Here's some sage advice for the ladies from that brave defender of traditional marriage, Pat Robertson. Ladies, if your man cheats on you, try harder! Clearly you haven't made your home "so wonderful that he doesn't want to wander." Yeah, I doubt that the wandering had much to do with the home, quite frankly. Uncle Pat, so full of sage advice, also informed the woman that it was too bad, but after all, "he's a man." Oooh, manly thing, breaking commitments and cheating on your wife. Yes, very, very manly.

More from Right Wing Watch:

On today’s 700 Club, Robertson told a woman whose husband was cheating on her that she should stop focusing on the adultery and instead ponder, “Does he provide a home for you to live in, does he provide food for you to eat, does he provide clothes for you to wear, is he nice to the children…is he handsome?”

Well, there you go. You know, those girls held hostage in Cincinnati were probably fed and clothed in some fashion and the guy did have them in the house, so there was that. He wasn't very handsome, though.

So all women could hope to expect was food, clothing, kindness to children and a handsome face -- in exchange for working their tails off making sure he was always so satisfied his eye wouldn't wander!

I guess General Petraeus' wife knew, since that was Robertson's reason for shrugging his affair off, too. I wish that woman had told Robertson her husband had a gay affair, just to see what his reaction would have been.

Tick, tock...time is running out for this Congress to act before taxes go up on everyone. But it would appear that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have decided to pass the buck rather than deal with what is already on the table; namely, an extension of the middle class tax cuts. The Senate passed that last summer, but John Boehner doesn't want to pass it with Democratic votes, so it hasn't been brought to the floor for a vote.

That's too bad, but Boehner is caught in a vise of his own creation. Adele Stan's report on AlterNet brings news of House intrigue and a possible coup plot.

At the right-wing Brietbart.com, Matthew Boyle writes of a plan by conservatives to wrest the speaker's gavel from Boehner by changing the rules of the vote to a secret ballot, under the reasoning that, if Boehner was unable to determine who voted against him, he would be unable to visit retribution on those members should his speakership survive the vote.

Although Boyle relies entirely on unnamed sources, he obtained a document laying out the plan, which is currently being circulated among right-wing members of the House. The irony is that they plan to use Boehner's promotion of an anti-union position favored by the Tea Party as the rationale for making the rules change.

Here's how Card Check plays in. Boehner wrote an op-ed saying that secret ballots were more democratic because there wouldn't be retribution for one's vote. They plan to use that op-ed to force Republicans to change the procedure. According to the document published by Breitbart.com (application/pdf - 102.43 KB), the plan is to bring a proposal up to change votes for the Speaker to secret ballot, then vote for a tea party candidate.

Since Boehner yanked tea party representatives out of leadership positions, there's been a lot of resentment on their part, and even more resentment about his pretending to negotiate with President Obama. They have lots of billionaires funding them, so assume they're bowing to the wishes of their patrons on this.

Here's a somewhat funny paragraph reassuring members that Nancy Pelosi couldn't sneak in and win if they did this:

Don't worry about Speaker Boehner losing GOP votes in a secret ballot. It is still not possible for Pelosi to become Speaker even with 100% of Democrats united behind her and a split GOP vote.

Honestly, the thought never occurred to me, but it must worry some Republicans who would be afraid a split GOP vote would end up electing the Minority Leader as Speaker.

According to Adele Stan, Norm Ornstein has weighed in with a novel idea.

Go to Article I, Section 2: The Constitution does not say that the speaker of the House has to be a member of the House. In fact, the House can choose anybody a majority wants to fill the post.

Ornstein's suggestion? Jon Huntsman, the erstwhile presidential candidate and former U.S. ambassador to China, who he figures could win the votes of enough Democratic members of Congress (Huntsman was appointed to his China post by Obama) and less radical Republicans to win the gavel.

Please don't drown out the Congress with your peals of laughter.

But let's say they try this idea. Who would they elect in place of Boehner? Paul Ryan? Eric Cantor? Who would you guess?

Our friend and sometime contributor Leah Nelson has a post up over at the SPLC's Hatewatch site examining that fringe world between far right and far left -- dominated by the rightist element, in the person of Alex Jones and his proto-Patriot conspiracy shop.

