Bryan Fischer: Sikh Temple Shooter Was a Liberal
Because He Hated Herman Cain

post from Crooks and Liars on 08 August 2012 07:00:07 PM. © Crooks and Liars

Bryan Fischer: Sikh Temple Shooter Was a Liberal Because He Hated Herman Cain

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Fundamentalist Christian radio host Bryan Fischer says that the white supremacist who massacred six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin must have been a liberal because he hated former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and had a "a left-wing political philosophy."

On his Tuesday American Family Association radio show, Fisher said that Wade Michael Page could not be connected to the tea party because he had threatened to leave the country if Cain was elected president. But the conservative radio host failed to mention that Page's hate for African Americans may have trumped any desire to support the Republican candidate.

"The tea party [is] primarily made up of white people, of evangelicals, people of faith," Fischer explained. "We loved Herman Cain. He was a black guy. We loved him. We would have been happy to have him be our presidential candidate. This guy despised Herman Cain."

Fischer then made the claim that Page's identification as a neo-Nazi meant he also must have been a liberal.

"You know what the Nazi Party stands for? It's the National Socialist Party. What about the word 'socialist' do you not understand? They were the National Socialist Party - that is a left-wing political philosophy," he insisted.

Fischer continued: "And you think even here in the United States, who was the part of racism? It was the left, it was liberals who were the part of racism. It was Democrats that supported and defended the institution of slavery. It was Democrats that resisted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. It was Democrats that instituted Jim Crow laws. It was Democrats that created the Ku Klux Klan. It was Democrats that filibustered the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960s."

While Fischer often recounts the Democratic Party's opposition to rights for minorities, he always fails to mention that Democrats surpassed Republicans on civil rights when Democratic President Harry Truman became the first president since Abraham Lincoln to address civil rights issues in the 1940s. After attempting to filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Southern Democrats have largely joined the national party in support of civil rights issues. Many of those that didn't agree with the party's civil rights agenda, defected to the Republican Party.

Earlier this week, televangelist Pat Robertson also attempted to disassociate Page with conservative Christians by suggesting that atheists were to blame for the shooting.

?What is it?? the TV preacher wondered. ?Is it satanic? Is it some spiritual thing, people who are atheists, they hate God, they hate the expression of God? And they are angry with the world, angry with themselves, angry with society and they take it out on innocent people who are worshiping God.?

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)

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The Mergers & Acquisitions Man

post from Firedoglake on 08 August 2012 06:50:53 PM. © Firedoglake

I have had many conversations among friends and family as to exactly why Willard Mitt "Mitt" Romney wants to be President of these here United States. We'll leave aside for the moment the daddy issues; trying to attain what his dad George Romney could[...]

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She Made 35% From this Trade Last Time Now
History Could Repeat Itself

post from Jutia Group on 08 August 2012 06:32:33 PM. © Jutia Group

In April 2009, the S&P 500 had lost more than a third of its value over the prior year. As recalls, "No one knew if the worst was over — or had just . . . → Read More: She Made 35% From this Trade Last Time… Now History Could Repeat Itself

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could-repeat-itself/

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NRC Halts License Approvals Pending New
Guidelines on Nuclear Waste

post from Firedoglake on 08 August 2012 06:00:54 PM. © Firedoglake

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced Tuesday it would suspend the issuing of new reactor operating licenses, license renewals and construction licenses until the agency crafted a plan for dealing with the nation's growing spent nuclear fuel[...]

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How one guy got seriously hacked, and Apple blew
it

post from US Politics | AMERICAblog News on 08 August 2012 06:00:32 PM. © US Politics | AMERICAblog News

Horrific story on WIRED. In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and...

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ly-hacked-and.html

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CEO: Obamacare to cause a 12-cent Increase for
his Pizza

post from Crooks and Liars on 08 August 2012 06:00:08 PM. © Crooks and Liars

He brags about taking care of his people, but doesn't that include health insurance?

I realize that pizza is always a matter of personal opinion, but MY opinion is that Papa John's makes some of the worst pizza I've ever had (and I've tried them all). All I have to do is think back to the last time I ate one, and my stomach immediately ties itself into an acidic knot. So if Schnatter decides to raise his pizza to cover the cost of Obamacare, and his business drops as a result, that's fine with me. But I have to wonder: What kind of corporate leadership can't absorb such a small cost in order to insure all of his employees? And more to the point: What kind of "papa" DOESN'T CARE ABOUT HIS EMPLOYEES' HEALTH?

