Dunham enriched her son's education with correspondence courses in English, recordings of Mahalia Jackson, and speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. She sent the young Obama back to Hawaii to attend Punahou School rather than having him stay in Asia with her. Madelyn Dunham's job as a vice-president at the Bank of Hawaii helped pay the steep tuition, with some assistance from a scholarship. ... Ann Dunham left Soetoro in 1972, returning to Hawaii and reuniting with her son Barack for several years.

... Dunham returned to graduate school in Honolulu in 1974, while raising Barack and Maya. When Dunham returned to Indonesia for field work in 1975 with Maya, after three years in Honolulu, Barack chose not to go, preferring to finish high school in Hawaii while living with his grandparents.

So, to quickly recap: Ann Dunham never "abandoned" Barack Obama. She did send him to a private school for the sake of giving him an elite education -- which is hardly the same as abandonment. And when she returned to Indonesia to conduct field work as an anthropologist, the teenaged Obama chose to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents instead -- again, nothing particularly unusual about that.

And for what it's worth, Dunham didn't go to work in Pakistan until the late 1980s, by which time she was conducting work for the Asia Development Bank (which suggests, coincidentally, that Dunham was not exactly an opponent of capitalism). And "little Barry" by that time was a full-grown man in his 20s.

There's a lot more wrong with Beck's attack on Obama's family, particularly his smearing of Obama's grandparents as likely Marxists because they attended a Unitarian Church.

But if nothing else, it proves something we've already come to know: There is no depth to which Glenn Beck will not sink.

And at this point, he's just wallowing in scum.

The Advocate:

To avoid Constance McMillen bringing a female date to her prom, the teen was sent to a "fake prom" while the rest of her class partied at a secret location at an event organized by parents.

McMillen tells The Advocate that a parent-organized prom happened behind her back — she and her date were sent to a Friday night event at a country club in Fulton, Miss., that attracted only five other students. Her school principal and teachers served as chaperones, but clearly there wasn't much to keep an eye on.

"They had two proms and I was only invited to one of them," McMillen says. "The one that I went to had seven people there, and everyone went to the other one I wasn’t invited to."

Last week McMillen asked one of the students organizing the prom for details about the event, and was directed to the country club. "It hurts my feelings," McMillen says.Two students with learning difficulties were among the seven people at the country club event, McMillen recalls. "They had the time of their lives," McMillen says. "That's the one good thing that come out of this, [these kids] didn't have to worry about people making fun of them [at their prom]."

What a despicable place to live in. Are these people actually Americans? The cruelty TeH adults inflict on TeH Gays is very sad. American Exceptionalism, indeed.

Pam Spaulding has more.

Itawamba Agricultural High School student Constance McMillen is a hero. She's paid a tremendous cost at the age of 18, no less, for standing up to the bigotry in her hometown over this debacle of attending the school prom with her girlfriend.

How many of our professional gays have put themselves on the line for equality like this? Not to take away from the work orgs do, but it's acts like Constance's that show how one individual can expose and challenge ignorance and fear. The average gay person living in flyover country is bolstered by courageous efforts to simply be treated equally in a hostile environment. It's a sobering thought that she stood up to fight against an ENTIRE TOWN. No one stepped in to tell her about the fake prom, not even any of her peers. That's immense peer pressure to avoid any support of TEH GAY at any cost in Fulton, Mississippi.

She lost, but she actually won - respect and support from around the country, as well as legal help from the ACLU. She didn't back down or hide.

Maybe Haley Barbour can explain to us why Mississippi is the unhealthiest state in the union and DC as he's trying to block HCR again.