You may recall that there were a couple of nooses displayed as protests of Barack Obama in right-wing precincts the night he was elected in 2008, and there have been effigy hangings of the president here and there since. They quickly were swept under the rug, everyone moved along, and that was that. But obviously, those sentiments among racist rednecks have, if anything, intensified in recent years.

And now that it's clear he is about to win re-election, it's coming back out -- with clear references to Clint Eastwood's speech at the GOP convention included.

First there was the cretin who hung an empty chair labeled "Nobama" in close proximity to a George Allen sign at festival in Virginia this weekend. No one evidently was able to track down the culprit.

As we say, effigy hangings aren't particularly new, though they do serve as a nice barometer of the anger levels of the expressly racist faction out there. What made this noteworthy was the clear reference to Eastwood's use of an empty chair as a proxy for President Obama.

Then an angry Republican in Austin, Texas, did it in his front yard:

Today, Burnt Orange Report received the photo at right, taken in front of a home in Northwest Austin. The resident, a Republican, lynched an empty chair from a tree in his yard, which one can easily interpret to represent a racially motivated act of violence against the President.

When confronted, the man doubled down:

I called the homeowner to ask about his display, citing my concerns as a fellow Austinite. He replied, and I quote, "I don't really give a damn whether it disturbs you or not. You can take [your concerns] and go straight to hell and take Obama with you. I don't give a shit. If you don't like it, don't come down my street."

Ironically, the homeowner in question, Bud Johnson, won "Yard of the Month" in August 2010 from his Homeowners Association. I guess his display was a little different that month?

The next day, the man added an American flag and a guard to his display.

I wonder how Clint Eastwood feels about having his piece of impromptu acting serve as grist for a lynch mob.

Gawker:

Clint Eastwood was his usual candid self when speaking with Extra TV about hisnow-infamous "empty chair" speech at the Republican National Convention."If somebody's dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they're gonna have to take what they get," the veteran actor told an Extra correspondent during a one-on-one interview about his upcoming film Trouble with the Curve (skip to 2:15 in the video below).

Asked if Mitt Romney was that "somebody," Eastwood initially said "yeah," before adding, "actually, he had some of his people ask." In another interview on today's episode of Ellen, Eastwood poked some more fun at his rambling diatribe, saying "the Democrats who were watching thought I was going senile, and the Republicans knew I was."

Snap! Don't mess with Clint.

Even Peggy Noonan is going apeshit over conservative ineptitude.

The central problem revealed by the tape is Romney’s theory of the 2012 election. It is that a high percentage of the electorate receives government checks and therefore won’t vote for him, another high percentage is supplying the tax revenues and will vote for him, and almost half the people don’t pay taxes and presumably won’t vote for him.

My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning.

This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that. They’re usually young enough and dumb enough that nobody holds it against them, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know much about America.

We are a big, complicated nation. And we are human beings. We are people. We have souls. We are complex. We are not data points. Many things go into our decisions and our political affiliations.

You have to be sophisticated to know that. And if you’re operating at the top of national politics, you’re supposed to be sophisticated.

--

You know what Romney sounded like? Like a kid new to politics who thinks he got the inside lowdown on how it works from some operative. But those old operatives, they never know how it works. They knew how it worked for one cycle back in the day.

They’re jockeys who rode Seabiscuit and thought they won a race.

--

It’s time to admit the Romney campaign is an incompetent one. It’s not big, it’s not brave, it’s not thoughtfully tackling great issues. It’s always been too small for the moment. All the activists, party supporters and big donors should be pushing for change. People want to focus on who at the top is least constructive and most responsible. Fine, but Mitt Romney is no puppet: He chooses who to listen to. An intervention is in order. “Mitt, this isn’t working.”

This was truly one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen on live television, and it just got worse as it went on. No one will be talking about Mittens' speech -- they'll be talking about this one, in which Clint Eastwood veered from left, to right, to libertarian, to old man with Lipitor brain fog who was up past his naptime.

(Nicole): It was truly bizarre and cameras caught Paul Ryan cringing in the audience, a reaction shared by many of us watching. The Romney campaign said it was unscripted, but think about it, someone had to know enough about the shtick to put that empty chair there for Eastwood to talk to. So the Romney campaign knew what would happen at some level and thought that this would be a good lead up to the candidate taking the stage. That's hard to wrap my brain around.

As to the empty chair, the Obama administration wins Twitter last night with this response.
Watch and read the whole sad thing:

Here's the full transcript of Eastwood's remarks:

EASTWOOD: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Save a little for Mitt.

(APPLAUSE) I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, what’s a movie tradesman doing out here? You know they are all left wingers out there, left of Lenin. At least that is what people think. That is not really the case. There are a lot of conservative people, a lot of moderate people, Republicans, Democrats, in Hollywood. It is just that the conservative people by the nature of the word itself play closer to the vest. They do not go around hot dogging it.

(APPLAUSE)

So -- but they are there, believe me, they are there. I just think, in fact, some of them around town, I saw Jon Voight, a lot of people around...

(APPLAUSE)

Jon’s here, an academy award winner. A terrific guy. These people are all like-minded, like all of us.

