Susie Sampson went down to her local Chick-fil-A to interview the fine folks who were participating in Bash the Faggots Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day.

As always with Tea Partiers, you learn all kinds of amazing things from these folks. Did you know that Halloween is a satanic holiday? Me neither.

Plus: A guest appearance by Jesse Lee Peterson!

As we all wait for that verdict, the nuns have received one of their own. The Vatican has judged the nuns to "have serious doctrinal problems", among other things, and therefore have assigned them their own man to smack them back in line.

Via the New York Times:

The Vatican has appointed an American bishop to rein in the largest and most influential group of Catholic nuns in the United States, saying that an investigation found that the group has “serious doctrinal problems.”

The Vatican’s assessment, issued on Wednesday, said that members of the group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, have challenged church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, and promoted “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

The sisters were also reprimanded for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the Bishops, who are the Church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” During the debate over the health care overhaul in 2010, the American bishops came out in opposition to the health plan, but dozens of sisters, many who belong to the Conference, signed a statement supporting it — support that provided crucial cover for the Obama administration in the battle over health care.

[...]

“I’m stunned,” said Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a Catholic social justice lobby founded by sisters. Her group was also cited in the Vatican document, along with the Leadership Conference, for focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping “silent” on abortion and same-sex marriage.

Oh my, perish the thought. Focusing on helping the poor and needy. [cue sarcasm] How could church leaders possibly justify helping the poor and needy when there are abortions to be stopped and gays to hate? [end sarcasm]

Fear not, nuns. The Bishops will save you. They have a plan. It looks like this:

The verdict on the nuns group was issued by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is now led by an American, Cardinal William Levada, formerly the archbishop of San Francisco. He appointed Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle to lead the process of reforming the sisters’ Conference, with assistance from Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki and Bishop Leonard Blair, who was in charge of the investigation of the Leadership Conference.

They have been given up to five years to revise the group’s statutes, approve of every speaker at the group’s public programs and replace a handbook the group used to facilitate dialogue on matters that the Vatican said should be settled doctrine. They are also supposed to review the Leadership Conference’s links with Network and another organization, the Resource Center for Religious Life.

Sartain may have some difficulty whipping the nuns into shape, since he can't even seem to get the churches in his diocese to bow to his edicts.

Here's what feels so deeply hypocritical to me about the Vatican's smackdown, and make no mistake, it was a hard smackdown. Just yesterday, those very same bishops criticized the Ryan budget (and the House of Representatives for passing it), saying:

“Major reductions at this time of economic turmoil and rising poverty will hurt hungry, poor and vulnerable people in our nation and around the world,” the Rev. Stephen Blaire, bishop of Stockton, Calif., and the Rev. Richard E. Pates, bishop of Des Moines, wrote for the conference. “A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to the poor and vulnerable persons; it requires shared sacrifice by all.”

Dang it. There they go caring about the poor and stuff. I don't see a word in there about same sex marriage or abortion or birth control. Just poor folks. I guess that means it's totally all right for bishops to care about poverty and the downtrodden, but God forbid that women should do it? Well, Pope forbid, anyway.

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Teh stoopid, it hurts:

If your Thanksgiving turkey starts speaking Arabic or insists on wearing a hijab, now you know the reason. But this is no joking matter to Fischer, who raises the possibility of a pressure campaign against Butterball this Christmas.

In reality, the process that Fischer is decrying is no different than the typical way turkeys are slaughtered. It just means that observant Muslims can eat the turkey, and Butterball can sell more food here and abroad. It’s common sense and smart business. It also respects diversity without changing the product in any way whatsoever.

I await eagerly Fischer's condemnation of kosher salt and Ball Park Franks. Ironically, remember that infamous video of Sarah Palin in front of a turkey farm? That turkey meeting his maker in the background was being slaughtered by halal standards, which is the same standards as Butterball, and not terribly dissimilar to kosher butchering techniques.

But this kind of nod to Sharia Law will not stand with those upright idiotic conservatives, like Pam Geller, as TPM recounts:

“In a little-known strike against freedom, yet again, we are being forced into consuming meat slaughtered by means of a torturous method: Islamic slaughter,” Geller writes.

She continues that if you like freedom and hate sharia, you should boycott Butterball and ask them to stop selling these nefarious birds:

Non-Muslims in America and Europe don’t deserve to have halal turkey forced upon them in this way, without their knowledge or consent. So this Thanksgiving, fight for your freedom. Find a non-halal, non-Butterball turkey to celebrate Thanksgiving this Thursday. And write to Butterball and request, politely but firmly, that they stop selling only halal turkeys, and make non-halal turkeys available to Americans who still value our freedoms.

