No
friend of affirmative action, voting rights protections, or anything he
deems “racial entitlements,” the high court’s least inhibited
conservative was at it again this week during oral arguments in
in
which advocates for minorities are challenging Michigan’s
voter-approved ban on affirmative action in college admissions. The case
reached the Supreme Court after a federal appeals court held the ban
violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection guarantee, in that it
prevents minorities from lobbying for racial preferences, when other
groups can lobby for their favored programs, Huffpo explained.
A
lawyer challenging the ban argued that the original goal of the 14th
Amendment was to protect minority rights against a white majority.
Scalia
begged to differ. “My goodness,” he said. “I thought we’ve held that
the 14th Amendment protects all races. I mean, that was the argument in
the early years, that it protected only—only the blacks. But I thought
we rejected that. You say now that we have to proceed as though its
purpose is not to protect whites, only to protect minorities?”
A
little history: the 14th Amendment was approved three years after the
end of the Civil War, and it was definitely about protecting the rights
of former slaves. Scalia has not made any secret of his view that the
country is all done with that racism stuff. If anything, the pendulum
has swung too far the other way, he seems to think.
Section
5 of the Voting Rights Act was a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”
He later joined the majority in voting to strike down the provision,
which quickly led to several states enacting voter ID laws that are
blatantly discriminatory.
With
all the dopey things said and done by intransigent Republicans in last
week’s shitstorm of dopey intransigence, Republican Rep. Mick Mulvaney
earned his place right up there in the pantheon. When the 11th hour deal
to raise the debt ceiling and reopen the government was struck between
Senate leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, it did not have much
trouble getting through both houses of Congress. But there were those
Republicans deluding themselves that they could fight on.
Rep.
Mulvaney of South Carolina was one—and among his objections? The deal,
he said, included funding for Joseph Kony’s Uganda-based Lord’s
Resistance Army. Now, that would be pretty evil if it were true. Kony is
an exiled war criminal with a messianic complex known for kidnapping
children, and turning them into sex slaves and soldiers who kill their
own families. The funding, if Mr. Mulvaney had read a little closer, was
a small amount earmarked to the Pentagon which is funding African
troops trying to capture Kony and end his reign of terror and atrocity.
Ohhhh…oops. It seems Sen. David Vitter isn’t the only Republican in
Congress Harry Reid could legitimately claim was not playing with a full
deck.
3. Tony Perkins: Democrats are the theocrats for wanting to help the poor.
This
will be news to biblical scholars. The Bible apparently says that
government should have no role in helping the poor. Expressly forbids
it.
This comes straight from the horse’s mouth, Tony
Perkins, head of the right-wing Family Research Council, in a radio
interview with conservative host Janet Mefferd. He then follows what can
only be termed a rather bizarre train of thought to its illogical
conclusion which is that it is the liberals who are trying to establish a
theocracy in this country, not conservatives, because liberals want
government to help the poor. Wait, we thought Christianity forbids that.
Color us confused.
Perkins’ organization does have a unique take
on the Bible and its treatment of the poor. Another spokesman for the
group recently said there is “nothing more Christian” than eliminating
millions of food stamp recipients from the government rolls.
But
in this round Perkins does not merely want to stick it to the poor, he
wants to flip the whole argument about which group is conflating church
and state. It’s those liberals, you see. “They accuse evangelicals of
wanting to create a theocracy, which is the farthest thing from the
truth, when in fact, they are treating the government as if it had
divine instruction from God to be a form of theocracy.”
So there!
4. S.C. official: Trans people should be put in camps.
It
is tempting to suggest: Don’t drink and tweet. Well, we don’t know for
sure that drinking was involved, but the former head of the South
Carolina Republican Party went a bit bonkers with some recent rants on
Twitter about transgender people and the people who support them.
“There are people who respect transgender rights,” Todd Kincannon
tweeted this week. “And there are people who think you should all be put in a camp. That’s me.”
People? Or you?
Kincannon
further opined that transgender people are “sick freaks” who should be
“locked up in mental institutions and their care paid for by the state.”
He thinks this shows his compassion for these “sick freaks.”
This
Kincannon fellow has a heart as big as all outdoors. Previously, he’s
drawn attention to himself for calling it a shame an Iraq veteran did
not come home in a body bag, mocked murdered teenager Trayvon Martin,
and scoffed at the victims of Hurricane Katrina. But in another tweet,
he said his hatred was limited: to commies.
Good to know.
5. Tea Party leader suggests “class action suit” against “homosexuality.”
While
most rational people interpreted this week’s events as a rather strong
rebuke to the Tea Party, Tea Partiers really didn’t feel too bad. So at
their Tea Party Unity event on Thursday, Chairman Rick Scarborough
floated another novel idea for the assembled haters and nut jobs to
rally behind now that the darn federal government is reopened: filing a
“class action lawsuit” against “homosexuality.”
Now, how exactly would that work, you might ask? Or, maybe more to the point, how does that even make sense? Here goes:
“Homosexuality,”
argued Scarborough, a former Baptist minister, “is much more likely to
lead to AIDS than smoking is to lead to cancer. And yet the entire
nation has rejected smoking, billions of dollars are put into a trust
fund to help cancer victims and the tobacco industry was held
accountable for that.”
So, similarly, the gay industry, whatever that is, could be held accountable.
6. Author Ed Klein: Obama provoked the shutdown.
Conservative
“journalist” Ed Klein has been known to be factually challenged for
some time now, but he just keeps churning out those hit jobs on leading
Democrats. Even some of his fellow conservatives can’t stand him. John
Podhoretz once wrote that he’d rather have “stakes driven through my
eyes” than have to read another word of Klein’s book on Hillary Clinton.
