Mark Potok, famous as a scholar of US right-wing extremism and tabulator of domestic hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center, reacted to the proposed Iowa GOP political platform two days ago. It’s a platform fit for the fans of Alex Jones conspiracy Internet radio show, composed by people who reason exactly like Ted Nugent. It is, in two words, bug nuts.
And that’s how Potok calls it. But bug nuts, mean and evil are the mainstream of the modern GOP. Of the two major political parties in the US, it has morphed into a national security threat because of these insane beliefs.
When you cleave to what these people do and your country is the size and throw weight of Romania, it’s of no consequence except to the unfortunates who must live with you. When it’s a country the size and power of the United States and one of the people running for president caters to such hateful rubbish because he’ll go along with anything to appeal to the group, it’s a jaw-dropping threat.
I used to think you were a pretty straight-ahead place, what with all that flat land and healthy vegetables and honest living. I mean, Iowans rejected slavery 20 years before the Civil War and they approved interracial marriage a century before the U.S. Supreme Court. Homosexuality was decriminalized almost 30 years before the 2003 Lawrence vs. Texas decision did so nationwide. Today, control of the state’s Legislature is split between Democrats and Republicans and, a few characters aside, it is not known for political extremism …
That idea of the state ended for me last week when I read the proposed platform released by the platform committee of the Republican Party of Iowa.
Are you people totally insane?
The platform is absolutely thick with ideas from the extreme right, lunatic conspiracy theories, and barely concealed hatred for President Obama and anything that smacks of multiculturalism. It sneers at science, is down on poor people, and despises, really despises, the United Nations.
Here’s a sampling of the deep-thinking goals of the Iowa GOP:
• Require candidates for president to prove that they are “natural born citizens,??? beginning with the 2012 election …
• Reject the “claims??? of global warming, which are “based on fraudulent, inaccurate information??? and pushed by people using “extremist scare tactics.??? The Iowa GOP “recognizes??? that policies and laws designed to combat global warming are really “a plan to take our freedoms and liberties away.???
• Eliminate the Federal Reserve Act and implement a “sound commodity-backed currency??? with a gold or silver standard …
• Entirely eliminate the departments of Agriculture, Education, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Energy, Interior, Labor and Commerce, along with the Transportation Safety Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
• Likewise, abolish the Internal Revenue Service and repeal the 16th Amendment, which legalized the federal income tax …
• Allow parents to refuse to have their children immunized.
• Reject the teaching of multiculturalism.
• Only teach evolution as a theory, along with creationism.
• Repeal compulsory school attendance laws.
• Outlaw pornography …
• Oppose the imposition of Shariah, or Islamic religious law, in the United States …
There’s a lot more, all of it as rancid as can be. Near the end Potok concedes there’s so much he can’t cover all of it.
The proposed Republican Party Platform of Iowa is here.
It starts with a boxed out quote from Cicero on ‘the enemy within,’ employed here to argue the nation is being cut down by treason in the highest office:
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero
(106-43 B.C.)
‘ Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
Other excerpts:
We believe human life should be protected from conception to non-intervened natural death, excluding acts of capital punishment.
We affirm that science has now proven that life begins at conception. On day one (1) a baby’s genetic code and DNA are formed. That is the beginning of life.
We call for the Iowa General Assembly to repeal the recently passed “Electric & Plumbing??? Bill which takes away an individual’s right to make household repairs. {There is no such prohibition.]
We call for the repeal of all mandatory minimum wage laws.
We call for the removal of Kevin Jennings, now head of the United States Office of Safe Schools (Safe School Czar). America’s schools would be safer without him.
We believe that Intelligent Design theory, or Creationism, should be included with all science instruction along with the Darwinian theory … We recommend that tax funded school libraries include creation science or intelligent design materials on their bookshelves.
The use of the Bible as a textbook should be allowed.
We believe the state should prohibit school based health clinics and external organizations from providing or recommending abortion or birth-control services or referrals, including the distribution of condoms … We believe that sex education should not be taught as a mandatory course in public schools …
We believe that sexual orientation should not be allowed to be a basis for any school clubs, such as the Gay Straight Alliance, at any level of the public school system …
We support an amendment to both the U. S. and Iowa constitutions that states that all marriages should be traditional one natural male and one natural female, omitting transgendered …
We favor improvement, strengthening, and simplification of adoption laws, and oppose adoption by homosexuals …
We affirm that desecrating the American or state flags is not constitutionally protected free speech, and should be punished accordingly …
We demand full restoration of 2nd Amendment rights and call for a state law authorizing law-abiding citizens to carry firearms, open or concealed, without a permit …
We demand that the U. S. House of Representatives exercise its constitutional responsibility and duty to impeach activist judges who legislate from the bench. We refuse to surrender to judicial tyranny …
We support the continued use of Guantanamo Prison as long as needed.
