I Do Not Heart Huckabee

GOP Presidential also-ran/religious troll Mike Huckabee inadvertently hit (or at least suggested) the wingnut trifecta Saturday when speaking to the Iowa Republican Party’s “Celebrate Life” event. Via Rawstory:

During his keynote speech at the Republican Party of Iowa’s Celebrate Life event on Saturday, Fox News host Mike Huckabee compared abortion in the United States to the systematic elimination of the Jewish population by the Nazis.

If you absolutely must watch Huckabee’s execrable comments in their entirety, here you go (barf bag not included):

Mike Huckabee has managed to remain even somewhat relevant in US politics for as long as he has due to two main factors. The first is that this kind of awful, lunkheaded horseshit is exactly what a large swath of today’s GOP base wants to hear. That gives him a built-in constituency. But there are plenty of others with as much or more hate to spew. Why has Huckabee succeeded – to the extent he has – where others have failed?

The second main factor in whatever success Huckabee has had is that the man sounds reasonable. And by “sounds,” I mean the actual sound of his voice. It’s also generally known – if you’re familiar with Mike Huckabee at all – that he is not just a former governor of Arkansas, but also a preacher. A man of God. That knowledge, coupled with the soothing and quite pleasant tone of his voice, almost serve to mask the hateful garbage that comes out of his mouth. Someone like Rush Limbaugh sounds and has the mannerisms of a nasty, brutish schoolyard bully: simultaneously full of fear and loathing at anyone he perceives as “the enemy™.” By contrast, Huckabee sounds like a kindly father figure – or if “father” is a bit much for you to stomach, maybe scout leader or youth group advisor. He sounds nice, even though he isn’t, and it’s what’s allowed Huckabee’s voice to be heard where people with very similar views get (rightly) marginalized for those views.

But when you get a dose of The Full Huckabee, from a setting in which he’s more-relaxed and feels he’s speaking exclusively to an audience of like-minded people (like he apparently did at the Iowa GOP’s “Celebrate Life” event), that’s when the ugliness shines forth so brightly that not even the folksy charm and soft-spoken demeanor can conceal it.

Aside from the generic awful inappropriateness of likening much of anything to the Holocaust, it struck me as interesting that Huckabee would choose to use the Schindler story as his touchstone for the comparison. Huckabee made it a point to mention that Schindler was a “bad guy” initially, highlighting that he made much of his fortune from the forced free labor of the Jews in pre-war Germany.

As I sat there seething, listening to this hateful garbage drop from Huckabee’s lips in that charming folksy voice, it occurred to me that he shouldn’t be complaining about it, he should be organizing! I mean: the GOP isn’t pro-life, they’re simply pro-birth. They’re not interested in funding Head Start or increasing funding for education, they don’t favor providing health care to expectant mothers, any of a host of other pro-ACTUAL life (not just birth) measures are anathema to the modern GOP. So why not use that indifference to the actual lives of others? Why not take Oskar Schindler’s whole example, since Huckabee was holding him up as an example anyway? Why not just go the full monty and advocate not only the eradication of legal abortion, but push for a companion law that allows the actual children who are the products of state-mandated births to poor mothers who would’ve chosen otherwise to be shipped as soon as they’re old enough right to America’s factories, to live lives of indentured servitude as a neverending repayment for their upbringing at someone else’s expense?

It’s genius! It’s clear large chunks of the south are still angry about and have not gotten over the loss of the Civil War. Shipping the human products of universal anti-abortion laws off to factories helps solve that by bringing back slavery, and it increases industrial production at virtually NO cost, since you don’t need to PAY slaves! Think about it! The wingnut trifecta: outlaw abortion, bring back slavery and increase private wealth!

Oy. This is what happens to me when I’m unwise enough to watch Huckabee speak for any length of time.

Current American Corporate Values In A Nutshell

Save the Twinkie, lose the workers:

The Twinkie brand, along with other iconic brands owned by the company, will be sold off in bankruptcy to other companies who expect to be able to profitably market them. Of course there is no guarantee that they will restart the old factories and rehire the Hostess workers, likely leaving them out in the cold.

There are two major issues here. First, in the United States firms can in general fire workers at will. This means that if they can find workers elsewhere in or outside the country who will work for less, then they can dump their current workforce and hire lower cost labor. This happens all the time. Most other wealthy countries require some sort of severance payment to longer term workers, but the United States does not.

On Yesterday’s ‘Blackout Bowl’

Where’s Don Meredith When You Need Him?

