DownWithTyranny!:: Modoc County - A Lesson In Republican Extremism and Their Cult of Freeloading

Informed Comment: Dear Rev. Graham: Obama was not born a Muslim and neither is anyone else

Mugsy`s Rap Sheet: Katrina devastation five years later, shows the folly of relying on Corporate America for recovery

Taylor Marsh: 2012: Room for growing as an Independent

Oliver Willis: Blanche Drowns

Mercury Rising: Democrats beating Republicans in the cash race

HBO's Big Love returns tonight and if you haven't seen it, the show is a blast. It's the show that the Mormon church never wanted hitting the airwaves. It takes place in Utah and focuses on Bill Paxon's independent polygamist family structure as well as their ties to the polygamist cult called UEB in Juniper Creek. He's a successful businessman with three wives and eight kids and they live in fear that the LDS will catch them violating the ban on polygamy. One of his wives is the daughter of the "prophet" from the fundamentalist cult that he was once part of but had been kicked out of because the leader feared him as a possible future "leader' of the cult.

In a NY Times article about the show back in 2006:

"The pro-polygamists think it's too dark," Mr. Olsen said. "The anti-polygamists don't think it's dark enough. I think we've split the baby down the middle." The men said they spent almost three years researching the show, talking to experts and reading everything from sociological tracts to official Mormon records.

Mr. Scheffer said future episodes would explore some of the darker aspects of polygamy, like the abuses of patriarchy. There are already hints in the early episodes: Roman has at least one teenage bride.

The show also exposes teachings and history of the Mormon church that the church would rather not see put on public display and was especially not happy that a "Temple" scene was included in last years finale.

Here's a wrap up of season 3.

The acting is off the charts great with very good story lines that keep you engaged week to week. I'm not trying to analyze it for you from the point of view that it either makes polygamy seem more normal or less normal or that the Mormon religion is bizarre or typical of religion in general, but that the writers have plenty of material to work with to produce a very entertaining series. The rest is up to you.

Suburban Guerrilla: SCREWED

Climate Progress: The Washington Post goes tabloid and publishes Palin's second falsehood-filled op-ed in five months - on climate science

TalkLeft: Leaving the cult?

Robert Reich's Blog: The president's jobs initiative doesn't measure up

MAL Contends: Ike the liberal

MN Progressive Project: Michelle Bachman: "Fiscal conservative" You must be kiddin' me!

The Washington Monthly: Reagan, Bush fail GOP's new 'Purity Test'

Taylor Marsh: Howard Dean: Dems will "rue the day they didn't go to budget reconciliation to pass this bill."

Amped Status: The Critical Unraveling of U.S. Society

BAGnewsNotes: War grief in all its faces

They gave us a republic..: Nightowl Newswrap

HOLY CRAP: 'Rogue' Christianity...Prayer...The Scripture game...Bible slavery quiz...Pedophile cult attacks U.S Representative...Christianist Manifesto... Brimstone in the Religion section...Sabbath or else...Believers...He touched me...Demon obsession...Kirk Cameron Action Kit...Chuck Colson talks turkey...Vatican clerics claim monopoly on fairy tales...Muslim clerics claim monopoly on doomsday predictions...

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Bill O'Reilly did an interesting thing last night when he reran that footage of Barney Frank castigating that woman carrying an Obama-as-Hitler sign at his town-hall meeting on health care: He completely omitted the fact that the woman who Frank was castigating was in fact a member of the far-right Lyndon Larouche cult.

All O'Reilly could muster was to mention that the woman was "a political activist." But that's like calling a Great White Shark a fish.

No, right-wingers like O'Reilly have been eagerly airbrushing out the existence of right-wing extremists from their worldview for some time now, embodied by their reaction to that DHS bulletin. But it's getting harder and harder to do all the time now.

Because, as we've noted, the far-right extremists are bubbling up everywhere in supposedly mainstream conservative circles these days -- particularly at the tea parties and their associated health-care protests.

Most recently, it turns out that the guys who brought those guns to a health-care forum in Arizona in fact were longtime members of the old Arizona Vipers Militia. These were characters who, prior to their arrests in 1996, had stockpiled close to 2,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and conducted field training exercises, practiced bomb-making, and trained with illegal automatic weapons.