So I -- so I’ve got Mr. Obama sitting here. And he’s -- I was going to ask him a couple of questions. But -- you know about -- I remember three and a half years ago, when Mr. Obama won the election. And though I was not a big supporter, I was watching that night when he was having that thing and they were talking about hope and change and they were talking about, yes we can, and it was dark outdoors, and it was nice, and people were lighting candles.

They were saying, I just thought, this was great. Everybody is trying, Oprah was crying.

(LAUGHTER)

EASTWOOD: I was even crying. And then finally -- and I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there is 23 million unemployed people in this country.

(APPLAUSE)

Now that is something to cry for because that is a disgrace, a national disgrace, and we haven’t done enough, obviously -- this administration hasn’t done enough to cure that. Whenever interest they have is not strong enough, and I think possibly now it may be time for somebody else to come along and solve the problem.

(APPLAUSE)

So, Mr. President, how do you handle promises that you have made when you were running for election, and how do you handle them?

I mean, what do you say to people? Do you just -- you know -- I know -- people were wondering -- you don’t -- handle that OK. Well, I know even people in your own party were very disappointed when you didn’t close Gitmo. And I thought, well closing Gitmo -- why close that, we spent so much money on it. But, I thought maybe as an excuse -- what do you mean shut up?

(LAUGHTER)

OK, I thought maybe it was just because somebody had the stupid idea of trying terrorists in downtown New York City.

(APPLAUSE)

I’ve got to to hand it to you. I have to give credit where credit is due. You did finally overrule that finally. And that’s -- now we are moving onward. I know you were against the war in Iraq, and that’s okay. But you thought the war in Afghanistan was OK. You know, I mean -- you thought that was something worth doing. We didn’t check with the Russians to see how did it -- they did there for 10 years.

(APPLAUSE)

But we did it, and it is something to be thought about, and I think that, when we get to maybe -- I think you’ve mentioned something about having a target date for bringing everybody home. You gave that target date, and I think Mr. Romney asked the only sensible question, you know, he says, “Why are you giving the date out now? Why don’t you just bring them home tomorrow morning?”

(APPLAUSE)

And I thought -- I thought, yeah -- I am not going to shut up, it is my turn.

(LAUGHTER)

So anyway, we’re going to have -- we’re going to have to have a little chat about that. And then, I just wondered, all these promises -- I wondered about when the -- what do you want me to tell Romney? I can’t tell him to do that. I can’t tell him to do that to himself.

(APPLAUSE)

You’re crazy, you’re absolutely crazy. You’re getting as bad as Biden.

(APPLAUSE)

Of course we all now Biden is the intellect of the Democratic party.

(LAUGHTER)

Kind of a grin with a body behind it.

(LAUGHTER)

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Part of being a Democrat is acting like you’re losing even when you’re winning. Part of being a Republican is acting like you’re winning even when you’re losing. The phrase “silent majority,” that brilliant bit of Nixonian rhetoric, is a way to augment Republican numbers and voices. “Nearly all people agree with me and they’re not only in my imagination … you just can’t hear them.”

Senator Jim DeMint (SC-R) has an odd obsession with ill-fitting metaphors. He famously proclaimed his only reason to kill the Affordable Care Act was to annihilate the president politically. "If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him,” said the tea-touting Senator. DeMint has a pre-existing condition; he thinks an enemy’s high casualty mêlée is comparable to the inability to pass a sensible, relatively mild, reform bill. Well, at least when he’s talking about Democrats. As the kick-off speaker at this year’s CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) DeMint used a somewhat softer analogy: football. Specifically these two teams DeMint sees have different goals. “We don’t have shared goals with the Democrats…Compromise works well in this world when you have shared goals."

In football the teams are never expected to go in the same direction with the best interests of the fans in mind. Also in football, no team threatens to shut down the country as a strategy to win the game.

But maybe DeMint is correct: It’s really tough to compromise with a group that’s solitary goal is destroying you. Apparently taking the same oath to uphold the same Constitution, in the same country, drawing the same paycheck, in the same office building, in the same city and being of the same religion, sharing the same language and being mostly (85 percent) male, white and wealthy isn’t enough common ground for Republicans to even entertain working with those alien Democrats. It’s even tougher to compromise with a group who you could totally agree with but they retroactively become against their own ideas once you propose them. Like say, the individual mandate every GOP candidate was for before he was against it. (Yes, except Ron Paul, keep your emails.)

Enter the “severely conservative.” This was the description Mitt Romney bestowed upon himself at this year’s CPAC. “I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” said the oft-frontrunner. “Severe” is a word normally associated with pain or really bad weather. With today’s GOP, not only do Republicans refuse to have the same goals – they deny all similarities to their enemy. “The President is not like us.” This is severely conservative.

In the same speech Romney promised to repeal ObamaCare even though it’s nearly identical to the plan Romney signed into law in Massachusetts, dubbed RomneyCare.

Let’s put it this way: If Romney “repealed and replaced” the “job-killing ObamaCare” with RomneyCare, no one would notice. If there were a taste test and you covered the labels – no one could tell the difference. You’d have a 50/50 chance of guessing which reform you were actually enjoying.

