Posted 10:09 AM by Scoobie Davis

A Belated Happy Festivus!


1. My favorite Christmas essay: "All Hail Pottersville" by Gary Kamiya

2. My favorite X-mas film: Bad Santa (directed by Terry Zwigoff (also, see Zwigoff's Crumb and Ghost World). Second Favorite Christmas film: Go. Third Favorite: A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas

3. Favorite Christmas TV episode: Futurama's "Xmas Story"

4. Favorite Christmas song: "Christmas Wrapping" by the Waitresses:

Posted 12:57 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Post on the Anti-Amway blog
Read it here

Posted 2:07 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Post on Anti-Amway Blog
I just found out the other day that Scamway's Dick DeVos was one of the people behind the vote to make Michigan a right-to-work state.  Watch this video.

Posted 10:38 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read and Must View
GOP consultant Scott Tranter: Voter ID and long voter lines help "our side"

UPDATE:  Slate's David Weigel has more.

Posted 9:24 AM by Scoobie Davis

Terry McAuliffe for Govenor of Virginia?
Terry McAuliffe is again running to be governor of Virginia (he got trounced in the Democratic primary in 2009 and I celebrated).   Here is my open letter to Democratic primary voters when McAuliffe last made a run.

Posted 10:04 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must View
Salon.com's "must-see" morning clip is also mine: John Stewart takes on Fox News' War on Christmas

Posted 8:36 AM by Scoobie Davis

Person of the Day
Thomas Ricks.  And he didn't apologize to Fox News about his comments.

Posted 10:43 AM by Scoobie Davis

Execute Pat Robertson!
Pat Robertson believes there should not be a wall between church and state.  Earlier this year, Robertson had a "conversation" with God in which The Almighty told him that Obama would lose his reection bid and that there would be a GOP sweep.  Accroding to Deuteronomy 18:20-22, a prophet who is wrong should be put to death.  By Robertson's own standards, he should be executed.

Posted 7:36 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Paul Krugman column "Grand Old Planet" gives a lot information about possible 2016 GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio.

Posted 8:06 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Rick Perlstein, "The Long Con: Mail-order conservatism"

Posted 8:49 AM by Scoobie Davis

Glenn Beck
Most of the time, listening to Glenn Beck's radio show is as painful as a spinal tap but I had to listen to it this morning: it was priceless.  Find a podcast and listen to it. It was almost as much fun as watching Karl Rove on Fox News on election night.  I can't wait to hear Rush.

UPDATE: Why do the wingnuts rage?  Rush rants, "It's hard to beat Santa Claus!"  Salon's Alex Halperin has more rants here.

UPDATE II:    Jospeh Farah of WorldNetDaily: "That’s what Obama represents to me – God’s judgment on a people who have turned away from Him and His ways and from everything for which our founders sacrificed their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor."

UPDATE III:   A quick review of Drudge last night.

UPDATE IV:   Two words: Victoria Jackson

Posted 12:28 PM by Scoobie Davis

Belated Endorsement of Barack Obama
I endorse him

Posted 9:48 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must View for Ohio Voters
Via Mother Jones:

Posted 12:29 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Jack Chick Tract
The Chickster pimpslaps Roman Catholicism with "Mama's Girls"

Posted 11:52 AM by Scoobie Davis

Reason 48958 not to Trust Karl Rove
Today on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Rove which counties in the battleground states to watch on election night.  Rove mentioned Butler County, Ohio as an important county to watch.  Butler County is the home to Paul Ryan's alma mater, Miami University of Ohio,  so it's likely that the Romney-Ryan ticket will perform much higher than McCain-Palin four years ago.  Plus, Butler County is one of the most Republican counties in Ohio.

Read my post about Ryan and Miami University.

Posted 8:28 AM by Scoobie Davis

Great News from Nate Silver
The title says it all: "Nov. 2: For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be Statistically Biased"

Posted 12:11 PM by Scoobie Davis

Heckuva Job, Brownie!
Former FEMA director and horse show judge Michael Brown's criticism of President Obama for acting "so quickly" to Sandy reminds us all about how things were were when both Bush administrations made FEMA a dumping ground for hacks and cronies to cool their heels until campaign time.  Read Kevin Drum for more on the matter.

Posted 10:23 AM by Scoobie Davis

American Bridge Super Pac has Two Devastating Anti-Romney Commercials--Watch Them
Romnopoly and a war on women ad

Posted 9:56 AM by Scoobie Davis

Ron Blackwell: Person of the Day
Kudos to the AFL-CIO's chief economist Ron Blackwell for not suffering a fool like Fox News' Neil Cavuto.

Posted 12:44 PM by Scoobie Davis

Maureen Sullivan Stemberg
Remember that name and read David Corn's article about the raw deal she received.

10/25 Update:  A judge is releasing Mitt Romney's testimony in the case.

Posted 7:35 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read Article on GOP Election Fraud
Jane Mayer on Hans von Spakovsky.

UPDATE:  Also read Alex MacGillis, "The Campaign to Steal Ohio."