We support repealing the smoking ban. We believe this to be an issue of liberty.
We support prison reform including the limitation of prisoner rights and amenities. Inmates should be required to work for their room and board …
We support retribution for acts of war on the citizens of this great nation. It is to be swift and severe …
We call for the continued development of weapons that would give our troops an advantage in battle situations …
We call for the continued deployment of the anti-ballistic-missile defense system and for the updating, retraining, expansion, and reequipping of our nuclear strategic forces. We call for continued research and deployment of strategic missile, rocket, and artillery defense systems. We support the deployment of the newest laser weapon system, recently killed by President Obama …
We believe there should be longer and more hunting seasons to thin the population of deer …
We strongly oppose the diabolical collusion of the United Nations …
We require each duly nominated candidate that won their primary to sign the State platform once passed, and agree with 80% of the planks in order to receive state party funding … [Thus guaranteeing the purity of the crazy.]
It’s stupefying in its sheer awfulness, a mixture of “sovereign citizen” rebellion, Tea Party dogma, John Bircher-ism … it just goes on and on, a frenzy of pet hates collected and written out as a set of party planks. It seems to have been created by and for people with no intelligence or even slight decency, a wish list for persecuting everyone everyone who doesn’t share their various phobias and mental illnesses.
Our University of Alabama patented solar desalination product uses no electricity, has no filters to replace, can be taken anywhere and extracts pure water from any contaminated water source. It removes radiation, fluoride, salt, pesticides, bacteria, dirt and other contaminants from any water. It aids people to be prepared for disasters.
Ted’s outbursts this year — the gift that keeps on giving.
He has been noticeably off on the pages of the WaTimes, embarrassed into relative silence over the matters of being visited by the Secret Service, snapping out on network television and being banned from hunting in Alaska over an illegal black bear bagging.
Plus the US Army gave him the boot from a regular gig.
There’s been some opposition, to the booking of Ted Nugent to play a couple county fairs in Wisconsin this summer. “The Nuge??? is scheduled to play at the Racine and Dodge County Fairs. Jeri Bonavia with Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort says some members contacted her with concerns. “They didn’t think that Ted Nugent was the kinds of performer who should be at family friendly events like county fairs. Given his track record recently of incredibly violent and threatening rhetoric, we agreed with our members completely and started an effort of contacting the county fair officials,??? says Bonanvia. “When we didn’t get any response from them, we are now turning to the sponsors.???
Bonavia says it seems fair to ask whether Nugent belongs at the fairs. “In Racine County they have him scheduled for children’s day,??? Bonavia notes. “I can’t imagine that there are too many families who would want to oppose their kids to that kind of hate speech.???
Nugent plays the Racine County Fair on July 26th, and the Dodge County Fair on August 15th. “They have a contract with him and they are going to honor that contract,??? Bonavia says. “Even though the U.S. Army canceled his performance at Fort Knox, in the wake of some of his particularly violent speech directed at President Obama.???
County fair businesses have reason to be wary of Nugent. He has a history of suing when kicked from a state sage, most infamously the Muskegon (Michigan) Summer Celebration.
However, Nugent cannot sue Fort Knox and the US Army, where he was just dumped. It would be way too much bad publicity. Even for someone who often uses it to advance the career, anyway.
In any case, this quote begs repetition:
“In Racine County they have him scheduled for children’s day … I can’t imagine that there are too many families who would want to oppose their kids to that kind of hate speech.”
Well, whatever would make one think Ted’s not quite the guy for ‘children’s day’?
Yes, DD blog is devoted to chronicling the many ways Ted Nugent has made himself a public disgrace this year. It’s easy work.
Quick quiz: What’s a good five-letter description of Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, that ends in “y????
The obvious choice is, of course, “bully.??? But as a recent debate over the state’s budget reveals, “phony??? is an equally valid answer. And as Mr. Christie goes, so goes his party.