Now, all the Fox talkers have been in heavy denial about extremists showing up for their tea-party protests, even making a regular joke out of it by asking the protesters they have on their show if they're Klan members and the like.

But it's becoming clearer all the time that, while not everyone at these events is an extremist, the percentages of them keep going up and up. And with them, so does the threat to public safety.

Scoobie Davis: Sun Myung Moon's alliance with another cult-run media group

PERRspectives: USA Today misleads on politics of stimulous spending

Shakesville: Federal Appeals Court: No conscience clause for Plan B

Daily Howler: Washington Post in decline/Sotomayor edition

TPMMuckraker: Coburn not denying that he urged Ensign to pay "restitution" to girlfriend's family 

NotionsCapital: Marion Barry observes Cell Phone Courtesy Month

TalkLeft: Rosen recants on Sotomayor, Turley takes up his standard, but who will represent white males on the court?

The Pump Handle: The Climate Bill is less than ideal, but the best we're gonna get right now

The Big Picture: The back story to "Bailout Nation" (h/t swimgirl)

TPMMuckraker: A sketchy DOD report does not attempt to establish the original status of the detainees it claims "reengaged" in terrorism, and does not consider the possibility that some of the 540 men released from Gitmo just might have been radicalized during their imprisonment.

American Street: Death rattle of the cult of Intelligence?

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Scoop44, Alien Truth, Politics In Color, Michigan Liberal

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We had one of those great existential crises occur yesterday: Rush Limbaugh showed up to talk about the Evil Federal Government on Glenn Beck's Fox News show.

Normally, this much complete wingnuttery in one location threatens to create a black hole, a tear in the time-space continuum, and thus end all life as we know it. Fortunately, we seem to have been saved by the fact that Limbaugh wasn't actually present in Beck's studio. Who knows what would have happened then.

As it was, it was pretty bad. They devoted the focus of the segment to talking about Beck's theory that the government is going to "nationalize" the states and strip them of their ability to levy taxes, which even Mark Sanford dismisses as a "conspiracy theory". But evidently, Limbaugh believes in Beck's theory, at least in its larger outlines:

The question that we're all asking is: At what point the American people decide they wanted this kind of power grab by government into the private sector or have they decided that? Did they vote for a cult-like figure based on emotion when they voted for Obama? If so, what's it going to take for them to wake up?

I mean, the politics of this is, that with the numbers in Washington, even if the Republican Party was a unified conservative opposition in stark contrast to Obama, even if they were all unified, they don't have the numbers to stop anything that he is doing. It's going to be — it's going to require the American people stopping this and you have to wonder at this stage at — where are they?

Do they want the government owning their house? Do they want the government owning the mortgage company that they deal with and the bank that they deal with? Do they want the government owning the car company that they're going to buy their little putt-putt from?

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President Bush has driven the GOP right into the gutter and it's finally starting to show in the wingnut media. Remember BillO going nuts in New Hampshire when he was given the B-list treatment by Barack Obama? We've covered a few of the latest warriors to fall, but my friend TRex has a more complete list of the losers: (Caution, may not be suitable for work)

Actually, it’s illustrative of the fact that the Pox News Cargo Cult is either dying off in waves (they are all 90 years old, after all), that Heath Ledger’s ghost is having a laugh at Gibson’s expense, or just that the wheels are totally coming off the Right Wing Propaganda Machine.

In the last six months, we’ve seen:

1. Michelle Malkin fired from “The O’Reilly Factor”.

2. Ann Coulter’s book sales tanking and her credit cards getting declined by Publix.

3. Melamine Misstatement fired from her job.

4. Tucker Carlson tossed out on his amply padded backside.

5. And now Jumpin’ John Gibson being taken away to be rendered into fat for cheap tallow candles for The Poor or whatever. Read on...

Happy Valley News Hour: Not ready for primetime Christmas specials

Connecting.the.Dots: A Backward Presidency

Beyond School: Thinking about science, religion, and goodness

The Heretik: Show your papers, or no vote for you!

Words of Power: The false religion of laissez faire and Milton Friedman--it's most pursuasive cult leader--have led us to a monetary Jonestown

The Washington Note: When the intolerant kill Christmas