UPDATE II:   Jillian Rayfield on Mayer's article on von Spakovsky

Posted 8:55 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Michael Shaw on the Washington Post's embarrassing defense of the Paul Ryan soup kitchen photo-op kerfuffle.

Posted 11:49 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must View
Rachel Maddow on the Romney campaign's legitimization of Jerome Corsi.  Here is my correspondence with Corsi.

Posted 7:32 AM by Scoobie Davis

Watch it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFiu-KrwdXI

Posted 11:08 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Matt Taibbi on the Biden/Ryan debate:

I've never been a Joe Biden fan. After four years, I'm not the biggest Barack Obama fan, either (and I'll get into why on that score later). But they're at least credible as big-league politicians. So much of the Romney/Ryan plan is so absurdly junior league, it's so far off-Broadway, it's practically in New Jersey.

Paul Ryan, a leader in the most aggressively and mindlessly partisan Congress in history, preaching bipartisanship? A private-equity parasite, Mitt Romney, who wants to enact a massive tax cut and pay for it without touching his own personal fortune-guaranteeing deduction, the carried-interest tax break – which keeps his own taxes below 15 percent despite incomes above $20 million?

The Romney/Ryan platform makes sense, and is not laughable, in only one context: if you're a multi-millionaire and you recognize that this is the only way to sell your agenda to mass audiences. But if you're not one of those rooting gazillionaires, you should laugh, you should roll your eyes, and it doesn't matter if you're the Vice President or an ABC reporter or a toll operator. You should laugh, because this stuff is a joke, and we shouldn't take it seriously.

Posted 10:22 AM by Scoobie Davis

Great Moments in Science
Click here.  For more about Mark Levin, click here and scroll down to "Addendum: Battle of the Loons in the 3 to 6 PM Time Slot"

Posted 8:32 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must View
Jon Stewart on Voter ID laws.

Posted 1:19 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Buy
Greg Palast's Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.   The book is on the New York Times bestseller list.

Posted 9:05 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Paul Krugman, "The Real Referendum" :

Republicans came into this campaign believing that it would be a referendum on President Obama, and that still-high unemployment would hand them victory on a silver platter. But given the usual caveats — a month can be a long time in politics, it’s not over until the votes are actually counted, and so on — it doesn’t seem to be turning out that way.

Posted 9:00 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Timothy Noah asks supposedly principled conservatives why thye don't denounce voter suppression efforts.  Here's one of the more thoughtful insights from the comments section:

It's curious that while the conservatives are excoriating Obama for wanting to introduce European-style "socialism," their anti-voter fraud laws assume that the demography and social environment in the U.S. is like the Netherlands or somewhere. You just pop down your nearest office a few streets away and hey presto!

There are a lot of parts of this country that are geographically remote, in which people don't have a car, in which public transit is sparse or non-existent, in which many people only have a high-school education at the most, in which they may not have standard documentation of birth etc, where they aren't following the news every day, and so on. In the South in particular, this can be a situation in which both blacks and whites find themselves, but blacks are more likely to sense (rightly or wrongly) that the system is against them.

One could accept the legitimacy of the laws more readily if it was obvious that there was also a bona-fide attempt to get IDs to people who need one.

Posted 1:59 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Matt Taibbi, "This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close"

These people represent everything that ordinarily repels the American voter. They mostly come from privileged backgrounds. Few of them have ever worked with their hands, or done anything like hard work. They not only don't oppose the offshoring of American manufacturing jobs, they enthusiastically support it, financing the construction of new factories in places like China and India.
They've relentlessly lobbied the government to give themselves tax holidays and shelters, and have succeeded at turning the graduated income tax idea on its head by getting the IRS to accept a sprawling buffet of absurd semantic precepts, like the notions that "capital gains" and "carried interest" are somehow not the same as "income."

The people in this group inevitably support every war that America has even the slimmest chance of involving itself in, but neither they nor their children ever fight in these conflicts. They are largely irreligious and incidentally they do massive amounts of drugs, from cocaine on down, but almost never suffer any kind of criminal penalty for their behavior.

That last thing I would say is probably appropriate, except for the fact that hundreds of thousands of poor (and mostly black and Hispanic) kids get tossed by cops every year (would you believe 684,000 street stops in New York alone in 2011?) in the same city where Wall Street's finest work, and those kids do real time for possession of anything from a marijuana stem to an empty vial. How many Wall Street guys would you think would fill the jails if the police spent even one day doing aggressive, no-leniency stop-and-frisk checks outside the bars in lower Manhattan? How many Lortabs and Adderalls and little foil-wraps of coke or E would pop out of those briefcases?

For all this, when it came time to nominate a candidate for the presidency four years after the crash, the Republicans chose a man who in almost every respect perfectly represents this class of people. Mitt Romney is a rich-from-birth Ivy League product who not only has never done a hard day of work in his life – he never even saw a bad neighborhood in America until 1996, when he was 49 years old, when he went into some seedy sections of New York in search of a colleague's missing daughter ("It was a shocker," Mitt said. "The number of lost souls was astounding").
He has a $250 million fortune, but he appears to pay well under half the maximum tax rate, thanks to those absurd semantic distinctions that even Ronald Reagan dismissed as meaningless and counterproductive. He has used offshore tax havens for himself and his wife, and his company, Bain Capital, has both eliminated jobs in the name of efficiency (often using these cuts to pay for payments to his own company) and moved American jobs overseas.

