Beyond Beyond the Fringe category archive

How To Treat Different Opinions, authored by Rand Paul Supporters, now at your bookstall:

I know, it’s all over the place.

Everyone needs to see it.

There are also reports of a Conway supporter’s stepping on the foot of a Paul supporter, with no indication whether or not it was intentional. Somehow, that doesn’t seem to rise to the level of mob assault, as this appears to.

Via TPM.

Addendum:

There are lots of addenda out there, but this is the best I have seen:

Bob Cesca points out that these are manly men.

Afterthought:

These folks feed on and propagate hate. They must be discouraged where it counts. At the ballot box.

Here.

Roy Edroso reports.

Walmart wants to build one of its Sucky Centers adjacent to the Wilderness Battlefield, where Grant and Lee met on the battlefield for the first time.

In Wally World, the only sacred things are green pieces of paper with presidents’ faces on them.

The local rag has the right take:

As the 150th anniversary of the Civil War approaches, many Americans will turn their eyes to landmarks like the Wilderness. And many won’t look kindly upon the prospect of a Wal-Mart so close to the park.

Development has crept near the park in recent years, but nothing is on the scale of Wal-Mart’s plans. It’s in the wrong place, . . . .

There are reasons I avoid Walmart.

Now, this is strange:

Her day was about to get weirder. She would learn that a neighbor and hospital colleague of her husband had dognapped Jackson and Sammy Jo, cut off their electronic collars and turned them in at the Roanoke Valley animal shelter, after asking an SPCA worker if the shelter puts strays to death.

The dogs were traced to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Martinsville by a microchip roughly the size of a grain of rice implanted under Sammy Jo’s skin before the Zimmers adopted her from the shelter in 2002.

Reportedly the dog owners’ electric fence wasn’t working and the neighbor was pushed over the edge by the dogs’ cat-chasing behavior.

I’ve never placed much stock in those electric fence things. I know it wouldn’t have kept my Labrador in–he used to go through the lower screens on the porch because, frankly, he didn’t even notice them. I solved that problem with several sheets of lauan plywood.

I do not creep out easily.

This report from Field creeps me out.

Get your a picture of you with Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin and save ten grand as you do.

Via DelawareLiberal.

I listened to the interview that StevenD refers to in this post and have been wondering about how to address the topic.

Fortunately, he did so I don’t have to.

“The Family” seems to believe in a Christianity as imagined by L. Ron Hubbard.

Lord, deliver us from those who suborn evil.

Better yet, let them enlist. The military, at least since Cheney is gone, takes this stuff seriously.

Via Atrios.

The theology of pretzel-minds, who wish death to others to demonstrate their allegiance to the God of love.

Andrew Sullivan is right to call the “Christianists.” There is no moral difference between them and jihadis who profess other faiths.

Pah!

Punishing the victim:

8 states in this country deny coverage to women who have been victims of abuse. Because they’re a greater risk for needing medical treatment.

This is beyond evil. Someone else beats you up, then the hospital bills force you into bankruptcy.

Health care is not just an economic or medical issue, though a rational health care system would save lots of money.

(The United States spends more than any other industrialized country on health care.)

It is also a moral one.

We are no longer in a day when we can go into the woods (how many of you live near woods?), gather up roots and herbs, and boil up a cure on the campfire, and a society has an obligation to take care of its ill and destitute.

Only the cold-hearted can fail to see this.

Addendum:

Melissa McEwan comments in the Guardian:

The Republicans’ strategy is predominantly centred around continuing to take massive donations from insurance companies and giving victims of domestic abuse the finger.

The Democrats – specifically Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington state, who also led the opposition with then-Senator Hillary Clinton to the Bush-administration proposed HHS rule change that fundamentally undermined women’s healthcare – introduced legislation known as the Safe Act in 2006, which would have put an end to insurance company discrimination against survivors of domestic violence.

The then-Republican controlled Senate health, education, labour and pensions committee blocked the legislation on a party-line vote. Massive donations. Giving the finger. Rinse. Repeat.

At Scientific Blogging, Michael White dissects creationism’s laughable efforts to offer credible criticism of evolution. Follow the link to see the concrete evidence for his reasoning:

Creationists aren’t interested in real scientific debates over evolution; they want to use this code language to put religiously motivated, amateur critiques into the curriculum. The Texas school board controversy over these seemingly insignificant words isn’t about whether we should discuss weaknesses with high school students; it’s about whether we should let unqualified members of the intelligent design PR movement put nonsensical critiques into the classroom.

(snip)

Creationists have no credibility on this issue of common descent because they don’t know what they’re talking about. The main intelligent design textbook Of Panda’s and People can’t even get the basic argument used by biologists straight. The authors clearly don’t understand how biologists infer evolutionary relationships from DNA sequence, because they make a basic blunder that anyone who has taken Biology 101 in the last 20 years could refute.

(Here’s another discussion of the blunder, from the Kitzmiller trial transcript – scroll down to the part that starts with “I think the treatment of biology by Pandas is inaccurate…” In a nutshell, Pandas falls for the basic ‘if humans descended from chimps, why are there still chimps?’ fallacy, by suggesting that today’s living amphibians are intermediates between fish and reptiles. The correct answer is that today’s reptiles and amphibians are both descendants of a common amphibian-like ancestor – and DNA sequences reflect that.)

A calvacade of spits,

Death threats send elementary school into lockdown.

Out of the mouths of Fox babes.

Really, it is difficult to imagine anyone who paid attention in fourth grade history class–or any history class–making this mistake.

Via Atrios.

I could not have said it as well as Noz.

Brendan said it so I don’t have to. Follow the link:

These lunatics, and the people who are irresponsibly inciting them, need to be dealt with before someone gets hurt. And believe me, eventually someone’s going to flip out.

They’ve already flipped. We’re just waiting for the out.

From whence did all these columnists get the brown acid?

If I had been beaten and robbed, I might not be holding my teacup with my pinkie out either.

When did cops become Miss Manners?

A Bucks County woman who had been robbed and left bleeding outside the Tweeter Center in Camden just didn’t behave well as a crime victim, or so police thought.

Camden Detective Maurice Gibson, who alleges that Kimberly Halpin made racial slurs in describing her assailants, decided that she should be handcuffed, arrested, and jailed.

Their he-said, she-said trial landed before U.S. District Judge Renee Bumb this week. And a jury of five women and three men unanimously decided yesterday that the detective fabricated information to justify the June 19, 2004, arrest.

(snip)

Gibson, who is African American and has been a police officer for 16 years, said he tried to take Halpin’s report, but she cried too much, was irate, cursed, and then twice used the “N-word” in describing the two assailants who took her backpack, purse, car keys, money, and cell phone.

So she got slapped with a disorderly conduct charge for crying, being angry, and forgetting her manners.

I’ve known and worked with a lot if cops. Almost all of them were decent persons who, underneath the locker room joking, took their responsibilities seriously.

Some were not.

And some were psychologically brutalized by the job. Those had the emptiest eyes I have ever seen.

None of them had such thin skins as today’s cops seem to have.