But to be a true severe conservative demands suspending disbelief. What must you be willing to accept? The economy buckling while a Republican was in the White House never happened. Bush never bailed out the banks or the auto industry. Deficits suddenly matter. Clint Eastwood is a hippie. And if the country continues to struggle it’ll be great for the GOP.

It reminds me of King Pyrrhus’ quote which sums up the term Pyrrhic victory: "If we are victorious in one more battle, we shall be utterly ruined."

And well, these severe conservatives are acting like they’re winning.

That should tell us something.

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I know this has been out there for a few days, but I still wanted to respond. Conservatives have long tried to carry the mantle of America exceptionalism are our global superiority. They say the left doesn't believe Americans are the kings of the universe. Hey, we're tree huggers, aren't we? Rove wants Americans to think we're giving up being the leaders of the free world to China and the terrorists. It's quite childish and has been for a long time. They also prop up their straw man that all a person has to do is strap on their boots, pull them tight and they too can host a show like Bill O'Reilly and join the 1 Percenters club. It's so easy if only you try. That's all it takes you lazy rubes -- but you'd rather live off the dole then go to college, work and feed your family.

Well, here comes Super Bowl XLVI and it's usually the most watched TV event every year. For years many people tuned in to actually watch the ads because it was the one time that there was a greater creative license bestowed upon the ad agencies to produce as clever an ad as possible. That changed after conservatives hijacked the SB and the ads with the Janet Jackson flap which was created by conservatives lame attempt to attack Hollywood once again. This time it worked. Movement conservatives even went on TV and said their kids had been permanently damaged by the brief Jackson areola flashing. Wow, for an exceptional people, conservatives are very scared of nudity. They pressured networks and the NFL into thinking children never have seen nekkid body parts before. Heaven forbid if their kids walk in on them right after a shower. They could be damaged for life seeing a reflection of their own bodies.

I bet you don't remember many of the ads from Feb. 5th now except one: Clint Eastwood's ode to Detroit. I was caught up in the game and angry that the Giants blew their first half lead, but Clint's voice momentarily caught my interest and I tried to figure out where what was happening. Ha! It was all about American Exceptionalism and the resilience the auto industry had endured to recover after the global financial crisis. Paulbots screamed to let them all crumble, but Eastwood's message was we can find a way through tough times because the second half is coming. You'd think this would cross party lines since Clint is known to be a center right guy. Not so. See, Karl Rove can't have anything said about America now that makes a case for a positive future. How dare Eastwood praise us.

Karl Rove: I was frankly offended by It. I'm a huge Clint Eastwood fan. It was an extremely well done ad, but it is a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.

Say, what? Is he kidding me? Clint was shocked too and so he felt he had to call out his spinning.

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Fox News just cannot leave this alone. First of all, they loathe American car companies, especially American car companies who were part of the auto industry rescue. Those companies would be General Motors and Chrysler. Never mind that the first piece of the bailout was in December 2008 before Barack Obama took office. It was nevertheless a grievous socialist sin visited upon us by That Guy in the White House.

Fox News', and by extension, Roger Ailes', hate for these two companies is large and consuming. Every Friday, a very large segment of the day is spent trashing the Chevy Volt as much as they possibly can. I don't really know why they chose Friday, but I know they do it. They hate the Volt with a passion and General Motors even more.

Enter Chrysler, with a commercial made by a staunch Republican with a simple message: It's halftime in America, and we've clawed our way back from the brink of collapse. It is not a partisan message. It is a celebration of success and overcoming, something that everyone should celebrate. Unless, of course, your political fortunes might turn on America's decline. There is that.

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A widely-lauded Superbowl ad from Sunday's football game starring Clint Eastwood declared that "It's Half Time in America." The ad had Eastwood poignantly talking about the troubles that the country faces and the fear that Americans are dealing with during a turbulent economy. The final message of the ad, is that we're all going to pull together and rally to win in the "second half." The Chrysler ad evoked the auto industry bailout in a positive way and showed various images of citizens protesting against the ills they see across the country, including an image from protests at the Wisconsin capitol from last year. That's where the problem comes in. Apparently the images were doctored to take pro-union sentiment out of them. Chrysler apparently had no problem exploiting citizen discontent to sell cars, but couldn't go as far as to allow unions to be shown in a positive light.

Many in Wisconsin recognized the misty evening shot of the King Street entrance to the Wisconsin Capitol with Colonel Hans Christian Heg, who led the all-Scandinavian Regiment into the Civil War, in the foreground. Recognizing the shot, Wisconsinites went wild on Facebook and Twitter. But what the cheeseheads quickly started to realize is that they did not recognize the protest signs in the shot. Apparently, Chrysler was comfortable using the Wisconsin Capitol shot as a symbol of the nation’s discontent, but actually using pro-union signs was too much for the bailed-out car company. Somewhere along the line, red hearts and text were removed from the “Care for your educators like they care for your kids” signs. Plus, Madison Teachers Inc. signs—MTI in a circle—were weirdly written over ...