The point is, Mitt Romney's natural constituency should be about 1% of the population. If you restrict that pool to "likely voters," he might naturally appeal to 2%. Maybe 3%.

If the clichés are true and the presidential race always comes down to which candidate the American people "wants to have a beer with," how many Americans will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall Street multimillionaire who fires your sister, unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss accounts in his wife's name, cheerfully encourages finance-industry bailouts while bashing "entitlements" like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq and generally speaking has never even visited the country that most of the rest of us call the United States, except to make sure that it's paying its bills to him on time?

Romney is an almost perfect amalgam of all the great out-of-touch douchebags of our national cinema: he's Gregg Marmalaard from Animal House mixed with Billy Zane's sneering, tux-wearing Cal character in Titanic to pussy-ass Prince Humperdinck to Roy Stalin to Gordon Gekko (he's literally Gordon Gekko). He's everything we've been trained to despise, the guy who had everything handed to him, doesn't fight his own battles and insists there's only room in the lifeboat for himself – and yet the Democrats, for some reason, have had terrible trouble beating him in a popularity contest.

Posted 1:43 PM by Scoobie Davis

Read my Review of Ann Coulter's Mugged
Click here and give postive or negative feedback.

Posted 3:00 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Joe Conason, "Tax Avoidance, Government Dependency, And Romney’s Boca Raton Host"

Posted 9:28 AM by Scoobie Davis

Playboy's "Girls of the Big Ten" Pictorial
The October 2012 Playboy is the college issue.  In the "Girls of the Big Ten" pictorial:

Posted 9:24 AM by Scoobie Davis

Blast from the Past!
Mitt Romney's top drug advisor, Mel Sembler, ran the notorious cult-like Straight, Inc. drug treatment centers.  I first found out about Straight, Inc. in the 1990's when I read a chapter on it in Arnold Trebach's book The Great Drug War.

Posted 9:27 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read and Must view
Krugman on workers and Homer votes for Romney:

Posted 9:38 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Zachery Pleat and Remington Shepard, "How The Right Wing Media Built Mitt Romney's 47 Percent Line."

Posted 10:44 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Reads from Salon.com about Anti-intellectualism
"Just the Right Kind of Stupid" and "Conservatives Killed the Liberal Arts"

Posted 1:22 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Article on Mitt Romney and Monsanto.

Posted 1:00 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Post on the Sun Myung Moon Blog
Click here

Posted 12:58 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Robert Parry, "A Test for the Right's Machine"

Posted 10:01 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must View
Jon Stewart on Fox News

Posted 8:23 AM by Scoobie Davis

New Posts on the Sun Myung Moon Blog
Since Moon just died, I updated the blog.  Click here.

Posted 8:14 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship on Ralph Reed's comeback. What a piece of work:

Which brings us to that curious Mariana Islands minimum wage plank in the Republican platform. Some years ago, our government made an effort to clean up sweatshops on the islands — including Saipan — that have been under the control of the United States since the end of World War II. . .

Chinese women were brought over to the islands to work under awful conditions — subject to forced abortions and prostitution and paid pennies for producing garments labeled “Made in the USA.”

Corrupt local officials hired the firm of infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff — for more than four million dollars — to try to stop the reforms proposed back in Washington. Abramoff, in turn, hired Ralph Reed and his political direct mail company, Millennium Marketing, to conduct a phony grass roots campaign urging Alabama Christians to write their local congressman to oppose the reforms.

Of course, Reed didn’t tell those Christians he was being paid to help keep running sweatshops that exploited women. Instead, he told them the reforms were a trick orchestrated by the left and organized labor. Limits on Chinese workers would keep them from being “exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ.” His company explained it was just trying to encourage “grass roots citizens to promote the propagation of the Gospel” and that many of the workers were “converted to the Christian faith and return to China with Bibles in hand.”

Posted 3:13 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Greg Palast on Representative Tim Griffin, the GOP Convention's opening act and vote cager.

Posted 10:00 AM by Scoobie Davis

I posted a new update on the Paul Ryan/Ayn Rand Post
Click here

Posted 7:30 AM by Scoobie Davis

Claire McCaskill's Exponential Curve
Intrade's view on McCaskill's chances of winning the Senate seate in Missouri over the past three weeks.  The last day indicates the response to her opponent's view on the mysterious mechanism that causes rape victims to avoid pregnancy:
Closing Prices chart - Democratic candidate to win

Posted 11:20 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Media Matters for America's comprehensive examination of Who's Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk by Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund and Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky

Posted 3:18 PM by Scoobie Davis

Will Paul Ryan's Miami of Ohio Connection Help Him in the Buckeye State?
Paul Ryan is speaking at his alma mater Miami University today.  I'm also a Miami of Ohio grad.  Will being a grad of a state university in Ohio help Ryan and Romney with the state's  voters?  Paula of the Redstate blog thinks so: 

. . . Paul Ryan is a graduate of Miami University in Ohio. He graduated in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in in economics and political science. While it probably won’t make a major difference in terms of peeling off Ohio votes, having a connection to the state certainly won’t hurt in this important swing state. Miami is a well-regarded university here, located in Oxford, Ohio, near Cincinnati. When I graduated from high school (a few years before Ryan), Miami was where the smart, preppy kids went to college – the kids who wore Izod sweaters and had goals in life. He can certainly use it to name drop and sell himself as the smartest kid in the room.

