10 worst right-wing statements of the week — abortion typhoon edition

One Christian historian has decided women's rights around the world helped power deadly Typhoon Haiyan

Janet Allon, AlterNet

This image provided by NASA shows Typhoon Haiyan (Credit: AP/NASA)

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

Rand Paul may have assumed the mantle of Wacko-in-Chief this week, but lots of lesser known right-wing nutjobs had banner weeks as well.
1. Christian historian: Abortions caused Typhoon Haiyan.
This might come as news to the grieving survivors of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines: the cause of the powerful storm was abortion. Not necessarily their abortions, but just the fact that anyone has abortions, especially legally, even though abortion is illegal in the Philippines. God is very, very pissed about that, and that’s why he sent a typhoon that killed all those Filipinos on its way to Vietnam. He’s vindictive like that. That is why he is causing all these very destructive and scary storms.
What is not causing any of this climatological havoc is global warming—not that it even exists. Burning fossil fuels is something God actually wants us to do more of. So goes the theory of Christian denialist, oops, we mean “historian” David Barton. The blanket explanation for all this “climate stuff that we can’t explain,” he said this week in a conversation with televangelist Kenneth Copeland, as well as murder and pedophilia, is legalized abortion. America voted for politicians who support abortion rights, and in doing so “opened the door to the curse.”
Here is the historical background. In the good old days, when America was first starting out, Barton explained that if there was really bad weather, leaders would “call for a national day of repentance, humiliation, fasting and prayer … and today we’re saying, ‘Oh no, it’s global warming.’”
That’s how we lost God’s protection. We chose to lose it. What did we expect?
2. Radio host Damon Bruce: Sports are set to the dial of men.
Sports are for men, and Richie Incognito is a man, acting manly in a man’s world. And if you don’t like it, ladies, you can lump it. That is the short version of a nine-minute tirade against women in sports this week by KNBR sports radio host Damon Bruce.
Bruce is mad at women because women are to blame for the suspension of Miami Dolphins guard Richie Incognito after his alleged (and apparently legendary) harassment, bullying and threats against teammate Jonathan Martin drove Martin from the team.

Here’s how the tirade starts:

“A lot of sports has lost its way and I’m gonna tell you, part of the reason is because we’ve got women giving us directions. For some of you, this is going to come across as very misogynistic. I don’t care, because I’m very right. I’m willing to share my sandbox, as long as you remember you’re in my box. I didn’t slip into your box….”

Allowing women to “slip into the box” of professional sports has pretty much ruined sports, Bruce thinks. It has feminized men and made it hard for men to bond the way they like to bond—by being assholes. That’s what Jonathan Martin didn’t understand. Incognito was trying to bond with him when he called him racial slurs and threatened to rape his sister.
Here’s Bruce’s sage advice to women sports journalists who can’t hack it: “If sports get too gruesome for you, go write a restaurant column. Go write a housekeeping column.”
Sweet of him to be concerned.
3. Rand Paul overtakes Ted Cruz as chief Republican wacko bird.
This is a tightly contested race—neck and neck. Lately, Texas Tea Partier Cruz has been relatively subdued since his widely ridiculed Obamacare filibuster which led to the widely reviled government shutdown.

So, Kentucky libertarian Paul was good enough to step into the breach to fulfill the role of what Senator John McCain coined as “chief of the wacko birds.” Paul has distinguished himself in the last week or so with his passionate defense, or is it ignorance, of plagiarism, challenging Rachel Maddow to a duel for repeatedly pointing out that he lifts passages from Wikipedia wholesale for speeches, articles, books, whatever. She’s impugning his honor by doing so, “spreading hate” on him. Besides libertarians don’t attribute stuff; that’s for big government suckers.