In this case, it's these pseudo-economists who put out conspiracist newsletters to investors -- their most recent theory being that President Obama is plotting to defy the Constitution and ensconce himself for a third term come 2016 -- whose Planet Bizarro version of reality gets a good sharp look:

'Anarcho-Capitalists’ Seen as Cousins of the ‘Patriot’ Movement

The star of the show is a fellow named Porter Stansberry, a scam artist/"financial guru" convicted of making over a million dollars selling false "inside tips" (he claimed a First Amendment defense) and was subsequently fined $1.5 million by the SEC.

Evidently soured on the government by his brush with the law, Stansberry has turned from scam artist to antigovernment radical, using various Internet publications to mix dubious investment advice with apocalyptic warnings about a coming era of tyranny that will destroy America.

His most recent insight? According to a YouTube video distributed across a multitude of far-right websites and discussed with great seriousness by figures like antigovernment conspiracist Alex Jones, President Obama is planning to overthrown the Constitution, implement socialism, and seize a third term in office.

According to Stansberry, Obama won’t even have to use force to do it. Instead, the president plans to buy his third term with untold profits gained from mining America’s vast shale oil deposits, which will lead to an era of extraordinary prosperity unlike anything America has seen before.

“All of this new wealth,” Stansberry says, “will seem like a gift from the Prophet Muhammad to the administration of Barack Obama.”

Continue reading »

On a conference call with House Republicans, Speaker John Boehner gave them some much-needed medicine as he tells them to fall in line.

On a conference call with House Republicans a day after the party’s electoral battering last week, Speaker John A. Boehner dished out some bitter medicine, and for the first time in the 112th Congress, most members took their dose.
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It was a striking contrast to a similar call last year, when Mr. Boehner tried to persuade members to compromise with Democrats on a deal to extend a temporary cut in payroll taxes, only to have them loudly revolt.
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“To have a voice at the bargaining table, John Boehner has to be strong,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, one of the speaker’s lieutenants. “Most members were just taught a lesson that you’re not going to get everything that you want. It was that kind of election.”

Tea Partiers like Jennifer Stefano (who works for Koch's Americans For Prosperity group) were terribly upset by Boehner's words. Now when you're watching this clip, just imagine you lived in a far-off land where we didn't have a two-year election.

Cavuto: Tea Partiers made Boehner Speaker, and he better watch how and to who he is speaking. Jenn, you didn't like that?

Stefano: Well look, here's what I'd like everyone to say. Why don't we all talk about instead of who's getting in line and who's cooperating with who? What is the best thing for our country? Wouldn't it be nice if we had a leader in Washington who said hey, it's not about just working together for show, it's about what is best for our country. And Neil, there are some very hard decisions to be made and I don't think we should compromise on things that are not good for all of us as Americans.

Not only is she delegitimizing Obama's reelection, but she's saying NO to f*&king reality. Do these people come from the conservative section of Storybrooke?
Here's more lunacy as this short interview continues:

Cavuto: But the president's going to claim that elections have consequences and it was close, but I won and I won despite this call for higher taxes and maybe because of it and the rich just have to deal -- you say what?

Stefano: I say number one, just because you win an election doesn't mean you get to go of the rails and do what is NOT good for America because you have some weird ideological agenda. Number two, let's talk seriously about what tax cuts are and what they're going to do. You can take all of the wealth --100% of the wealth in this country, Neil, and from everyone making over $250,000 and you are not going to solve the problems we have in this country.

Hey Stefano, regarding your first point: Over 62,000,000 people voted for this "weird agenda", in your words, so in reality it's not weird at all. As for her second point: As I said before, we've just completed a long, serious and arduous process of picking the type of person we wanted to be in charge of the executive branch, and we've decided what we want to do.

Maybe not in Tea Party Nation, a world many light years away. But here in America. That's how democracy works.

But Stefano's not a fan of that system. She then refuses to say she's open to compromise and instead calls the problems with entitlements 'immoral.' She doesn't want to compromise, period. End of story. The message from many Tea Party groups is clear: Don't compromise, don't negotiate and become more conservative.

Cavuto: Jennifer says no, she's not going to budge on anything.

Stefano: I, I, I... it's not that I'm not going to budge. I want a serious conversation with this president outside, I won't compromise my child's future. And I won't throw the poor and the weak under the bus by hurting charities. Are you afraid I'm going to leap through and grab you?