What Dave Zirin said. A taste:

The Super Dome is supposed to stand, in post-hurricane, post-levees New Orleans as a symbol of the city’s resurgence. It’s also supposed to stand as a symbol of the city’s reborn tourism industry and status as an “event town” ready to be the Mecca for Fortune 500 companies and the hottest happenings in sports. But this economic comeback, with an emphasis on low-paying, zero-benefits service-industry jobs, has had another effect as well: widening inequality. The poverty rate is up to 29 percent, 8 percent higher than in 2007 when the city was still rebuilding after the Hurricane. Child poverty is up to 42 percent and the Lower Ninth Ward has seen its population drop by 80 percent in the last decade. The “event economics” of what Professor Jules Boykoff calls “celebration capitalism” only exacerbates these trends, creating a small army of migrant service-industry workers forever attempting to catch on to the “seasonal work” brought by these splashy yet temporary gatherings.

Last year, Clint Eastwood talked about “Halftime in America” on behalf of Chrysler, but it felt (at least for a moment) like perhaps on behalf of us all, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis we still have yet to fully recover from. But then Clint Eastwood went loony at the GOP convention this past fall, and it reminded us that he’s only an actor, and those uplifting words in the “Halftime” ad were only words he was paid to say.

What seems clear after yesterday’s post-halftime blackout, though, is that Chrysler, speaking in Eastwood’s voice, had it quite wrong. It’s well past halftime in America. In fact, we’re deep into the fourth quarter, and, like last night’s 49ers, we’re down by more than one touchdown. It’s time for us to dig in an stop tolerating mediocre play from our leaders, and from ourselves. I just hope we can manage to pull ourselves together enough to achieve a better outcome than the 49ers did last night.

Today In Responsible Gun Ownership

Not Photoshopped, click for full-size:

Awww…How Cu-u-u-u-u-te. Not.

Sometimes I Am Not-So-Proud To Be From This State

From Slate, Georgia’s Hunger Games. Simply infuriating and disgusting; no other way to say it.

Welcome to America, ca. 2012

Thank you, NRA!

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A Utah sixth-grader caught with a gun at school told administrators he brought the weapon to defend himself in case of an attack similar to last week’s mass shooting at a Connecticut school, officials said Tuesday.

What have we become?

The Zeitgeist, In One Photo

This pic, from twitter user @reclaimuc, via Jamie Kilstein of the excellent Citizen Radio, on the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, pretty much sums it, four years after the financial crisis that brought down Lehman, made the taxpayers 85% owners of AIG Insurance, and nearly wiped out the global financial system:

Sign O’ The Times

What That Avalanche of Right-Wing Hate Produces

If you, like me, have been appalled at the increasingly-harsh, absolutist, violent and even sometimes apocalyptic tone of nonstop hatred coming from the right (too many examples to link), if you’ve wondered what kind of corrosive effect it is having on not just our discourse but on our people, wonder no more:

Because when a 16 year-old white girl takes to Twitter to openly call for the assassination of our President, you have got to wonder where we, as a society, have gone wrong; why we, as a society, have failed; how we, as a society, have allowed hatred to incubate within such a young, malleable mind. It is a choice that, as President Obama paralleled tonight in his invocation of our rights and responsibilities as a nation and as a society, we all shoulder the burden of making, because the consequences of that choice will shape a future of our own making.

I am speechless at the tweet and what it represents. Let it sink in your conscience once again:

Someone needs to assassinate Obama…like ASAP #DieYouPieceOfShit

That tweet has been RT’d over 300 times. Over sixty people have marked it as a Favorite. The kid has actually gained followers since she tweeted that.

Nice work, wingnuts. Proud of yourselves?

Texas GOP Formally Opposes Critical Thinking In Schools

(h/t: ThinkProgress)

Texas GOP Educational Policy

As Dave Barry used to say, I swear I am not making this up. You could certainly be forgiven if you assumed I was making it up, because such a statement sounds so obviously ridiculous that no one – not even the Texas GOP – could possibly say it and mean it. Alas, you’d be wrong. Page 13 (or, in Texas GOP-numeration, “page 12″ – go figure) states the following (pdf):

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs…

Why? Why would even such a revanchist entity as the Texas GOP oppose what they call “HOTS” (but you may be familiar with as TAG or the gifted program), as well as critical thinking, period? Because it has…

…the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

No, really. Go read it for yourself. Then go and wonder no more why America’s academic achievement continues to slip relative to other countries.

Words Just Fail Me

Submitted without comment - but feel free to add your own (h/t BoingBoing):