Until now the attack of the fiscal phonies has been mainly a national rather than a state issue, with Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, as the prime example …
Here’s the story: For some time now Mr. Christie has been touting what he calls the “Jersey comeback.??? Even before his latest outburst, it was hard to see what he was talking about: yes, there have been some job gains in the McMansion State since Mr. Christie took office, but they have lagged gains both in the nation as a whole and in New York and Connecticut, the obvious points of comparison.
Yet Mr. Christie has been adamant that New Jersey is on the way back, and that this makes room for, you guessed it, tax cuts that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.
Last week reality hit: David Rosen, the state’s independent, nonpartisan budget analyst, told legislators that the state faces a $1.3 billion shortfall.
And it just so happened I had a song for the guy, an adaptation of Nazareth’s “Fat Man” from ’72. It’s an evergreen because Christie, being the a way overstuffed national figure, is reliably and regularly in the news.
Paul Ryan was done up a few weeks ago. And the Republican Party being full of people hell bent on giving all the national swag they can to the wealthy at everyone else’s expense is too easy to lampoon. Still, it makes no difference, about like trying to shame a bag of garbage into walking itself into the dumpster.
If you really know your early Seventies hard rock: Yes, that is Dan McAfferty of Nazareth’s dubbed in vocals for the choruses. And I do play it live.
Proving only that putting Republicans in power is dangerous because they do paranoid as well as predatory things antithetical to what the country once stood for, Kansas governor Sam Brownback signed into law the state GOP’s anti-shariah bill.
Republican Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed a bill aimed at keeping state courts and agencies from using Islamic or other non-U.S. laws when making decisions, his office said on Friday, drawing criticism from a national Muslim group.
The law has been dubbed the “Shariah bill” because critics say it targets the Islamic legal code …
About 20 states [all under GOP governance] have considered similar legislation but the Kansas law is the only one signed in recent weeks, Council on American Islamic spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said.
“It’s unfortunate the governor chose to pander to the growing Islam-phobia in our society that has led to introduction of similar unconstitutional and un-American legislation in dozens of state legislatures,” Hooper said.
Hooper said legislators have often referred to Shariah law in supporting such legislation, but he said they take the word out of the bill to stave off legal challenges. The Kansas bill does not mention Shariah.
The Islam-o-Phobe most responsible for the national campaign to get anti-Shariah legislation passed into law in red states is birther Frank Gaffney, the man lampooned in the excerpt from the Tom Tomorrow cartoon, above.
Gaffney is also a prime mover in the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy and a vocal part of the Bomb Iran/ballistic missile defense lobby. Over the past few years he’s been in the blog on a frequent basis, every time for activities connected with electromagnetic pulse doom and whipping up fear, confusion and hysteria over the imagined creeping threat of shariah law in this country.
While we won’t be around to read future histories of the country, those who write them won’t be kind because of the likes of Frank Gaffney and the extremists of the Republican Party. They are a symptom the country is ungovernable and immune to reason, now in a demonstrable decline.
What do you do if your a sub-mediocre writer of thriller fiction for the extreme right and out of ideas on threats to the United States? Go with electromagnetic pulse.
1,633 entries for the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy. Since it’s generated by an Amazon search algorithm it is not accurate.
However, a quick browse of the list uncovers a stupefying amount of fiction publishing, much of it vanity press digital editions.
It’s prepper/survivalist romance novels. They call it post-apocalypse, a too generous description by far as it insults famous post-apocalypse novels that aren’t atrocious reads. Like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, or various novels by J. G. Ballard.
Here’s the eye-watering run down.
77 Days in September by Ray Gorham.
On a Friday afternoon before Labor Day, Americans are getting ready for the holiday weekend, completely unaware of a long-planned terrorist plot about to be launched against the country. Kyle Tait is settling in for his flight home to Montana when a single nuclear bomb is detonated 300 miles above the heart of America. The blast, an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP), destroys every electrical device in the country…
Death Pulse by David Alexander
Chaos rules when an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon is set off in orbit, triggering the most massive power failure and blackout in history. The blackout, whose epicenter is New York City, is far more serious than any ordinary mass power outage …
Half Past Midnight by Jeff Brackett
The Doomsday Clock gauges the threat of nuclear war. Currently, the clock is set at six minutes before midnight. What happens after the hands reach midnight? Survivalist Leeland Dawcett finds out when he and his family are plunged into the nightmare of their country returned to a third-world state. No phones. No computers. No television.