I think this is wishful thinking. Sure, a lot of Miami grads who live in Ohio are more likely to vote for the ticket. However, what do Ohioans think of Miami U.? I think most people in Ohio acknowledge that it's a good school academically.  However, it also has a reputation for being insular and whitebread--the very type of place that Miami students like Ryan pick up his Ayn Rand worship. When I tell people that I'm a Miami grad, I often add, "but I'm not a snob."

Posted 2:26 PM by Scoobie Davis

New post on the Sun Myung Moon blog
Click here

Posted 9:14 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Paul Ryan didn't build that!

Posted 7:25 AM by Scoobie Davis

My Previous Posts On Paul Ryan
I went to Ryan's alma mater Miami University of Ohio so I had some unique insights on Ryan, the Miami of Ohio theodicy, and Ayn Rand's skeezerhood. I wrote a brief post about the Ayn Randian nature of the birthday cake that Ryan received from Chris Wallace while on Fox News Sunday.

Posted 8:32 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read: Early Military Voting in Ohio and the Fox News Disinformation Machine
Read about it here

Posted 9:34 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Ryan J. Reilly on Voter Fraud "Study" Author Horace Cooper.

Posted 7:43 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read: Voter ID and the Swing States
Click here

Posted 3:01 PM by Scoobie Davis

Interesting article
Alex Seitz-Wald on "The Villages."

Posted 2:26 PM by Scoobie Davis

Say What?
Voting is a privilege?

Posted 11:05 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
"Life after Herman Cain"

Posted 3:39 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
The 5 Saddest Second Careers of Celebrities

Posted 8:30 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must View
How Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard Came Up With Their Big Ideas

Posted 3:01 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Sarah Laskow on climate skeptics

Posted 2:58 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read/View
Fox News editing

Posted 2:39 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Evolution a "satanic lie"

Posted 1:03 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Jim Romenesko on the cease and desist letter from the NY Daily News.

Posted 11:39 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must View
Bill Maher on philosophy.

Posted 8:19 AM by Scoobie Davis

Busy Busy Busy
Sorry about the dearth of posting but I've been busy.  I will post soon.

Posted 11:32 AM by Scoobie Davis

The Anti-Veterans for a Strong America Googlebomb is Working!
A while ago, my Googlebomb Blog called for a googlebomb against Joel Arends and his Veterans for a Strong America. The Google results for Arends and VFSA both show that the sites are coming up on the first page of the Google results. Great!

Posted 10:01 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must View
I previously wrote about the late Jerry Falwell's diploma mill Liberty University here (along with another Moonie-funded carp-school The Univeristy of Bridgeport). Here's Bill Maher's take:

Posted 10:42 AM by Scoobie Davis

John Lewis Calls Out Rep. Paul Broun over Comments and Attempts to Defund Part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965
 The Huffington Post has the story:

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) introduced an amendment to cut all funding for enforcement of a part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 intended to prevent racial discrimination. The provision, Section 5, requires a number of states and counties, mostly in the South, to receive federal approval before changing their election laws. . .Broun argued that the provision unfairly targeted several states and had become "antiquated" . . [Rep. John] Lewis, who marched with Martin Luther King Jr., took to the floor to denounce Broun's amendment: "It is hard and difficult and almost unbelievable that any member, but especially a member from the state of Georgia, would come and offer such an amendment," Lewis said, recounting the history of struggles over voters' rights. "It's shameful that you would come here tonight and say to the Department of Justice that you must not use one penny, one cent, one dime, one dollar to carry out the mandate of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act."

Just a little background on Broun: he's the guy who got on the House floor and referred to the Civil War as the "Great War Of Yankee Aggression."

Posted 3:40 PM by Scoobie Davis

Googlebomb Joel Arends and the Phony Veterans for a Strong America
Check it out on the Googlebomb blog

Here's the post:

Joel Arends, a notorious right-wing operative (e.g., he was South Dakota assisant director of the Koch Brother's Americans for Prosperity), has created an ostentively nonpartisan front group, Veterans for a Strong America, that are the 2012 version of the Swift Boat liars. Arends and VFSA have a disgustingly deceptive commerical that darkens President Obama's skin.