Geller’s anti-Sharia cohort Robert Spencer called this revelation “shocking” on his Jihad Watch blog — and touted the “Boycott Butterball Turkey” Facebook page, which so far has 758 “likes” and encourages supporters to “keep calling and writing. All halal should be labeled.”

Be afraid...be very afraid...

File this in your notebook under "in case you didn't believe prejudice and bigotry lives on" here in the United States. I won't even try to summarize this. I'll just give it to you straight:

Kymberly Wimberly, 18, got only a single B in her 4 years at McGehee Secondary School, and loaded up on Honors and Advanced Placement classes. She had the highest G.P.A. and says the school's refusal to let her be sole valedictorian was part of a pattern of discrimination against black students.

Wimberly says that despite earning the highest G.P.A. of the Class of 2011, and being informed of it by a school counselor, "school administrators and personnel treated two other white students as heir[s] apparent to the valedictorian and salutatorian spots."

Wimberly's mother is the school's "certified media specialist." She says in the federal discrimination complaint that after her daughter had been told she would be valedictorian, the mother heard "in the copy room that same day, other school personnel expressed concern that Wimberly's status as valedictorian might cause a 'big mess.'"

McGehee Secondary School is predominantly white, and 46 percent African-American, according to the complaint. Bratton says that the day after she heard the "big mess" comment, McGehee Principal Darrell Thompson, a defendant, told her "that he decided to name a white student as co-valedictorian," although the white student had a lower G.P.A.

I guess the school authorities found it uppity that someone who had the highest GPA in the school would actually expect to have the valedictorian honor bestowed on her.

I think I'll set a Google Alert for this one...and hope for an appropriately punitive outcome.

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The next time your Tea Partying/Breitbart-reading brother-in-law challenges you to demonstrate evidence of racism in the Tea Parties, direct them to Grady Warren's videos.

Warren is a sport-fishing promoter in Florida who runs a site called "Conservative Sportsmen" that seems now to have become the launching pad for Warren's presidential ambitions. As you can see, he's already declared.

His platform: Deport all Muslims. Deport all "illegal aliens." Force blacks into "re-education camps". Bring all liberals "to justice." And deny nonwhites the right to vote.

And he voices it so charmingly -- especially in his attacks on President Obama:

WARREN: Barack, you're in a fight you will not win. Because you have underestimated how many millions of Americans love this country and have lost loved ones for these United States.

You have declared war on the white man in America -- putting the wants and needs of moochers, leeches, looters, and criminals ahead of the producers, and the workers of America. And we don't want 15 to 20 million illiterate Mexicans and Chicanos as our new welfare society, living like rats in our neighborhoods.

They must go, and either the government steps up, or the government will have to clean up. They will not stay and get citizenship for breaking the law.

Barack, you, your advisers, pollsters, pundits, talking heads, have wanted to know: Who are the pissed-off people in this country? Well, the pissed-off people, sir, are the white people. It's the white people, stupid.

You'll notice, in fact, that all Warren is doing is taking standard Tea Party rhetoric and just amping it up to the next level -- the level, in fact, that you often encounter among the movement's rank and file, where they're not as inhibited about believing insane things or saying vicious and bigoted things. This is why the Birther garbage continues to be so popular with this crowd.

This was embodied in Warren's defense of the Tea Party last fall against charges of racism -- by, essentially, claiming that racist behavior and beliefs were perfectly legitimate:

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We all know that the wingnutosphere, particularly Andrew Breitbart, has been searching for evidence of liberal racism and anti-white bigotry on the part of President Obama and various liberal organizations for some time now. So far, the best they've come up with is Shirley Sherrod.

So here's how desperate they've become:

And Even STILL I Am Not Allowed To Make A Racial Slur About Our President? After THIS? AYFKM!?!?!?

I almost don’t have words…almost:

He said Republicans had driven the economy into a ditch and then stood by and criticized while Democrats pulled it out. Now that progress has been made, he said, “we can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.”

In the new post-racial America, brought to us by Barack “don’t call me black or white, just call me American” Obama, we have been told our differences are behind us now…just because he exists and… just because he is black. Yet, day by day and speech by speech, this President has done more damage to race relations than any combination of Presidents since Lyndon Johnson…and he, at least, tried to make things better with a sincere heart.

Were anyone else to have been caught on tape making these sorts of remarks, they’d have already been fired and given a 2 million dollar job contract with the competition. Oh wait.