A plagiarism scandal, or multiple plagiarism scandals, need not be devastating. Hey, mistakes happen. Admit them and move on, we say. But no, Paul started talking “duel” during an interview with ABC’s “This Week.”
“If, you know, if dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, you know, it would be a duel challenge. But I can’t do that, because I can’t hold office in Kentucky then.”
Note to Paul: Toto, you’re not in 19th-century Kentucky anymore.
4. Antonin Scalia brings up the devil in case about prayer.
It’s almost as if there’s a little red guy with horns and a tail sitting on the shoulder of the Supreme Court’s most verbose right-winger, making him say really off-the-wall things. Justice Antonin Scalia just keeps seeing the devil and his worshippers everywhere, bringing them up during oral arguments in a case about the constitutionality of legislative prayer. This, just weeks after a somewhat embarrassing interview in New York magazine in which he gleefully affirmed his belief in the Antichrist. And what’s wrong with that?
During this week’s case, fellow conservative jurist Samuel Alito was asking questions about whether any kind of prayer would be permissible before a legislative session, one that would not offend Christians, Jews, Muslims, or Hindus.
“What about devil worshippers?” Scalia interjected. Laughter ensued. He’s such a card.
His larger point was that not letting people pray before legislative meetings deprives them of their religious freedom, and that it is impossible to design a prayer that satisfies all faiths—not to mention lack thereof.
“What is the equivalent of prayer for someone who is not religious?” Scalia asked. “There are many people who do not believe in God. … If you had an atheist [town] board, you would not have any prayer. I guarantee you.”
After all, who do you think makes people atheists? Guy with the horns, we’re talking to you.
5. Louie Gohmert: Shutdown was necessary to save people from Obamacare.
Two quick refreshers: 1) Obamacare is the “worst law known to man,” worse than slavery, Nuremberg laws, Indian removal act—you get the idea; and 2) Tea Partiers received a drubbing in this week’s election, but seem not to realize it.
Texas Tea Partier Louie Gohmert was out stumping this week, bizarrely bragging that the devastating shutdown was necessary because people would “suffer and potentially die” because of the Affordable Care Act. Yup, nothing kills people faster than health insurance. It is deadly stuff.
He made the statement at a nursing home in East Texas, where he hoped to scare the bejeezus out of seniors so they won’t sign up for the dreaded healthcare coverage. “Anybody that thinks the Affordable Care Act helps seniors doesn’t really understand what’s unaffordable to seniors,” Gohmert helpfully and misleadingly explained. “It makes most of the Medicare Advantage plans go up, but you’ve got to remember, Obamacare actually cut $716 billion from Medicare and seniors rely on Medicare.”
That, of course, is either a lie or make-believe, or both, but since when has that stopped the opponents of Obamacare?
6. Rep. Steve King knows personally—don’t ask him how—that Saddam Hussein purchased uranium from Niger.
Who can forget the fiction that fueled the invasion of Iraq in 2003? Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was building the bomb, and was ready to use all of it against us or Israel. He got his uranium from Niger, high-level intelligence said. President George Bush even said so in a speech.
Cut to a couple months after “Shock and Awe” and not even Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney or President Bush was standing by that statement. They were misled by some bum intelligence. Sorry. Our bad.
But crazy Iowa Rep. Steve King still believes it because, as he said on Jan Mickelson’s radio show this week: “I have had hands-on evidence that what George Bush said in that State of the Union address was the truth.”
What Bush said was: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
When the claim unraveled, the Bush administration had to eat crow and admit the so-called intelligence was “bogus,” documents “forged.” Spokesman Ari Fleischer admitted the statement should never have found its way into the president’s speech. But nobody took the war back.
But King has “hands-on” knowledge. He just does.
7. Illinois Rep.: Marriage equality has nothing to do with rights; it’s about the Bible.