Let's give web searchers accurate information about Arends and his phoney front group:

1. Copy and paste the following to your web site or on an internet bulletin board:

<a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201205040010">Joel Arends</a>
<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/swift-boat-obama-bin-laden-video">Joel Arends</a>
<a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/topics/veterans-for-a-strong-america/">Joel Arends</a>
<a href="http://video.msnbc.msn.com/now-with-alex-wagner/47296673/#47296673 ">Joel Arends</a>
<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Joel_A._Arends">Joel Arends</a>
<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/05/obama-street-thug">Joel Arends</a>
<a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/04/1088736/-Swift-boating-jumps-the-shark">Joel Arends</a>
<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/05/06/478820/obama-swift-boat-veterans-for-a-strong-america/?mobile=nc">Joel Arends</a>
<a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201205040010">Veterans for a Strong America</a>
<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/swift-boat-obama-bin-laden-video">Veterans for a Strong America</a>
<a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/topics/veterans-for-a-strong-america/">Veterans for a Strong America</a>
<a href="http://video.msnbc.msn.com/now-with-alex-wagner/47296673/#47296673 ">Veterans for a Strong America</a>
<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Joel_A._Arends">Veterans for a Strong America</a>
<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/05/obama-street-thug">Veterans for a Strong America</a>
<a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/04/1088736/-Swift-boating-jumps-the-shark">Veterans for a Strong America</a>
<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/05/06/478820/obama-swift-boat-veterans-for-a-strong-america/?mobile=nc">Veterans for a Strong America</a>

The Results will look like this:

Joel Arends
Joel Arends
Joel Arends
Joel Arends
Joel Arends
Joel Arends
Joel Arends
Joel Arends
Veterans for a Strong America
Veterans for a Strong America
Veterans for a Strong America
Veterans for a Strong America
Veterans for a Strong America
Veterans for a Strong America
Veterans for a Strong America

Posted 9:18 AM by Scoobie Davis

New Jack T. Chick Tracts
"Why Should I?" and "Wassup?" (which is the African-American version of "Hi There!")

Posted 10:40 AM by Scoobie Davis

Guntoting Badass Ted Nugent Crapped his Pants and Cried like a Girl to Avoid Fighting the Vietcong

Ted Nugent, GOP flag waver and macho hunter, whom Senate candidate John Raese called a "patriot" after Nugent made a veiled threat agaisnt the President, had a different experience when his country called on him to fight against some targets who shot back:

Here is the relevant portion of the interview from the October, 1977, edition of High Times as provided by a reporter who still had a copy in his archives:

"High Times: How did you get out of the draft?

Ted Nugent: Ted was a young boy, appearing to be a hippie but quite opposite in fact, working hard and playing hard, playing rock and roll like a deviant. People would question my sanity, I played so much. So I got my notice to be in the draft. Do you think I was gonna lay down my guitar and go play army? Give me a break! I was busy doin’ it to it. I had a career Jack. If I was walkin’ around, hippying down, getting’ loaded and pickin’ my ass like your common curs, I’d say “Hey yeah, go in the army. Beats the poop out of scuffin’ around in the gutters.” But I wasn’t a gutter dog. I was a hard workin’, motherf***n’ rock and roll musician.

I got my physical notice 30 days prior to. Well, on that day I ceased cleansing my body. No more brushing my teeth, no more washing my hair, no baths, no soap, no water. Thirty days of debris build. I stopped shavin’ and I was 18, had a little scraggly beard, really looked like a hippie. I had long hair, and it started gettin’ kinky, matted up. Then two weeks before, I stopped eating any food with nutritional value. I just had chips, Pepsi, beer-stuff I never touched-buttered poop, little jars of Polish sausages, and I’d drink the syrup, I was this side of death, Then a week before, I stopped going to the bathroom. I did it in my pants. poop, pi** the whole shot. My pants got crusted up.

See, I approached the whole thing like, Ted Nugent, cool hard-workin’ dude, is gonna wreak havoc on these imbeciles in the armed forces. I’m gonna play their own game, and I’m gonna destroy ‘em. Now my whole body is crusted in poop and pi**. I was ill. And three or four days before, I started stayin’ awake. I was close to death, but I was in control. I was extremely antidrug as I’ve always been, but I snorted some crystal methedrine. Talk about one wounded motherf****r. A guy put up four lines, and it was for all four of us, but I didn’t know and I’m vacuuming that poop right up. I was a walking, talking hunk of human poop. I was six-foot-three of sin. So the guys took me down to the physical, and my nerves, my emotions were distraught. I was not a good person. I was wounded. But as painful and nauseous as it was – ‘cause I was really into bein’ clean and on the ball – I made gutter swine hippies look like football players. I was deviano.

So I went in, and those guys in uniform couldn’t believe the smell. They were ridiculin’ me and pushin’ me around and I was cryin’, but all the time I was laughin’ to myself. When they stuck the needle in my arm for the blood test I passed out, and when I came to they were kicking me into the wall. Then they made everybody take off their pants, and I did, and this sergeant says, “Oh my God, put those back on! You f*****g swine you!” Then they had a urine test and I couldn’t pi**, but my poop was just like ooze, man, so I poop in the cup and put it on the counter. I had poop on my hand and my arm. The guy almost puked. I was so proud. I knew I had these chumps beat. The last thing I remember was wakin’ up in the ear test booth and they were sweepin’ up. So I went home and cleaned up.