Grid Down Reality Bites by Bruce Hemming and Sara Freedman
The author of Buckshot’s Modern Trapper’s Guide for Xtreme Safety, Survival, Profit, Pleasure. This is now a collector’s book. His new novel brings you a working man’s guide to the end of the world. If you enjoyed One Second After and Lights Out then you will love this fast paced novel of 3 different groups surviving the confusion and terror of The End Of The World As We Know It.
Two young men, Mark and Eric struggle desperately trying to make it to their retreat in Northern California. Their truck is dead from an EMP. They have to walk 200 miles.
Land, a Stranded Novel (Volume 1, it threatens) by Theresa D. Shaver
Five go by Land – Five go by Sea A group of teens on a class trip to Disneyland are left stranded. An EMP over North America has destroyed everything electronic. No cars, no planes, no phones, no electricity. Refusing to wait for someone else to help them, ten courageous young people take charge of their future …
Lights Out America by Hale Meserow
The USA, as we know [sic], is gone.
But you won’t see any reports on the 10:00 news, because there is no broadcast signal. There are no computers, no circuit boards, no telephones, no wireless, no trains planes or autos, no refrigerators, furnaces, or lights.
Hundreds of millions of American citizens are instantly thrust into the technological equivalent of the mid-19th century.
The ultimate weapon of mass destruction, an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from a hydrogen bomb, exploded 300 kilometers over Kansas …
Dark Grid by David C. Waldron
In the wake of a solar event, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since 1859 when the height of technology was the telegraph, the northern hemisphere is faced with a new reality…a life without power. The electrical grids of virtually the entire planet have shorted out …
Lights Out by David Crawford (Made by, wait for it, Halffast Publishing)
Downloaded from the internet over three million times, this exciting, action-packed, survival story is finally available in book form. Lights Out chronicles the challenges of Mark “Karate Man??? Turner when the lights go out over most of the free world …
The Long Ride Home by Susan Gregerson
Pedaling her bicycle through the countryside, mile after mile, had been one of Sue’s favorite ways to travel. Despite the shaky conditions in the world, she and a friend embark on a cross-country bicycle trip.
She’s nearly two thousand miles from home when an EMP (Electro-magnetic pulse) over the eastern third of the nation takes out the power grid and cripples transportation. She must get home!
The EMP of the Beginning by Rowan A. Scott
High altitude nuclear explosions generate an Electro Magnetic Pulse over the majority of the world. Electricity transmission lines are taken out, taking with them their transformers and generators. Nothing works any more …
“I normally quite like post apocalypse novels, but this one just didn’t grab me,” writes one Amazon reviewer. “There just wasn’t much character development. ”
The Rally Point: Bugging Home by Susan Gregerson, again
When an EMP over the eastern third of the US knocks out the power grid and disables cars near the detonation point, it takes a while for people to realize this is bigger than a normal power outage. But Sue and her family acted right away. Sue was 2,000 miles from their home in Montana. She was on a cross-country bicycle trip …
Fear of Falling by Susan Kiernan-Lewis
When Matt and Sarah Woodson take a much-needed vacation with their ten-year old son, John, their intention is to find a relaxing, remote spot to take a break from the artificial stimulation of their busy world back in Jacksonville, Florida. What happens within hours of settling in to their rural, rustic little cottage in a far-flung spot on the coast of Ireland is an international incident that leaves the family stranded and dependent on themselves for their survival. Facing starvation, as well as looters and opportunists, they learn the hard way the important things in life. Can a family skilled only in modern day suburbia and corporate workplaces learn to survive when the world is flung back a hundred years? When there is no internet, no telephones, no electricity and no cars?
The Great Collapse by Jeff Horton
While scientists prepare for a massive solar flare heading towards the earth, a hostile foreign government steals a top-secret, experimental weapon. When they use the EMP weapon to attack America however, the result is the immediate and catastrophic loss of modern technology …
Terawatt by Des Michaels
In the aftermath of a devastating EMP event, an unprepared suburban Texas school teacher battles his way across a thousand miles of post-apocalyptic terrain to rescue his wife and son stranded in Tennessee.