During a shareholders conference call last week, "Papa" John Schnatter, founder and CEO of the pizza chain that bears his name, issued a warning to consumers that, unless Obamacare is repealed, the company's pizza prices are likely to increase.
"If Obamacare is in fact not repealed, we will find tactics to shallow out any Obamacare costs and core strategies to pass that cost onto consumers in order to protect our shareholders best interests," Schnatter said, according to Politico.
A major Mitt Romney backer, Schnatter estimates pizzas under Obamacare will cost 11 to 14 cents extra, "or 15 to 20 cents per order from a corporate basis."

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First Look: NBC’s ‘Go On’

post from ThinkProgress on 08 August 2012 06:00:04 PM. © ThinkProgress

The television season gets an early start this summer, thanks to the Olympics, which NBC is using to launch the two most promising new comedies it developed this year, Go On late tonight after Olympics coverage ends, and Animal Practice, which it will air at the same time on Sunday (both will be available online the next day).

Go On which features Matthew Perry as Ryan King, a sports radio host whose wife recently died, and who is required by his boss Steven, played by John Cho, to attend a support group before he can return to work, reminds me a bit of the early days of Community before the show became a wildly creative exploration of pop culture tropes with dismal ratings. Ryan is snarky and resistant about the gongs and self-affirmation exercises employed by Lauren (Laura Benanti, freed from servitude in The Playboy Club), the group leader. But as in Community, he can’t help but be drawn to the other members of the group including Owen (Tyler James Williams of Everybody Hates Chris), a withdrawn young man whose brother is in a coma after an accident, George (Bill Cobbs), an older man who has gone blind, and Anne (a wonderful Julie White), a widowed lesbian whose partner died after being cavalier about taking her heart medication.

The show’s goofy, at least through the pilot, operates on a less intense level than Community‘s did, where exploring the trope was the way you accessed emotion (in a sense, the show was an enormous, continuously operating video game). Ryan sets up a March Sadness competition to get the members of his group talking about the tragedies that have befallen them, and there’s a weirdly joyful bit involving equipment stolen from a LARPing group, but the characters don’t need them to express what they’re feeling, just as aides to start accessing joy and humor again. And while Jeff’s former lawyer colleagues have played a decidedly minor role in Community, the biggest problem with the Go On pilot is the time it spends on Ryan’s job, which is introduced as a relatively generic radio station with no character beats as good as those in the support group, unless Steven’s tendency to pat people on the ass counts as a personality trait.

But the characters in-group are very strong, and hopefully Go On will have the sense to devote the bulk of the show’s time to them. Anne, in particular, who Ryan describes as “a cool, very angry lady,” is one of the most quietly original characters of the new season. Unlike Ryan Murphy’s The New Normal about a gay couple seeking to have a baby via surrogate, which will debut in September, Anne conforms to no particular trope of gayness, and the death of her partner, mercifully, has nothing to do with their sexual orientation. Instead, it’s the mundanity of heart disease that felled her and has flattened Anne, who is furious at telemarketers who keep calling for her dead wife, and at Patricia, for leaving their children without one of their mothers. When I asked Julie White about Anne at the Television Critics Association, she surprised me by explaining that the character was initially written as straight, but that creators Scott Silveri and Todd Holland changed the role after White was cast.

“And as soon as he called he was kind of hemming and hawing and [Scott] said, ‘You know, I wondered if I might ask you to’ and I don?t know if I said it out loud, but in my mind I went, oh, she?s gay. Oh, she?s gay. OK. Yeah,” she said. “And I thought, well, how smart and, like you say, how fresh to talk about families from a different perspective and that the idea of losing your spouse or your partner is the same kind of grief for everyone. And in that way, Matthew and I kind of our characters are on sort of a very, very similar journey.”

“It was important for us to just sort of represent all different kinds of people in the show: ages, genders, all the genders,” Silveri said, and the show strikes an impressive balance in doing so. Both it and Animal Practice have black (Go On has three), Asian, and Latino characters, and women who aren’t extremely thin who are treated well. And Go On uses the characters’ diversity as source of interesting details about people, as opposed to the defining factor in their characters. In the pilot, Don (Khary Payton), a middle-aged African-American man devastated by the financial crisis, helps translate for Fausta, an older Latina who has been left alone by the deaths of many of her family members.