They took a putty knife to me. I got the street rats out of my hair, ate some good steaks, beans, potatoes, cottage cheese, milk. A couple of days and I was ready to kick ass. And in the mail I got this big juicy 4-F. They’d call dead people before they’d call my ass. But you know the funny thing about it? I’d make an incredible army man. I’d be a colonel before you knew what hit you, and I’d have the baddest bunch of motherf****n’ killers you’d ever seen in my platoon. But I just wasn’t into it. I was too busy doin’ my own thing, you know."

Posted 2:11 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Blog
The Amway Nightmare Stories Blog

Posted 1:39 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
The Ailes Effect

Posted 1:11 PM by Scoobie Davis

Was Jon Stewart's "Vagina manger" Comment Funny?
You watch; you decide. Not surprisingly, the ususal suspects--L. Brent Bozell and Bill Donohue of the right-wing Catholic League--are up in arms.

Posted 1:07 PM by Scoobie Davis

Support Greg Palast's Fight for Voting Rights
Watch the video and support the project through Kickstarter. 4/21 UPDATE: Great news! They reached their $15,000 goal. You can still contibute to their cause. Every little bit helps.

Posted 8:43 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Chris Mooney on Fox News’ misinformation effect

Posted 12:15 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Spearated at birth: George W. Bush and the late Thomas Kinkade.

Posted 11:52 AM by Scoobie Davis

Lovely
It didn't take long for the mouthbreathers at the Free Republic to jump on the revelation that Trayvon Martin had been suspended from school because he was caught with an empty plastic bag with traces of marijuana in it. Read the responses. Example: JustaDumbBlonde responded, "Was he USING....or SELLING? Probably [sic] bof."

Posted 4:41 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Paul Krugman on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Posted 11:07 AM by Scoobie Davis

Book Review of Hollywood Hypocrites by Jason Mattera
Jason Mattera, who lied in his ambush interviews of Al Franken and others, just came out with the book Hollywood Hypocrites. Here's my Amazon.com review (with Links). The wing-nuts are savaging it. Give it a thumbs up on Amazon if you like it:

Flawed in Many Ways

In order to understand this book, it is necessary to give a little background on its author Jason Mattera. Mattera started his career with a deer-in-the-headlights appearance on Chris Matthews' show Hardball (the YouTube video of the side-splitting encounter titled "Matthews Grills Chickenhawk" is priceless). Mattera became a radio talk show host in the mold of Rush Limbaugh (not surprisingly, in Hollywood Hypocrites, Mattera uses the ungrammatical and Limbaughesque reference to the "Democrat [sic] Party").

Mattera's first book, Obama Zombies, is based on the patronizing premise that young adults overwhelmingly voted for Obama because they are clueless and out of touch. As luck would have it, about the same time that the book was released, Human Events--the magazine Mattera edits--offered subscribers a free copy of a repugnant neo-Confederate book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War. The book's cover has a flattering illustration of war criminal and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest (not surprisingly, the book completely whitewashed Forrest's massacre of captured Union troops at Fort Pillow). Talk about being clueless and out of touch!

In Mattera's latest book, he takes on the alleged hypocrisy of Hollywood--at least that is what the title promises. However, Mattera's targets include non-Hollywood filmmakers such as Michael Moore and Al Gore. Aside from that, there are two major problems with Hollywood Hypocrites. First, Mattera's standard of morality is so high that no political opponent could do anything without being accused of hypocrisy. So what if non-Hollywood environmentalist Al Gore flew on a private jet? Hasn't Mattera ever heard of carbon offsets?

More important, Mattera is oblivious to the fact that an accusation of hypocrisy entails that the targets of the accusation possess a moral worldview. That is not a problem for much of the American Right since many hold an Ayn Randian worldview that professes that self-absorption and superciliousness toward the less fortunate are virtues. Hence, the only way that a Rand acolyte such as Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) could be accused of hypocrisy would be if he surreptitiously helped the poor and afflicted!

Perhaps this is too harsh. Mattera has expressed a moral worldview. In fact, as a spokesman for the conservative Young America's Foundation, Mattera first appeared on Hardball and fervently argued about the morality of the Iraq War. Matthews then rightfully called out Mattera for supporting other young Americans being placed in harm's way but not exposing himself to the same dangers. Now that's hypocrisy!

Posted 10:06 AM by Scoobie Davis

Quote of the Day
Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio): "Ultimately, we'll stop it [investigations into Solyndra] on Election Day, hopefully. And bringing attention to these things helps the voters and citizens of the country make the kind of decision that I hope helps them as they evaluate who they are going to vote for in November."

Posted 4:12 PM by Scoobie Davis

Exclusive: Farrelly Brothers' Three Stooges Movie Zings The Weekly Standard
A friend of mine attended a preview screening of the upcoming movie The Three Stooges (release date: April 13). Apparently, one of the film's villains is shown reading The Weekly Standard in bed. The movie is a production of Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century Fox; Murdoch also used to own The Weekly Standard. Is there some bad blood? The Weekly Standard didn't respond to an inquiry from this blog.

Posted 9:52 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Steve Weinberg's article "There Will Be Paranoia" about Arthur Goldwag’s new book The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right. I've read Goldwag's previously published work Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more. It was a great read.