Our End Of The Lake: Surviving After The 2012 Solar Storm by Ron Foster and Cheryl Chamlies
A solar storm has just hit the world causing a EMP event. A emergency manager visiting Atlanta GA must find his way back home after this electromagnetic pulse has stranded him away from his vehicle and his beloved “bug out bag” …
Rohan Nation: Reinventing America After the 2020 Collapse by Drew Miller
ROHAN NATION tells the compelling story of how survivors of biological warfare and electro-magnetic pulse fight to defend and reinvent America. The disasters that lead to the collapse of America in 2020 and billions of deaths worldwide are based on sound research and analysis, the predictable results of on-going mistakes. ACE, the teenage daughter of a family that prepared for the worst, and Justin, the young refugee she captures who becomes her cavalry scout apprentice, struggle to survive in a post-collapse economy where horses are key to survival …
It’s not every day one can pickup a novel and see the name of a once top secret government project on the cover.
But you can do that with a new book out soon by part-time Naples resident Karna Small Bodman, whose careers in the White House and TV news have made her highly qualified to write her fourth novel — “Castle Bravo.”
Karna’s thriller is about a potentially life changing, international threat to the U.S. The core subject of her story has popped up on TV newscasts several times recently.
It is electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, detonated high in the atmosphere by a nuclear device …
All electromagnetic pulse fiction comes from people who are in the far right. There are no progressives in the bunker after The End of the World As We Know It. The lefties are cannon fodder, faceless characters who get to die first because they lack the virtues of the heroes. After all, it is satisfying to write about the demise of enemies and their eventual replacement by a more virtuous, simpler world of horse, buggy, plenty of guns, and no Democrats.
A majority of these numbers are done through CreateSpace, another Jeff Bezos gift of dubious value.
If you’ve wondered why Amazon has moved into being an on-line Wal-Mart to the world, it’s because Bezos has contributed to the annihilation of traditional publishing. This has blown up the market for real books, developed by publishing houses, often selected for quality and edited by professionals so you can read them enjoyably.
Bezos has replaced this with an on-line store for dry goods, a music competitor to the equally repellent iTunes store, and the sale of one or two copies of millions of vanity titles. This monetizes and aggregates the idea that the authors of the above works will at least buy one, or maybe even two, copies of their work.
I’VE spent the last week traveling to two of America’s greatest innovation hubs — Silicon Valley and Seattle — and the trip left me feeling a combination of exhilaration and dread. The excitement comes from not only seeing the stunning amount of innovation emerging from the ground up, but from seeing the new tools coming on stream that are, as Amazon.com’s founder, Jeff Bezos, put it to me, “eliminating all the gatekeepers??? — making it easier and cheaper than ever to publish your own book, start your own company and chase your own dream. Never have individuals been more empowered, and we’re still just at the start of this trend.
“I see the elimination of gatekeepers everywhere,??? said Bezos … “Sixteen of the top 100 best sellers on Kindle today were self-published,??? said Bezos. That means no agent, no publisher, no paper — just an author, who gets most of the royalties, and Amazon and the reader.
However, there is a significant difference between writers and a horde empowered by Jeff Bezos to churn out mind-numbingly bad and identical disaster stories on electromagnetic pulse doom just because Internet technology allows them to do so with little effort.
Ultimately, this is Bezos’ innovation: The destruction of that which had value, to be replaced with the digital world’s equivalent of beach sand, with Amazon getting a commission on every grain.
“Herd the Sodomites into captivity and chastise them with pointed sticks and electricity.” For a short time only, every copy of the Compleat Sayings of American Jesus will come with a small replica of the future North Carolina State Barbed-Wire Homo Corral.
The [House] tweak to the [defense authorization] bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.
The bi-partisan amendment is sponsored by Rep. Mark Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.
In a little noticed press release earlier in the week — buried beneath the other high-profile issues in the $642 billion defense bill, including indefinite detention and a prohibition on gay marriage at military installations …
The bill’s supporters say the informational material used overseas to influence foreign audiences is too good to not use at home …
Does it have any chance of passing” Maybe not.
But realistically, it’s hard to get very worked up over because we already have Fox News and the Citizen’s United case. Between those two, how could any US government of Pentagon misinformation campaign aimed at domestic targets do better?
Cynical? You bet.
On the other hand, over the last decade the US has been singularly bad at winning the hearts and minds of folks abroad. Truth or misinformation? It just hasn’t mattered.
