Quote of the day

How racist is Arizona's new "You look Mexican, prove to me you're a citizen" law? Pretty racist. So racist in fact that it's making noted over the top Mexican hater Tom Tancredo ask the state to dial it back a notch. Tom "Our President is a socialist black elected by illiterate Negros" Tancredo. Tom "We need a new Jim Crow style poll tests" Tancredo. Tom "Sonia Sotomayor is part of the Latin KKK" Tancredo. "Tom "I see brown people" Tancredo. That guy thinks Arizona went too far.

But he questions how police can stop people for any reason. “I do not want people here, there in Arizona, pulled over because you look like [you] should be pulled over,” says Tancredo.

He suspects police in Arizona will only pull people over for breaking the law. But they could already do this before the new law.

Tancredo added that Arizona’s law is what happens when the federal government fails to act. “States eventually get to the point where if things get bad enough, they’ll take matters into their own hands,” he said. “They’ve taken what we can call an extreme measure.”

When your "bash the Mexicans"/hate immigrants/"We want to wrench the racism title away from the deep south" law makes even Tom Tancredo question the lengths it goes to, then you've traversed a racist bridge too far.

On the other hand, you do have people smearing refried bean swastikas onto the state Capitol's window, so maybe Arizonans don't feel the law goes far enough. Refried bean swastikas? Once again, America has proven it has no need for outside political satire of the kind practiced here, the country is doing quite fine providing its own.

Tea baggers jump the crazy shark

We like taking the piss out of tea baggers. Why? It is literally the easiest thing in the world to do. Well, maybe beating an infant or kicking a three legged dog is easier, but where do you get the smug sense of self satisfaction in doing that? But it is true we do like to mock their ignorance, misspelled signs, bizarre conspiracy theories, low grade racism, lack of understanding of their own issues, and fevered insanity because, well, they're just resetting the bat on unintentional comedy each time out.

But today we must pause to note the time, date, and place where the Tea Party movement jumped the crazy shark so hard that we even have to step back a bit to make sure this just isn't some well executed satire or parody. Which, if you read this site, know that we are unable to execute or identify. Let us count the horrors.

Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) added, referring to President Obama: "If his wife says Kenya is his homeland, why don't we just send him back?"

Thanks Tom, for restraining yourself from screaming out the 'N" word. It must have been very hard. Still, "Send him back to Africa" is a nicely racist sentiment which ought to make people seriously consider the Tea Party's thoughts on tax law.

Pastor Stan Craig, of the Choice Hills Baptist Church, was particularly angry about the state of Washington, saying he "was trained to defend the liberties of this nation." He declared that he was prepared to "suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do."

Exploit religion for personal financial gain? Demonize minorities and gays in order to gain political power? Oh, you were talking about the gun part. Yeah, kill those duly elected members of Congress! Spoken like a true man of God. march on Washington, kill the interlopers, overthrow the government. Like it says in the Bible and Constitution.

Dan Gonzales, who Chairs the Constitution Party in Florida, asserted that "this is the end of America right here," and if the Tea Partiers "don't get to work we're going to be fighting in the streets."

Who knew that tepid health reform and the prospects of tepid financial reform and a tepid climate bill was all it took to end America? Still nice of him to warn that if they didn't act soon they'd be fighting it out in the street. That is unless they took the advice of several of the speakers of the day and got their guns, organized into militias and went to go fight it out on the streets. There's a subtle difference there I don't think many of you are getting.

At least Gonzales also added a crazy conspiracy about the Republicans, who he believes are all owned by the Rockefellers. Maybe I'm just longing for a more innocent time, but when was it that the Jews stopped secretly running everything? I didn't hear about this changeover form the Jews (in their secret underground bunker in Zurich) to the Rockefellers, who I'm not even sure own a bunker, let alone one 3 miles under a major banking hub.

But perhaps the best was from William Gheen of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC who in between praising Barney Frank (GAY!) for being open (GAY!) and brave (IN A GAY WAY!) about who he is (GAY!) and letting people know where he stands (WITH MEN, BECAUSE HE'S GAY!), let loose on Lindsay Graham.