Posted 7:02 AM by Scoobie Davis

Shocking Must Read
Robert Parry, "How the Right’s Smear Machine Started"

Posted 10:01 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Media Matters on "Hug-gate"

Posted 11:53 AM by Scoobie Davis

Cracked.com Takes on Amway Global
Priceless. Check out the anti-Amway blog for more details.

Posted 9:58 AM by Scoobie Davis

The Golden Rule and the Dead
I'm a bit put off by much of the venom directed toward Andrew Breitbart after his death. That's bad karma. It's true that he lied about ACORN, a group devoted to letting poor people and minorities vote (quick aside: I'm totally ecstatic that the Justice Department is calling the state of Florida on their voter suppression efforts).

Nevertheless, Breitbart is dead and we should obey the Golden Rule and hope that he has experiences that we would want to have in the afterlife. For instance, in the afterlife, I would love to have a conversation with the late Hosea Williams, who--along with others--suffered greatly in Alabama in his struggles for voting rights (e.g., the notorious "Bloody Sunday").

I hope for nothing less for Breitbart.

Posted 8:24 AM by Scoobie Davis

Jack Chick Takes on Al Gore!

New Chick tract "Global Warming." In the tract, not only is Gore caricatured, but Chick takes on Hillary (see the panel in which the scientist says, "Scipture? We're men of science!" and a cartoon Hillary adds, "And women!" Also, the Chickster reissued the out-of-print tract "The Passover Plot"

Posted 1:03 PM by Scoobie Davis

Sheriff Joe Arpaio says Obama's birth certificate is computer generated forgery
This would be funny if the guy didn't wear a gun

Posted 9:59 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must View
Jon Stewart on Fox News:

Posted 2:01 PM by Scoobie Davis

Romney's Linguistic Dog Whistle, Part Two
A couple weeks ago, I pointed out how Mitt Romney was subtlely appealing to the wing-nut GOP base through a grating grammatical error, namely the use of the word "Democrat" as an adjective--as in "Democrat [sic] Party."

He did it today on Sean Hannity's radio show (again). Romney was discussing Operation Hilarity (Democrats and progressives voting in the GOP primaries for Santorum). Here's what Romney told Hannity: "Look, this is, this is the old kind of dirty tricks that you've seen in politics before and the idea of trying to drum up Democrat [sic] voters to come in and vote against me, that's just the wrong way to go."

Posted 1:56 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Brad Friedman on Charlie White

Posted 12:29 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Purchase
The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine. I have read about 40 pages and have learned some important information I didn't know--e.g., that in the 70's, Ailes worked for a Coors-funded right-wing TV news organization called Television News Incorporated (TVN). TVN's idea of fair and balanced news was to red-bait Martin Luther King. Yuck!

Buy the book.

Posted 9:04 AM by Scoobie Davis

David Brock's The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine

I plan to buy the book. It will be released on Tuesday. Watch the promo video.

Posted 3:39 PM by Scoobie Davis

I Support Daily Kos' Operation Hilarity!
Read all about it here. I'm voting for Santorum in the primary.

Posted 9:35 AM by Scoobie Davis

Recent Evidence that Romney is Pandering to the Wing-nuts
Last week, Mitt Romney was interviewed on Sean Hannity’s radio show. Every time Romney referred to Democrats or the Democratic Party, he engaged in the de rigeur wing-nut practice of using the word “Democrat” as an adjective. Even Hannity usually uses the word “Democratic” as an adjective. Here are the instances from the interview in which Romney pandered to the far right: “We’re not going to let him [Obama] forget that for his first two years in office, he had a Democrat [sic] House and a Democrat [sic] Senate, that he did not need a single Republican vote to push through his healthcare plan, Obamacare.”

ADDENDUM: It’s not surprising that during Hannity’s interview with Romney that Hannity, in his attempt to portray President Obama as a secularist, trimmed an Obama quote in mid-sentence to give a different meaning to what Obama actually said. Here’s the Obama quote that Hannity aired: “Given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism are greater than ever. Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation . . .” Hannity trimmed the quote in mid-sentence. Here’s the complete sentence: “Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation–at least, not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”

Hannity is an old hand at trimming quotes in mid-sentence in order to give the quote an entirely different meaning. Check out this hilarious clip of Jon Stewart taking Hannity to task for using a truncated quote to suggest that President Obama was giving “a voice to 9/11 sympathizers.”

Posted 8:48 AM by Scoobie Davis

Intrade: Obama's Reelect Chances Over 60 Percent!
Here's Intrade's chart. Just a short time ago, his chances were below 50 percent:

Posted 9:53 AM by Scoobie Davis

Birtherism Bounces Back
Proof that you can't keep a good conspiracy theory down. Check out the stats here

Posted 10:42 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Reads
Frank Rich, "Who in God’s Name Is Mitt Romney?" and Salon.com's interview with Arthur Goldwag, author of the new book The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right

Posted 9:55 AM by Scoobie Davis

Obama Campaign's Online Ad: the Bikini Graph
I recently saw an Obama campaign online ad featuring the bikini graph. I couldn't find the ad but here's the bikini graph:

Posted 9:49 AM by Scoobie Davis

Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand-esque Birthday Cake
Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace and Fox News gave Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) a birthday cake for his 42nd birthday. The cake had a Rand-esque touch: it was decorated with a large dollar sign.