As the Illinois legislature began to debate whether to join the growing number of enlightened states that have legalized same-sex marriage, State Rep. Dwight Kay, R-Glen Carbon, pointed out that everyone has it bass-ackwards. Our nation was built on “the scriptures, then came the Constitution. Is that not right?”
It was, of course, a rhetorical question. “I think it is,” Kay continued. A brief course in American history could clear this up for the confused legislator, but never mind.
Kay is at a loss to understand why everyone keeps talking about human rights, and civil rights, and equal rights all the time when they talk about marriage equality. What do human rights have to do with a nation built on scripture? Who you gonna believe, that Constitution with its Bill of Rights written by men, or the word of God?
8. Larry Pratt: Trayvon Martin’s broken family is what killed him.
It’s never too late to pile more pain onto the grieving parents and loved ones of slain teenager Trayvon Martin. His killer is free, Trayvon has been blamed for his own death, and now, taking it one step further, Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America has suggested that Martin’s dysfunctional family is responsible for the boy’s death.
That’s what he said in an interview with NewsMax’s Steve Malzberg this week: Trayvon Martin was killed because he had a “broken family.”
Who else can you blame? Triggerman, neighborhood-watch volunteer George Zimmerman was just lawfully “standing his ground” when he shot unarmed Martin. “Stand Your Ground” laws can’t be to blame because, as Sen. Ted Cruz explained to Martin’s mother Sybrina Fulton in a Senate hearing on the controversial law, she’s just “mourning the loss of her son.” Stand-your-ground laws in fact “protect those in African-American communities,” he said.
Facts be damned, gun nuts and Tea Partiers agree. According to Right-Wing Watch, a recent “Tampa Bay Times analysis of stand-your-ground cases in Florida found substantial racial disparities in the application of the law, including that ‘people who killed a black person walked free 73 percent of the time, while those who killed a white person went free 59 percent of the time. A national study found a similar disparity.”
But, it’s Trayvon Martin’s family’s fault he’s dead. Probably his mother’s.
9. White, anti-LGBT Texan wins office by pretending to be black.
Dave Wilson, a Houston electrician, has become pretty adept at creating literature for the causes he believes in. While not rewiring people’s homes, he long pursued his sideline of mailing homophobic fliers to thousands of Houston voters attacking the city’s lesbian mayor Annise Parker. His argument is pretty simple. Open homosexuality is bad. It leads to extinction. (Closeted homosexuality, not so much.)
Recently, Wilson expanded his literary efforts into fiction, when he got himself elected to the Houston Community College Board of Trustees by out-and-out pretending to be someone else. He pretended to be a black man, defeating longtime incumbent Bruce Austin, who actually is black, in an overwhelmingly African-American district.
According to Right-Wing Watch, “Wilson’s campaign fliers were filled with black faces that he admits to simply pulling off of websites, along with captions such as ‘Please vote for our friend and neighbor Dave Wilson.’ Another flier announces that he was ‘Endorsed by Ron Wilson,’ which is the name of an African-American former state representative. Only by reading the fine print will voters discover that the ‘Ron Wilson’ who actually endorsed Dave is his cousin. The cousin lives in Iowa.”
Wilson is fine with this whole deception thing. After all, lying is what politicians do, he points out.
10. Nutjob former classmate of Obama reminisces about his cocaine-snorting, gay-hustling high school days.
Scott Lively’s “Defend The Family” website got a real scoop this week with an interview that nutjob preacher James David Manning conducted with Mia Marie Pope, who says—and why would we not believe her?—that she knew President Obama back in high school in Hawaii in the 1970s, when he was a foreigner (this is a birther website, after all) and a gay druggie.
“He very much was within sort of the gay community,” Pope claimed. “And we knew Barry as just common knowledge that girls were never anything that he ever was interested in … He would get with these older white gay men, and this is how we just pretty much had the impression that that’s how he was procuring his cocaine. In other words, he was having sex with these older white guys and that’s how he was getting this cocaine to be able to freebase.”
That clears a lot up.