I'm a tolerant person. I don't care about your private life, Lindsey, but as our U.S. Senator I need to figure out why you're trying to sell out your own countrymen, and I need to make sure you being gay isn't it.

He's tolerant, he just wants to make sure that secret gayness isn't the reason that America is about to explode. Look, Lindsay Graham might me collaborating in the destruction of America and it might be secret gayness and gay brain parasites that are making him do so. It's an honest concern. He just needs to be sure.

Again, go to Talking Points Memo for the full rundown with video. Merely reading quotes about Pastor led armies overthrowing government, thinly veiled spear-chucker jokes, and the serious concerns over the damage Lindsay Graham's covert homosexuality is doing to the country, doesn't do them justice. This was the Coachella of teabag crazy, it's just a shame Bachmann and Palin couldn't be there to push it to a Woodstock level teabag event.

Newt's "My bad"

Newtie is remorseful. He's decided that spending a full week yelling "RACIST!!!!" not only makes the throat red and inflamed, but is also intensely damaging to things like relations with the Latin community, elections, opinions of your sanity, and the reputation you're trying to cultivate as a conservative intellectual. He just wants to return to a safer place where we can all just demonize her for being a liberal. So now he wants to close the racism door on the racism barn after all those racist horses escaped.

My initial reaction was strong and direct -- perhaps too strong and too direct. The sentiment struck me as racist and I said so. Since then, some who want to have an open and honest consideration of Judge Sotomayor's fitness to serve on the nation's highest court have been critical of my word choice.

With these critics who want to have an honest conversation, I agree. The word "racist" should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person, even if her words themselves are unacceptable.

Yeah, I guess when your comments find you echoing the words of Tom Tancredo and allowing David Duke to re-enter the stage and throw his two cents into the political debate probably caused Newt to reassess some things. Like how far he's sunk and whether he's too old to get married for a fourth time. But only after he stopped crying and took the gun out of his mouth.

So you guys gonna take back all the hysterical/emotional/temperamental stupid woman attacks, or are we all still cool with those?

Quote of the Day: Someone tell him to breathe

Tom Tancredo, out there proving that you can't a tarnish your reputation if your reputation is as someone who race baits Mexicans.

TANCREDO: If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case, which is, from my point of view anyway, nothing more than a Latino — it’s a counterpart — a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that’s going to convince me and a lot of other people that it’s got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is “All for the race. Nothing for the rest.” What does that tell you?

I'm not that surprised he mistook the real La Raza slogan “Strengthening America by promoting the advancement of Latino families” with “All for the race. Nothing for the rest.” and confused the country's largest Latino civil rights advocacy group with a bunch of hooded white supremacist terrorists who murdered and harassed hundreds of thousands of people. Don't we all often make those mistakes?

He does raise an interesting philosophical question would a rose by any other name smell just as sweetly?" can you really be the KKK without the hoods and nooses? I'd like to thank Tommy for bringing up this important esoteric point about the nature of racism. Oh, he wasn't doing that? He was just being a racist? Sorry, my mistake.

These Bastards guide to HurriMcCain 08: Finale

She did it folks! Sarah Palin came out to give a speech and neither fell off the stage, cursed a blue streak, or spontaneously combusted. That means the speech was a rousing success! Then there was the sideshow in the stands. The Palin family decided to play a game of pass the baby, handing the kid off to another person in between every shot. Support the neck! Also there were all those great awkward shots of the kid that knocked up their daughter and the awkward interactions he had with the family and the McCains. They seemed so glad his penis shenanigans put him in a position to be there. Happyfamilyhappyfamilyhappyfamily. I hope the kid made sure the check cleared first before he flew down.

Then there was Rudy Giuliani, who strode to the stage and set the Reichstag house on fire. Josh Marshall, quoting Molly Ivins, said he preferred this speech in the original German. I'm not sure I'd even give it the credit of being translated. I'm sure I heard a Dussledorf, hinterland, putsch, and gespuckt in there. Also, Rudy hates the fuck out of community organizers. So do the delegates and Palin. Fuck you Obama and all community organizers, how dare that be the only thing you've ever done!