This was fitting considering that Rand was Ryan's motivation for entering politics. Check out my previous post on Ryan, Rand, and Miami University.

Posted 10:59 AM by Scoobie Davis

Book Review of Mark Levin’s Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America

I checked out Mark Levin’s book Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America, which was released today. That’s time I can’t get back but at least I can review it. Although the book is pretty unimaginative stuff, it’s sure to sell well to the teabaggers (to paraphrase Paul Krugman, this is a stupid person’s idea of an intelligent book). I submitted a two-star review to Amazon.com. If you have an Amazon account and you like the review, feel free to give it some positive feedback. The review (with links) is at the end of this post.

ADDENDUM: Levin is a talk radio show host. He is a standard Rush clone. He got the radio gig because Hannity is his friend. One of the things I find amusing is that Levin is feuding with Michael Savage (Levin and Savage compete with each other on the 6-9 PM EST time slot). They trade on-air personal attacks, e.g., Levin calls Savage (born Weiner) “little wiener” and Savage refers to the high-pitched Levin as “Groucho Marx’s grandmother after a hysterectomy”). Anyhow, I wrote about Levin versus Savage (click here and scroll down).

The review:

Meretricious Pseudo-scholarship
Mark Levin’s Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America is a flawed book, not just because of points that Levin gets wrong but also because of the book’s glaring omissions that refute the premises of the book. This book is the kind of pseudo-scholarship that has characterized the American reactionary counterestablishment—the forty-year effort by the hard right to create alternative institutions that appear to be legitimate think tanks, journalistic outlets, and educational institutions but whose “research” could never withstand the scrutiny of impartial peer review. It’s not surprising that Levin has been part of this counterestablishment; he is the head of the Landmark Legal Foundation, a right-wing legal group that only exists because of largess from the Koch Brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife, and the now-defunct John M. Olin Foundation.

The majority of Levin’s book is a literature review of some of the core works that address utopianism, namely, writings by Plato, Thomas More, Thomas Hobbes, and Karl Marx. These sections of the book are generally adequate though the reader would be better informed by reading academic books on these theorists and their works. Levin is also correct to point out the utopian view that a perfect world is imminent often has led to extremely dystopian societies.

What is particularly flawed about Levin’s book is that it is devoted to arguing that FDR, the Obama administration, and modern progressivism epitomize this dysfunctional utopianism and that the modern right is inherently anti-utopian. For instance, Levin absurdly claims, “[i]ndeed, [Franklin] Roosevelt’s worldview harks back to Thomas More’s Utopia, a precursor to Marx’s workers’ paradise, where the individual’s labor and property are ultimately possessions of the masterminds and subject to their egalitarian design.” It is also a stretch, at the very least, to lump a pragmatic reformer like Obama in with totalitarian utopians. While this line of argument is manifestly ridiculous, it fits into the tea party’s stock narrative that Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonial Marxist who seeks to turn American society into a socialist utopia.

At the same time, Levin’s attempt to portray American conservatism as a bulwark against utopianism is completely baseless. Indeed, much of the contemporary American right’s embrace of utopianism happened right under Levin’s nose when he was working in the Reagan Department of Justice. It was under Reagan that the American right began endorsing the following crackpot utopian movements: 1) The Unification movement; 2) the neo-Confederate “Lost Cause” movement; and 3) theocratic millenarianism (the online article “The Theocratic Chain of Misery” illustrates how these pernicious movements symbiotically support each other).

Although Reagan himself wasn’t a utopian and supported these causes for cynical electoral reasons, the dangers of the fanatics he welcomed into the conservative movement are real. Reagan praised self-proclaimed Messiah and cult leader Sun Myung Moon’s dubious journalistic outlets (Reagan’s vice president George H.W. Bush later called Moon “the man with the vision”). Reagan shamelessly pandered to those in the “Lost Cause” movement who romanticize the paradise lost of the antebellum South; among other things, Reagan called Jefferson Davis one of his heroes (amazingly, some people still wonder why so few blacks support the contemporary Party of Lincoln). Reagan also gave credence to chiliastic fundamentalists, such as Jerry Falwell and Hal Lindsey, who had prayed for a worldwide nuclear apocalypse in the belief it would lead to The Rapture (the moment that God sweeps True Believers into the utopian ecstasy of Heaven, leaving behind nonfundamentalists to dodge unmanned moving vehicles). Incredibly, Reagan invited Lindsey, the author of the asinine apocalyptic best-selling book The Late Great Planet Earth, to address Pentagon strategists about the prospects of nuclear war with the then-Soviet Union. Clearly, contrary to Levin’s argument, it is the contemporary American right that champions fanatical and dangerous utopian movements whose actions could lead to horrific consequences.

Posted 10:24 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Robert Parry on Katharine Seelye