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Koch brother says supporters of carbon tax are “on LSD”

He also expressed skepticism about renewable energy — and supports the Keystone XL Pipeline

Elias Isquith
SALON ®  

William Koch (Credit: AP/Louis Lanzano)

According to a report in the Palm Beach Daily News, Bill Koch, one of the lesser-known members of the Koch family, recently told a group of about 600 people at a Palm Beach Chamber of Commerce gathering that supporters of a carbon tax are “on LSD.” A better way to combat high carbon levels, Koch suggested, would be to plant more trees.
Koch also weighed in on the Keystone XL Pipeline, which he supports, and climate change, in which he does not believe. “I won’t bet on global warming,” Koch said before arguing that alternative energy sources — like solar or wind — were too expensive.  ”We can’t count on renewable energy to save us,” he said.

Koch encourages drilling for shale gas. He described the process involved in extracting shale gas deposits, which requires vertical and horizontal drilling and the process known as fracking to break through the rock surrounding the oil.

He dismissed concerns about pollution and environmental contamination raised with regard to fracking.
“Carbon is going to be around longer than we are,” Koch said. “Pollution problems can be solved.”
To get away from carbon dioxide, the human race will have to move to another planet, he said.

[h/t ThinkProgress]

Elias Isquith is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith, and email him at eisquith@salon.com.

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Radioactive Water From Fukushima Is Systematically Poisoning The Entire Pacific Ocean

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Lunatic Potential Senator From Texas Believes Global Warming is Caused by Abortion (Video)

Posted by Progressive Populist  |  on November 5, 2013

In January of this year, the state of Texas unleashed Tea Party looney bird Ted Cruz to wreak havoc on the nation, and believe it or not, there may be someone worse than he is who could end up as the other senator from Texas a year from now.
David Barton is an evangelical Christian minister who believes that separation of state and church is a “myth”, evolution should not be taught in school, the government should regulate gay sex, schools turn kids gay, the bible opposes the minimum wage, and that people should legally be able to own bazookas, tanks and fighter planes. He has been urged to challenge incumbent senator John Cornyn by Glenn Beck and is, of course, a Tea Party darling.
If that isn’t enough to scare the living hell out of you, maybe the video below will.
Barton, in a discussion with
snake oil salesmantelevangelist Kenneth Copeland, comes to the conclusion that abortion is behind global warming and the accompanying crazy weather patterns. They come up with this brilliant explanation by this head-scratching sequence of events…
First, God got mad at us for voting in pro-choice politicians.
Then, with God pissed off and wanting to unleash his anger on us, He “opened the door to the curse,” which led to a barrage of floods, tornadoes, murder and pedophilia.
And unlike in the old days when our ancestors would get together and pray for repentance when bad weather struck them, now we just call it global warming and don’t kneel down and pray every time a strong wind gust or blast of thunder is unleashed on us.
In conclusion, God is so mad at us that He is letting global warming and the crazy weather that comes with it happen to us.
No, this is not a sample article from someone seeking employment with the Onion. There really is a David Barton out there who really does think this way.
Let’s do our best to talk some sense into Texans and keep this guy out of the Senate. You think Ted Cruz is bad, which he absolutely is? This guy might be Ted Cruz on steroids. Barton’s only political experience to date is being the former vice chair of the Republican Party of Texas.
Watch the video below, from RightWingWatch.

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Did John Boehner Just Say Equal Rights Are 'Frivolous'?

Did John Boehner Just Say Equal Rights Are 'Frivolous'?

Daily Kos / By Laura Clawson November 4, 2013

 

The only hope for passing ENDA through this Congress is making it too hot to handle and forcing Boehner to let it come to the floor.

 

With Senate passage basically assured, some Democrats have been hoping to run the same playbook on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that got the Violence Against Women Act through the Republican-controlled House. As Nancy Pelosi describes how the VAWA fight went, "We made it too hot to handle in the public ... It had to come to the floor." ENDA will have to be white hot, though,  given this:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) affirmed on Monday morning that he would oppose a law that would prohibit discrimination against gay and lesbian employees in the workplace, citing the possibility that it would put a financial burden on businesses.
"The Speaker believes this legislation will increase frivolous litigation and cost American jobs, especially small business jobs," Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said in a statement.