So
perhaps it comes as little surprise that the opinionated Klein offered
up his cogent interpretation of the recent dysfunction in Washington.
Yeupp, President Barack Obama provoked the government shutdown and would
have allowed a default in a bid to further discredit Republicans. Klein
must know, he wrote a book about Obama which is just out in paperback.
Run. Don’t walk, to buy your copy. And don’t forget to pick up some
stakes to drive through your eyes.
“The shutdown was something
[Obama] welcomed,” Klein claimed, “that he encouraged, that he provoked,
and that he kept going because he saw [it] as in his interest, with the
media playing it as an anti-Republican problem.” Yes, Obama did seem to
be having a grand old time of it, canceling that trip to Asia and
everything.
“He would have allowed the country to go over the
cliff, and if he did, he would have gotten on television sets, pointed
his finger and said, ‘All those extremists’ fault, and if you want to
change the nature of this country and make it better, you better vote
for Democrats in 2014!”‘
Ummm, excuse us, Ed. Hate to break it to you. It was the extremists’ fault. Even moderate Republicans seem to think so.
7. Glenn Beck: Calling Ted Cruz and Mike Lee extremists will lead to Nazism.
Known
for his circumspection in the rhetoric department, and fresh off
revving up the crowd at the Values Voters Summit, with hilarity about
gays causing the Holocaust and other fun stuff, Beck’s busy little brain
continued making jarring connections on his radio program at the end of
the week. Noting that the far-right National Front was gaining traction
in France, Beck thought it a good time to caution Americans that
calling people like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee extremists could lead to
Nazism being on the march right here at home. No, we can’t quite make
heads or tails of this thought train either.
Beck’s universe is as
follows: the true Right is total anarchy, and Mitch McConnell is a big
government lefty. News to Mitch, we’re pretty sure. That puts Mike Lee,
the less-visible architect of the shutdown with Ted Cruz, right in the
center, as an eminently “reasonable man.”
8. Pat Buchanan: Republicans, you are Samson against the Philistines.
Previously,
hysterical right-wingers have called Obamacare the worst law known to
mankind, tantamount to the Fugitive Slave Act, the greatest evil the
country has ever known, and of course, its author Hitlerian for
inflicting it on the country. Earlier this week, former Nixon aide and
increasingly irrelevant, racist right-wing pundit Pat Buchanan invoked
some biblical imagery in a column penned for birther conspiracy website
World Net Daily. Urging Republicans to continue the fight against the
Affordable Care Act at any cost, Buchanan called on them to go ahead and
destroy the country just as heroic Samson pulled down the Philistine’s
temple to kill them and himself rather than live as their slave.
“Republicans
should refuse to raise the white flag and insist on an honorable avenue
of retreat,” Buchanan wrote as the shutdown dragged on. “And if Harry
Reid’s Senate demands the GOP end the sequester on federal spending, or
be blamed for a debt default, the party should, Samson-like, bring down
the roof of the temple on everybody’s head.”
Well, they certainly took that oh-so sensible piece of advice.
9. Weather channel founder says polar bears not in danger because Eskimos are more civilized these days.
You
might think that someone driven to start the Weather Channel would have
a passing acquaintance with and an interest in the science of
climatology. But in the case of John Coleman, the actual founder of the
Weather Channel, you’d be wrong. Coleman, despite arguably being a
person who pays a good amount of attention to weather patterns, has
planted his ignorant feet firmly in the camp of climate change deniers.
His steadfast assertions that ice caps are not melting, sea levels are
not rising and polar bears are not endangered, are infuriating enough.
But this week he added another offensive element to his
brew—bigotry—when he explained on the air that polar bears are, in fact,
better off these days than ever, because they are no longer being
slaughtered by Eskimos. “Eskimos,” he said, “have now become more
civilized.”
This is just so wrong on so many levels. For starters,
it is indisputable that polar bear populations are declining. According
to Media Matters, a ban on hunting the bears went into effect in the
1970s, with some exceptions for traditional Inuit populations. But the
threat from hunting is far surpassed by the threat posed by climate
change, and we might add, barbaric climate-change deniers, since what
could be more barbaric than the denial of science?
10. Fox News guest on Maryville rape victim: I’m not saying she deserved to be raped, but she did kind of ask for it.
Sometimes
… no, scratch that, nearly always, it seems that Fox News is just going
out of its way to be as hateful and offensive as it possibly can be.
Still, and we’re not sure why, we are shocked sometimes. This week,
another terrible story of high school rape, bullying (driving the
victim’s family out of town, in fact), and possible law enforcement
coverup came to light in the case of Daisy Coleman, 14 at the time, and
her friend Paige Parkhurst, then 13, in Maryville, Missouri. Once again,
a popular older athlete was involved, this time a politically connected
one, and charges were mysteriously dropped. Anonymous swept in, and a
case that Maryville wanted to go away was reopened. The girls involved
have spoken out, refusing to be shamed, admitting to their foible of
feeling safe with an older brother’s friend, but refusing to back down.
So
Fox News interviews the defense attorney for the newly accused boys.
And sure enough, Joseph DiBenedetto trots out some familiar rape tropes.
The girls invented rape allegations to get out of trouble for sneaking
out late at night, and in Daisy’s case for waking up her mother later,
scratching at the door in 22-degree weather nearly naked. Fun night.
And
further, sneaking out late, with boys and likely with alcohol, is a
clear invitation to be raped.“What did she expect to happen at 1am after
sneaking out?” DiBenedetto asked host Shepard Smith. “I’m not saying
she deserved to be raped, but …”
Yeah, he kind of is saying that.
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