And more recently, Secrecy blog released a DoD publication discussing the efforts to shape perceptions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Inescapable in our American landscape are those motivated by fear. The blog covers a lot of them and it’s depressing. One can laugh dryly at how crazy it reads — those prepper survivalists and electromagnetic pulse crazies, ha-ha — but it’s one reason, among a good number, the country has slipped into paralysis.An entire political party thinks only in terms of what it fears. And its actions are then to attack those fears, or more accurately, those who they deem behind them.
The end result has been poisonous in the extreme. The Republican Party fears and hates science. It fears and despises people not exactly like its members, so much so it appears bizarre and mentally to those not part of it. Worse, as quickly as possible it drafts law and policy to attack those believed to be enemies.
Last week, the worst example was in Kansas. I’d skipped it for days but it essentially boiled down to the state legislature crafting a law targeted at Muslims, specifically through the cracked idea that sharia law is infiltrating the US legal system. (Realistically, every week brings news like this. So you may see things equally astonishing and nasty but attacking slightly different classes of people, places and things n your news consumption.)
Previously, the blog has written on this craziness here. Readers will note the constancy of it.
A bill that would outlaw the use of foreign legal codes in Kansas courts — broadly written but particularly aimed at Islamic sharia law — is on its way to the governor.
The final Senate vote, a lopsided 33-3, came after a lengthy and at times emotional debate Friday on the last scheduled day of the session. Lawmakers said they plan to come back next week; unresolved issues include the budget, tax cuts and redistricting …
But in an impassioned speech, Sen. Chris Steineger, R-Kansas City, said the bill was obviously directed at Muslims.
He said he was originally approached about the bill in January. The original pitch wasn’t about protecting the Constitution, but that Muslims were trying to use sharia law to take over the United States and had to be stopped.
“I thought that was quite ludicrous at the time and I still do,??? he said. “This (bill) doesn’t say sharia law, but that’s how it was marketed back in January and all session long, and I have all the e-mails to prove it.???
It’s difficult to find any admiration for Republican Chris Steineger’s admission of regret. There’s a certain contingent within the GOP that knows the party has turned venomous and predatory. But they lack the spine to do anything about it because they are fearful of being purged.
To me, this is a women’s rights issue,” said Sen. Susan Wagle, R-Wichita. “They stone women to death in countries that have sharia law. They have no rights in court. Female children are treated brutally.???
Sen. Jean Schodorf, R-Wichita, said she had confirmed that criminal actions, such as stoning, are prosecuted in Kansas regardless of the offender’s religion, even without the bill.
Sen. John Vratil, R-Leawood, said he quizzed the bill’s supporters on when a Kansas court had ever based a decision on sharia law and had yet to be provided with an example.
The prime instigators who have built up an imaginary sharia law infiltration in US courts are Frank Gaffney, not coincidentally a birther and one of the chiefs of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, and the people who put out the Iranium movie last year. Which, of course, made the case that Iran was a threat to the United States on par with the old Soviet Union and that it ought to be bombed immediately before US civilization was ended by its mullahs.
[The Republican Party has] “become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.???
One cannot fix a problem one will not face. And the new cultishness of the Republican Party is certainly a problem … — opinion piece, the Miami Herald
I coined the name Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy to describe these same manipulative paranoid nutcases years ago. While they do not have their fingers directly on the buttons of power in DC because of the presidency of Obama, they assiduously work the sidelines in other related areas — like attempting to institute Islam-o-phobe laws against an imagined sharia menace in the heartland.
And they have been successful.
“A bill that would ban Sharia law in Kansas has passed both houses of the legislature and awaits the signature of the governor,” reads a news report from yesterday.
“While the rest of us are busy worrying about the economy, partisan gridlock in Washington or maybe even the Facebook IPO, the Kansas legislature has been busy fighting off a perceived ‘threat’ from shariah law,” said Simon Brown of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “[Governor Sam Brownback] hasn’t said what he will do with the anti-shariah bill, but stoning it would seem an appropriate response.”
An anti-sharia law from the heartland listing — from Google.
The world is full of cheats, liars, lazy bloodsuckers and people who cut corners. If their house gets in your way, burn it down.
While you scale your mountain of success, lend a hand to the person behind you and pull them up with you. Atlas doesn’t shrug in my book. Atlas commends, constructively criticizes, encourages and challenges those following him. Be an Atlas.
Burn down the houses of people who get in your way. But lend a hand. The logic, scintillating, as usual.
The views shot up this mornin’. Someone, either inflamed or amused, has pointed it out.
And this might have something to do with it. Bravo!