The facts show that the Speaker's beliefs on this front are wrong—Sen. Rob Portman cited the lack of lawsuits in states that have laws against anti-gay workplace discrimination as one of his reasons for supporting ENDA and, as President Obama  noted in his pro-ENDA op-ed, a majority of Fortune 500 companies have nondiscrimination policies—but we know how Republicans are with their beliefs. This gets to a fundamental distinction between VAWA and ENDA: Republicans had to at least pretend to be opposed to violence against women and quibble around the edges of which women should be protected and how strongly. They're a lot more comfortable just saying no when it comes to LGBT people—in fact, LGBT people were one of the groups House Republicans were trying to get excluded from VAWA protections.
Still, Pelosi is right: The only hope for passing ENDA through this Congress is making it too hot to handle and forcing Boehner to let it come to the floor for a vote with a majority of Republicans opposing it. The other hope, of course, is taking back the House.

Laura Clawson is the Labor editor at Daily Kos Labor, and a contributing editor at Daily Kos.

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Hottest September On Record, Fastest Pacific Warming In 10,000 Years, Warmest Arctic In 120,000 Years

By Joe Romm on November 3, 2013 at 11:47 am

Temperature change over past 11,300 years (in blue, via Science, 2013) plus projected warming on humanity’s current emissions path (in red, via recent literature.

It’s been a hot week for global warming.
NASA released global temperature data showing that this September tied with 2005 for the warmest September on record. That’s doubly impressive since 2005 was warmed by an El Niño and accompanying warm Pacific ocean temperatures, whereas 2013 has had cooler Pacific temperatures all year.
Greenhouse gases keep warming the planet to unprecedented levels with unprecedented speed. That’s the conclusion of two new studies out this week.
The first, “Unprecedented recent summer warmth in Arctic Canada,” concludes: “Our results indicate that anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases have led to unprecedented regional warmth.”
How unprecedented? The news release explains:

Average summer temperatures in the Eastern Canadian Arctic during the last 100 years are higher now than during any century in the past 44,000 years and perhaps as long ago as 120,000 years, says a new INSTAAR study.
The study is the first direct evidence the present warmth in the Eastern Canadian Arctic exceeds the peak warmth there in the Early Holocene, when the amount of the sun’s energy reaching the Northern Hemisphere in summer was roughly 9 percent greater than today, said study leader Gifford Miller.

The Holocene is our current geological epoch. It began after Earth’s last Ice age ended some 11,700 years ago. The release notes that, “The ice cores showed that the youngest time interval from which summer temperatures in the Arctic were plausibly as warm as today is about 120,000 years ago.”
What does the unprecedented warming mean?

“The key piece here is just how unprecedented the warming of Arctic Canada is,” said Miller, also an INSTAAR fellow. “This study really says the warming we are seeing is outside any kind of known natural variability, and it has to be due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

And it isn’t just the level of warming that is unprecedented. It is also the rate of warming.
Columbia University’s Earth Island Institute explained that in an article Thursday, “Is Global Heating Hiding Out in the Oceans?“:

… a new study in the leading journal Science adds support to the idea that the oceans are taking up some of the excess heat, at least for the moment. In a reconstruction of Pacific Ocean temperatures in the last 10,000 years, researchers have found that its middle depths have warmed 15 times faster in the last 60 years than they did during apparent natural warming cycles in the previous 10,000.
“We’re experimenting by putting all this heat in the ocean without quite knowing how it’s going to come back out and affect climate,” said study coauthor Braddock Linsley, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “It’s not so much the magnitude of the change, but the rate of change.”

We are experimenting on our previously stable climate without wisdom or morality, we are experimenting on our children and grandchildren without their consent. If we don’t stop ASAP, it won’t end well.

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