Here's how the conversation would go. Obama: Jenn, let's have a serious conversation about fixing our problem. Why won't you compromise? Jenn: Because I hate you and your radical agenda. Obama: I understand that, but I won the election so America has chosen. Jenn: No they haven't because we never had a serious conversation about this. Obama: Yes we did. Jenn: No we didn't and you can't make me...etc...

We had A SERIOUS CONVERSATION!

Argh. Never mind. Transcribing this has turned my frontal lobe mushy. The stupid, it burns.

I figured after a little time off I wouldn't get so sick reading and writing about the twisted minds of the conservative/TeaCrack Party, but I was wrong. Twitter has really fueled their lunatic scribblings. Check this out.

John Cole:

James Taranto, the WSJ rightwing nutjob whose job is the Best of the Web feature, which invariably means reposting whatever Glenn Reynolds or the halfwits at NRO write every day:

He is, of course, referring to the reports that a number of men used their bodies to shield their loved ones during the Aurora massacre. Most of us thought of this as a noble and amazing sacrifice, but to the American Taliban, these may have been slutty slut sluts who use birth control (or even worse, vote for Democrats!) and make their own decisions, so whether or not they deserved to be saved is up to wingnut judgment.

You know who got to make the decision whether their lives were worth it, Taranto? The three heroes who ate bullets saving their loved ones, not some fat scumbag neocon filth sitting comfortably with a glass of bourbon while wanking on twitter from the comfort of a wingback chair in Manhattan.

Taranto went on to pen a mea culpa, sorta kinda, at the WSJ:

We intended this to be thought-provoking, but to judge by the response, very few people received it that way. The vast majority found it offensive and insulting. This column has often argued that a failure of public communication is the fault of the public communicator, and that's certainly true in this case. What follows is an attempt to answer for this failure with a circumspect accounting of our thoughts.

One word: L.A.M.E.

Notice that at no point does Taranto say he's sorry for having even vaguely implied that the survivors -- who are also victims -- might be unworthy of the sacrifice. Nah. Being a right-wing a-hole means never, ever, EVER saying "sorry".

What you really notice here is that Taranto writes (habitually) in the Royal We, aka the Majestic Plural. In the 21st century, this kind of writing is perhaps excusable for editorials produced by an editorial board. Not so much for personal opinion columns. Then it’s just preposterously pretentious. Though perfect, in a let-them-eat-cake way, for a would-be spokesperson for the 1 Percent.

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Apparently there was a tea party convention in Illinois called TeaCon, which attracted very serious and sensible conservatives like Glenn Beck, Dana Loesch and the always, very serious Andrew Breitbart. Guess who else was on the bill? Rep. Joe Walsh, the deadbeat dad.

It takes a very bad family man to understand about the virtues of supporting the family values party I suppose. A judge ruled that he has to explain why he's 100,000 behind in child support.

A Chicago judge issued a preliminary ruling Wednesday against U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) in his child-support dispute with his ex-wife, ordering the Tea Party favorite to explain why he appears to be $100,000 behind in child-support payments.Cook County Circuit Judge Raul Vega also wanted to know why Walsh wasn’t in court Wednesday — the McHenry Republican’s ex-wife, Laura Walsh, was there — and initially said he expected him to show up for the next hearing...read on

Anyway, with the class and dignity that only Breitbart can bring to any event, he spews obscenities at Janeane Garofalo in this video and is just as vile in the next.

Little Green Footballs:

Here’s one of the star speakers at TeaBagCon this weekend, Andrew Breitbart, spewing obscenities at his enemies. He calls Janeane Garofalo “Hollywood’s sympathy f*ck,” to a wildly cheering audience of conservatives.
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He follows up this classless rant by telling union leaders James Hoffa and Richard Trumka; “F*ck you,” again to wild cheers and applause.

Meanwhile, we learn that one of the event’s main organizers, Chicago Tea Party Patriots Director Steve Stevlic, was arrested last September for soliciting a prostitute.

Teabag family values, proudly on display.

UPDATE at 10/1/11 11:02:00 am

And the scandal is getting even more interesting. Breitbart’s own far right blogger Warner Todd Huston notes that TeaCon organizer Steve Stevlic, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, may also have been playing some funny games with the Chicago Tea Party’s money.