The lack of outrage should surprise no one here. We were told to vote for him… not because he was black but… because he brought with him hope and change and the promise of a color blind society. He has delivered on none of these, instead making race relations worse today than they were before he was elected.

Excuse me, but ... WTF? Is this the first time this clown has heard Obama telling this story? Hell, he said nearly the exact same thing last week in Seattle, which is where we got the above video. And as we pointed out then, Obama has been telling this routine since at least May 14.

Suddenly now he has his noise out of joint? And over ... what, exactly? Somehow, the innate racism of Obama's remark eludes me. Is there some deeper racial connotation to sitting in the back seat we don't know about?

Besides, it's pretty clear that he's saying that Republicans have to sit in the back seat, isn't it? Or is Poff implying that the Republican Party equals white people? So just exactly who's being racist here?

BTW, I especially like Obama's closing bit here:

Obama: Have you ever noticed that when you want the car to go forward, you put it in 'D'. When you want it to go backward, you put it in 'R'.

Maybe that's racist too. We're sure Poff can explain to us how that is -- and how it now gives him permission to use racial slurs.

Indeed, given his headline, he sure seems as though he's just been bursting with withheld racial slurs against Obama. Dude, by all means, let it out. Better we know what you really think.

Though most of us can pretty much figure that out anyway.

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I dunno, what do you think? Think these guys might be Asian?

Well, anyway, now that Sharron Angle isn't having to make nice before a group of Latino students, she's back to her old Latino-bashing race-baiting ways, as TPM reports:

"Waves of illegal aliens streaming across our border, joining violent gangs, forcing families to live in fear," the announcer says. "And what's Harry Reid doing about it? Voting to give illegal aliens Social Security benefits, tax breaks, and college tuition. Voting against declaring English our national language -- twice. And even sided with Obama and the President of Mexico to block Arizona's tough new immigration law. Harry Reid, it's clear whose side he's on -- and it's not yours."

As with a previous ad, the victims of illegal immigration -- in this case the families living in fear, and kindergarteners who won't grow up in an America where English is the only official language -- all appear to be white, and stand in stark contrast to the dark-skinned criminals illegally coming from the Mexican border.

Greg Sargent astutely observes:

Here's why this is important. As you may recall, when Angle recently came under fire for another immigration ad that pictured swarthy young men sneaking around, she distanced herself from it by claiming that the men in her spot weren't necessarily Latinos.

Angle even suggested her earlier ad was a reference to border security in general, claiming: "Our northern border is where the terrorists came through."

Now that her new ad explicitly shows the Texas-Mexico border, can we assume that her earlier explanation is no longer operative?

I think we can also assume her doubtfulness that the men in her ads are Latino can be declared similarly inoperative.

You know, one can only hope that this kind of ugliness works as well for Angle as that right-wing Latino-voter-suppression effort.

I swear, you just can't write this stuff...it's almost like The Onion is writing this election cycle. But as it turns out, Carl Paladino wasn't objecting to speedoed men grinding against each other, per se. He just objected to them doing it without first paying Paladino a cover charge:

New York candidate for governor Carl Paladino, notorious for gay-bashing, rented to two gay clubs in downtown Buffalo. One of the clubs was run by his son, William. Paladino criticized opponent Andrew Cuomo’s parenting for taking his daughters to a gay parade, because gays there “wear Speedos and grind against each other.” Who knew Paladino was in the gay bar business?

…a club named Cobalt operated as a gay bar in 2004 and most of 2005 and was run by Paladino’s son, William. It was housed in a building owned by one of Paladino’s many companies, Huron Group LLC…

That's actually just one of two gay bars that Paladino's company owned. And that kind of even capitalist approval of gays was enough for the rabbi who had Paladino read that prepared statement to retract his endorsement.

A Brooklyn rabbi who says he helped write the speech that Carl Paladino gave to Orthodox leaders on Sunday that contained anti-gay remarks is withdrawing his support for the GOP candidate for governor. The rabbi says it is because Paladino apologized for those remarks under pressure from his family. Paladino said he has a nephew who is gay.

It also turns out that Paladino's company owned a gay bar upstate and that Paladino's son ran it.

Rabbi Yehuda Levin says Paladino doesn't have any backbone and bowed to political pressure.

Also, racy pictures of Roger Stone, a key advisor to Paladino, have surfaced. The pictures show a shirtless Stone at the Gay Pride Parade, kissing a woman's exposed breast. And there is another pictureof her licking his ear.

