Wingnuttery category archive

This news item shall certainly incite rabid wingnuttery:

The U.S. Supreme Court denied an appeal Monday by high school students in Morgan Hill who were barred from wearing American flags on their T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo, a year after an angry confrontation between flag-waving Anglo and Mexican American students.

Never mind that the U. S. Flag Code forbids wearing the U. S. Flag (see the complete Flag Code at the link–those who stridently claim to revere the flag and the republic for which it stands might do well to read and abide by it):

(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free.

I reckon that, in Wingnut World, disrespect is the highest form of respect.

Or something.

Rekha Basu spotlights a (yet another) disconnect in Rand Paul’s reasoning. Here’s a bit:

Rand Paul said a curious thing when asked, in reference to the measles outbreak across 14 states, if government should require parents to vaccinate their children. . . .

“States don’t own the children,” declared Paul, who is considering a run for president. “Parents own the children.”

No, we don’t own our children. From slavery to child sexual abuse, the notion of owning another human has led to nothing good. Legally, we’re responsible for our kids and their care, feeding and safety until they’re old enough to take care of themselves. But they are autonomous human beings, which is why, unlike property, there are laws and standards governing what we can and can’t do to them culled not just from individual whims and wishes, but from knowledge of child development, mental and physical health and education.

. . . produces swamp gas, even in Dubai, which, as far as I know, has no swamps.

My daughter was a Girl Scout.

If she had had to deal with this level of whackjobbery when she was eight or nine or ten years old, I would have been seriously annoyed.

Wingnuts are obsessed with sex and are determined to force that obsession on the rest of us, rather keep it in the privacy of their bedrooms, as discrete persons do.

Via Eschaton.

Mr. Feastingonroadkill explicates the blend.

Words fail me.*

Honest to Pete, these people are nuts.

If this keeps up, Sandisk will rename their Cruzer.

Full Disclosure:

I have two Sandisk Cruzers. I might just fire up Parted and change the label to something else. “Sandisk Too Stupid for Words” comes to mind.

_____________

*I try to use profanity sparingly in these electrons, but, really, now, it’s becoming a challenge.

The TWiB gang critiques Alex Jones’s appearance on the BBC.

Wait for the meltdown.

Take one gallon stupid.

Stir in one pound ground castor beans.

Place in envelope and garnish with postage stamp.

Serves 10 (years in the Big House).

North Colorado? Really?

Air travelers throughout the country were hit with cancellations and tarmac delays as long as four hours Monday, as the nation’s largest airports grappled with the onset of furloughs for Federal Aviation Administration air-traffic controllers.

“Industry-wide, the FAA plan could delay one out of every three people who fly, and the delays could be significant,” United Airlines says.

Some have wondered why the one sequestrian dressage dance step that upset Republican Congresspersons was the closure of certain air traffic control centers.

It’s because of a central myth of wingnuttery: the belief that the evul Fedrul guvmint doesn’t do anything useful.

Indeed, this may be a core belief of the nihilists on the right. In their view, government is not of the people, by the people, for the people, but is some kind of inherently evil other.

In reality, most of what most governments do is useful, stuff such as providing roads, hospitals, schools, garbage collection, scientific research, citizen protection, and many other things (with the possible exception of blowing up peasants all over the world because they look hinky to a gamer droning on in Nevada, yes, all over the world, tonight, all over the world you can hear the sounds of boom!).

Being reminded that the evul Fedrul guvmint does useful stuff strikes at the core of their nihilism, so they want the evidence to just

please

go

away.

Read more »

George Smith has more to say about the fringe’s fascination with ricin and dealing death-by-mail.

A self-defeating and nihilistic interest exists in ricin poison in this country, as if every red-blooded, disappointed and frustrated American kook has a defiant right to possess a recipe on their hard disk and a packet of castor seeds nearby, perhaps next to an unregistered handgun equipped with a silencer made out of a vegetable. In the last twelve years this has ensured a constant trickle of criminal apprehensions and prosecutions, a process the government has handled efficiently, depositing ricin crackpots where they belong. Everyone found with castor seeds and a ricin recipe gets a long prison stay. There have never been any exceptions, even with those in the group who have never gotten to the part where the seeds are actually turned to powder.

Heh.

Nothing and no one tick off contemporary conservatives more than someone who cares about working people, the exploited, or other victims of society, and does something about it.

Apparently, the wingnut-o-sphere is irate that Google chose to honor Cesar Chavez.

Via Balloon Juice.

. . . this one seems, thank heavens, to have failed.

But those campaigners are still in there pitching.

Don’t kid yourself that they are not still with us and still trying.

Stay classy, Texas.

For the second time in the past several months, vandals struck the Obama mural on a building on the southern edge of Midtown (Houston–ed.) that served as local Democratic Party headquarters during the presidential campaign.

Splashes of black and red paint mar the 10-foot image of the 44th president in the 3700 block of Travis near West Alabama. The mural had been restored in October after vandals had defaced it with splashes of paint. That previous vandalism was also discovered on a Monday.