That’s a lot of rich territory to lay out in a pilot. And while Go On may be seen as a bad sign by people who are worried that NBC’s abandoning its brilliant, experimental comedies for broader concepts, it has the potential to be an emotionally affecting character-driven comedy. If NBC wants to remind everyone else in broadcast that even comedies that don’t stage Law & Order parodies and do 8-bit episodes that they should have ambitions higher than2 Broke Girls‘ substanceless racism, that’s a marker I’m happy to see laid down.

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http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/08/08/654411/first-look-nbcs-go-on/

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California Appropriations Committee Advances Bill
To Protect Patients From Ex-Gay Therapy

post from ThinkProgress on 08 August 2012 06:00:04 PM. © ThinkProgress

In a party line vote, the California State Assembly’s Appropriations Committee passed SB 1172, a bill that would make California the first state in the nation to limit harmful ex-gay therapy as well as prohibit anyone under the age of 18 from undergoing sexual orientation change efforts. Representatives from a coalition of LGBT groups told the committee today that the bill ?will literally save lives.? The anti-gay National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) had launched a spending campaign to block SB 1172, falsely claiming that “reparative therapy actually works,” even though one of the most prominent studies used to support ex-gay therapy was just disavowed by its main researcher, who then apologized to the gay community. The bill will now head back to the Senate for concurrence on the amendments, then to the full Assembly floor, and finally to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk for his signature.

– Steven Perlberg

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http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/08/08/659111/california-advances-bill-to-prote
ct-patients-from-ex-gay-therapy/

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Beyond Obamacare: Rep. Steve King Wants To Repeal
Everything Obama Has Ever Signed

Rep. Steve King (R-IA)

Rep. Steve King’s (R-IA) displeasure with most of the Obama administration’s policies is well documented, but his latest oppositional tactic may accomplish more than he intends it to.

At a campaign event in Humboldt, Iowa, King told an audience that he is planning to sue the Obama administration over its recent decision to stop enforcing deportations of undocumented immigrants and floated a novel idea afterwards.

“King added that he’s thinking about introducing a bill, which if it became law, would repeal everything Obama has signed into law,” reports The Messenger, a local newspaper in Iowa. Such an extreme proposition would certainly do away with the biggest Republican bugaboos like Obamacare and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, but King’s “reset button” bill will come with many more casualties:

- Elimination of the Bush tax cuts. President Obama signed a bill in 2010 to extend tax cuts for all Americans. If King’s bill passed, he would raise taxes on every single taxpayer.
- Defunding of the US military. The repeal of the National Defense Reauthorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (and 2011 and 2010) would eliminate more than $1 trillion in spending on national defense and our interests abroad.
- Relaxing security along our southern border. The Border Tunnel Prevention Act of 2012 was just one measure the Obama administration took to strengthen protection along our border with Mexico.
- Striping Medals of Honor from 9/11 First Responders. The medals were to be displayed at the memorials of each attack site in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania’s countryside.
- Canceling plans to honor Ronald Reagan. President Obama signed a law authorizing funding to honor and celebrate the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth.

Of course, repealing Obamacare and the Recovery Act would have disastrous consequences of their own on the economy and health care system. And actually undoing things like appropriations bills are effectively impossible. But that kind of rhetoric usually plays well to King?s base.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/08/08/661291/beyond-obamacare-rep-steve-ki
ng-wants-to-repeal-everything-bill-obama-has-ever-signed/

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Better Know A Right-Wing Attack Group: Americans
for Prosperity

Americans for Prosperity logo Part three of ThinkProgress’ profiles of right-wing groups that are taking advantage of the Citizens United ruling to flood the airways with independent attack ads. See Part 1 and Part 2.

Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organization.

Created in 2004 when Citizens for a Sound Economy (a conservative organization founded in 1984 by oil billionaires David and Charles Koch) split, AFP calls itself “an organization of grassroots leaders who engage citizens in the name of limited government and free markets.” Its goals include “cutting taxes and government spending in order to halt the encroachment of government in the economic lives of citizens,” “removing unnecessary barriers to entrepreneurship,” and “restoring fairness to our judicial system.”

Though generally associated with the Koch Brothers, the organization is led by president Tim Phillips. Phillips, a former chief of staff for Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), co-founded Century Strategies with Ralph Reed — the former Christian Coalition executive director and Jack Abramoff-scandal figure. Phillips has made a career in corporate “astroturfing.”

The group’s directors include controversial millionaire and former North Carolina State Rep. Art Pope (R) and former Reagan administration budget director James C. Miller.

The group has funded efforts to “incubate” Tea Party organizations and was highly visible in the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election running ads and sending staffers in the state to support Gov. Scott Walker (R).