I think I'm beginning to agree with Rachel Maddow. This cannot be a real campaign. This has to be some weird performance art piece.

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[H/t Jamie]

Not-so-uplifting news, from Cincinatti's WLWT:

Two local attacks with one word common to both -- skinheads. Skinheads manufacture fear as if it was a craft, mixing intimidation and violence. What makes all this even more unsettling is that they’re doing it right here in the Tri-State.

The most recent attack occurred in Covington in August. A resident who asked to remain unidentified said, “I’ve never felt like I’ve had to worry about my safety around here until recently.”

The Covington community around MainStrasse has several gay bars and very little trouble. That’s why people there were surprised when a man tattooed with Nazi swastikas, along with a couple of his friends, was charged with beating two women outside of a gay bar. Police said the attackers shouted anti-gay slurs in the process of knocking the women to the ground and hitting them.

Devlin Burke is the tattooed man accused of leading the attack. He’s also charged with cutting a bystander who saw the attack and stopped to help the victims, sending that man to the hospital.

Not all of them are violent skinheads. Out on the other side of the country, in San Diego, they're trying to pose as normal white folks:

The former Army Ranger and small-business owner is wearing a plaid ivy cap over a shaved head. His T-shirt advertises “American Third Position: Liberty, Sovereignty, Identity.”

Though he asked CityBeat to withhold his surname, Damon is open about his views. He believes the government doesn’t represent the common man, that immigrants are a threat to public safety and employment (particularly in San Diego County, where he grew up) and that white Americans must become conscious of their race. He doesn’t censor himself when a server walks by, and he pays no mind to the customers a few tables over. That’s the point of American Third Position—it’s white nationalism packaged for a mainstream audience.

Damon wasn’t always so tempered with his rhetoric. He was involved with neo-Nazi groups in the past—he has protested, pamphleteered and brawled. “In my youth, like I think a lot of people are, I was just at odds with the world, and you get a little angry and you move with that because it’s kinda all you know,” he says. “As I got older and a little wiser, I saw that what I was doing wasn’t really reaching the regular white guy on the street.”

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Is anyone surprised by this?
NY1 is reporting a scary story:

Apparently a New York City cabbie was stabbed Monday night by his passenger -- after confirming that the cabbie was Muslim:

Investigators with the New York City Police Department say it all began Monday night when a 21-year-old man hailed a cab at 24th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan.
Police say the passenger asked the driver, "Are you Muslim?" When the driver said yes the passenger pulled a knife and slashed him in the throat, arm and lip.

According to NY1, the cabbie managed to lock the passenger in the back seat while he called 911. Then both cabbie and crazy deranged passenger were taken to Bellevue Hospital, a few blocks away. According to NY1 -- and sort of incredibly -- as of late last night, the crazy deranged passenger had not yet been charged. No word on the condition of the cabbie at this point, either. Right now, NY1 appears to be the only source for this story (and their source seems to just be the police).

Damn it all. Listen, lizard brain people: "Muslim" does not mean "terrorist" or "America hater". There have been American Muslims here for a century. Muslims died on 9/11 too. Muslims reached out and helped their community after that tragedy as well, as NYPD, FDNY and volunteers. It was their tragedy too. What you are doing makes you no better than the blind and dogmatic hatred of al Qaeda. Peter Daou:

Maybe if I put it in terms as simple as a Geico commercial, I can emphasize the point: hate breeds violence.[..]

For context, read this:

An abortion provider who had been a frequent target of Fox News’ bloviator Bill O’Reilly was gunned down during a church service in Kansas; a mentally disturbed man who believed the “tea-bagging” movement’s contention that the Obama administration is destroying the American economy — and who reportedly owned a number of firearms — withdrew $85,000 from his bank account, said he was part of a plot to assassinate the president and disappeared (he was later captured in Las Vegas); and this week, a white supremacist who was deeply steeped in far-right conspiracism entered the U.S. Holocaust Museum and opened fire, killing a guard before being shot and wounded by security personnel.

The three incidents share a common feature: All of these men thought they were serving a higher moral purpose, that is, defending their country from an insidious “enemy within” as defined by the far right — a “baby-killer,” the Jews who secretly control the world and a president who’s been accused of being a Manchurian Candidate-style foreign agent bent on nothing less than the destruction of the American Way.

Thankfully, the cabbie has survived this attack so far. But as David Neiwert points out again and again in his documenting of eliminationist acts, it's only a matter of time before there's a fatal assault.

And Gingrich, Palin, Fox News will have blood on their hands for continually feeding the fear of Muslims.