You can click over to LGF and watch the other video. He's a very angry person. But I'm sure the Beltway media will still take him seriously because they love conservative street performers and the rodeo clowns they produce going back to Jack Abramoff.

Bill O'Reilly always pulls a sliver of a video during his Fox show to make sure his audience hears profanities or what he decides is vulgar language or inappropriate behavior from some lefty every chance he gets. Being part of the fair and balanced network I hope he'd give these videos a chance with his crowd. It would be the only fair thing to do.

Boy, am I glad Ed Schultz dealt with this. It's been a Fox theme since yesterday, beginning on Megyn Kelly's show and continuing on all the way through tonight's O'Reilly Factor. It goes like this: Unlike here after Katrina, and the Haiti and Chile earthquakes (translate that to where black people and Hispanics live), there has been no looting in Japan. Glenn Beck took it out to an extreme on his show today and then came on O'Reilly to tell everyone how noble the Japanese are for not looting after a disaster.

Of course, the whole idea of "looting" supposes that there is a) anything left after a disaster to take; and b) those who take are doing so with the motive of enriching themselves in some way, which makes no sense in areas where dire need supplants more banal motives. The areas most heavily affected by the earthquake were virtually destroyed by the tsunami. When ships sit on top of buildings and homes are reduced to rubble, there isn't much left to "loot." What's left behind is need and desperation.

But if you really want to understand why you're not seeing a whole lot of stories about looting in Japan, Slate has an excellent article explaining Japanese culture and society that will enlighten you.

There's a race-related overtone that's really insidious here, with Beck insinuating that the Japanese people are somehow superior to Americans, Haitians and Chileans, more noble. More good. It's quite subtle, but Ed sees it too. He also completely unwraps the idea of "no looting" and indeed, the idea of looting at all.

Ed points out there is looting going on in Japan. But is it looting when there's deep, desperate need? As Ed points out, "What is looting, when you're trying to survive?"

It's the framing that I noticed and also what Ed picked up on.

See, it always comes back to Beck's vision of America. With Barack Obama as President, America just isn't what it should be. We don't have respect for our fellow man, we don't even have respect for where we live? Glenn Beck is using false information about looting in Japan to say America isn't good enough?

Let's remind Beck about the volunteers who went to the Gulf Coast to help clean up the BP oil spill. We should also remind him about the people who helped rescue their fellow man from the flood waters of Katrina. And Beck, let's not forget about the first responders who ran in to the twin towers back on September 11th, 2001. Let's remind him that yes, there are looters in America and yes, there are looters in Japan, but no matter what country they're from, people in crisis do their best to stick together, to help one another, and to survive. Survive.

Also, what IS up with that fake Oval office set Beck's pontificating from? Is this how Fox plans to rehabilitate him? Take away the chalkboard and put him in a big desk flanked with flags? It's offensive. Tonight Bill O'Reilly referred to him as a "Fox News Analyst." A Fox News analyst? Really?

[h/t JohnVMoore]
Hey, Whoopi Goldberg and Dixie Chicks....Look what happens when the wingers slam the liberal black guy in the White House at a charity event, no less. That's right. Nothing. In fact, it takes over 2 weeks for it to even hit the public airwaves.

I'm not sure what makes me sicker -- what he said or the fact that the crowd (and all those Marines) cheered.

Whoopi Goldberg didn't fare quite so well in 2004 with Slimfast when she spoke at a Kerry fundraiser and mocked George W. Bush. And then there's the Dixie Chicks, pulled off the air after criticizing Bush and the Iraq war.

And of course, let's not forget DC Douglas, the GEICO voiceover guy who was fired after drunk-dialing FreedomWorks and letting them have a piece of his mind.

See, when you're a spokesperson AND a right-winger,** I guess it's totally ok to disrespect the office of the President of the United States and bash him at a fundraiser for little kids and military folks. Or not.

** (Ed. note: Edited to reflect Ermey's position as a spokesperson, not executive with Geico)

Update 12/31/2010: The reaction to this video has been strong, especially on Twitter. They're initiating a phone campaign to GEICO and GEICO's parent, Berkshire Hathway as well as calling for @Geico_Service to respond.