Mittens gave a bizarre speech labeled by David Brooks on PBS as "borderline insane" about Adam Smith, why the word liberal was a synonym of bad, and seemed to think torture, warrantless arrests, secret trials, and habeas corpus suspension were the ideals this country was founded on. Someone get him a history book. Also Mike Huckabee told a story about veterans who stole desks from children.

The thing that stuck out to me is that they are giving almost zero airtime to any of the alleged policy or plans McCain will theoretically enact if he's elected. The closest they get is saying McCain wants to do something about something. It's all McCain biography and attacks. Want a solution to economic problems? Good luck finding a reference to it, but then again, McCain was a POW and Obama is a liberal. Want a plan to create more jobs? McCain can't raise his arms and Obama wants to tax your air breathing. Want some form of health care coverage? Obama was a fucking community organizer! If you tuned into this wondering what the Republicans want to do the next four years if elected, well they'll get to governing later, they have to talk about McCain and evil liberals first. All you have to do is change out the name Obama and the war and any of these speeches could have been given at any Republican convention since the fifties. There is nothing to distinguish that this party even knows what the major problems facing America in 2008. This is a convention pitched entirely to the base, the 20% of people who still believe in Bush and think the country is on the right track. Good luck on that election strategy.

And for the party that wants to demonize the other as suffering some form of deranged celebrity worship of its candidate, they sure are throwing stones in glass houses. Every speech is taken up by about 80% hero worship of John McCain and exultations of him as the ultimate American, nay God. Over and over and over we are told that we aren't good enough to deserve the honor of his mere presence and that the Presidency should be awarded to McCain as a prize for his meritorious service. They certainly aren't suggesting we should hand the Presidency over to him based on his policies. I'm not sure anyone knows what they are.

Tonight, the finale. John McCain hits the stage. The theme is "Barack Obama was a community organizer!" said in an exasperated and disgusted manner.

Speaker
Tim Pawlenty, Governor and Bridge Destroyer
Ahh, the coveted "I'm the governor of this state, you'll sit there and like what I have to say!" spot. I think his slogan for reelection was "A different kind of embarrassing than Jesse Ventura". No, RNC crowd, this man isn't up there to test the mics, he's giving a speech. At this point I don't think there's any new parts of McCain's biography to read from, so just expect a repeat of the greatest hits. If you see him squinting up there its just that he's trying to convince himself that the McCain/Palin signs say McCain/Pawlenty. No Tim, you're still the governor of Minnesota, deal with it.

Speaker
Senator Sam Brownback
Good thing they got all the crazies out of the way before the final ni.....oh shit Sam Brownback. If you want to see a tense standoff over immigration policy wait till Brownback and Tancredo hit the pre-speech buffet. Rolling Stone once said that this is the man Jesus would vote for and was God's Senator. Apparently Jesus only represents about 3% of the vote in Iowa and doesn't live in any other states. I guess they had to let him speak, lest his God be angered. But really, the last night? I guess too many people pulled out, pretended they were sick, or were indicted.

Nominee for President
Senator John McCain
If this is like any other McCain prepared speech it's going to be horrible. A colossally awful mishmash of obvious reading off a teleprompter, bizarre tonal notes, insincere inflection, weird grins, creepy laughing and creepier smiling, delivered in a voice that would make Joe Lieberman wonder where the energy is. Maybe here is where John will finally lay out some idea of what he actually wants to do with the Presidency. Or he'll just mention that he was a POW and that he's not actually questioning Barack Obama's patriotism when he insinuates he's a traitor. Early ratings estimates show that the first three nights weren't nearly as highly watched as the first three nights of the DNC, so I'm not holding out hopes that nearly 40 million people are going to see John-boy speechify. Maybe that's good. I'm hoping for the sort of uncomfortable comedy that shows up in Ricky Gervais' work. But maybe the kid has a good speech in him. We'll see. God help him if he gets 40 million and bombs.

Bonus drinking game: POW! or whining about the media analysis of the horrible VP pick. You are going to leave a whiskey soaked corpse.