That Obama’s Fabulous Homo-Futurama! screed from Dobson was pretty great.

Also, I love, ‘We’re voting for the n****r.’  Mel Brooks wins.

Can’t really call it my ‘favorite’, but I’m continually amazed by the desire of even very intelligent conservatives to try and make this election a referendum on…. 1969.

Soo….  Jewish grandparents should be concerned about the New Testament why?

“Popular culture” is defined by John Le Carre, The Four Musketeers, Judas Priest, and Kiss?  Is Belmont Club angling for Best Blog of 1974?

I don’t know if this came from the conservatives (my guess is no) but this is definately the weirdest thing I’ve seen based on this election. NOTE EXTREMELY NSFW.

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/horrors-of-porn/horrible-adult-toys.php?page=12

He’s a socialist or Communist. Why have a culture war over 1969 when you can take the way-back machine straight to the Red Scare ‘50s?

The folks trying to insist that Obama was born in Kenya or Indonesia are pretty far out, too.

And the straight-up racism of not wanting to vote for “one of them.” Who knew that in 2008 so many white folks wouldn’t be shy about racism? And people complain that everything’s gone PC now. Au contraire!

I couldn’t pick just one. There’s too much material!

Okay, so we are at Fantasy Fest in Key West right now….last night out on Duval street some variation of the God Hates Fags folks were there with their signs and much yelling went on around them.  They of course were telling everyone that we were all going to hell and so there was a lot of cursing back at them.  Later, as we walked away, some regular looking guy told us that if Obama was elected, FF would stop because it was against the islamist religion. 

We had to stop and look at him and ask him if he really meant that….yes, of course he did….that was why he was there this year….he thought it would end. 

We suggested to him that it was far more likely to end if Palin were in charge since her brand of loving religion actually hates gays and probably hates for people to act like they do here. 

Oddly, there were a number of women dressed as Palin and they were not doing it to mock her….when asked, they too thought she was great. 

Sometimes you just have to shake your head and wonder what the fuck people really know and think.

Truly weird about Fantasy Fest.

BTW, can you get a classic piture of the real Judas Priest with Rob Halford out front? Even back in the early 80s we knew he was gay. I’m glad he eventually came out and supported his community.

if Obama was elected, FF would stop because it was against the islamist religion

Somehow many people seem to have convinced themselves that the president’s religion is, like, the national religion.

He isn’t Barack Tudor.

Oh, where to begin?
I’d say the most bizarre thing I’ve heard is the attempt to paint Obama as a Scary Muslim Fundamentalist Who Will Bring Install Sharia Code AND a Radical Leftwing Socialist Who Turn Everyone Into Homosexual Abortionists. Convenietly ignoring the fact that he COULDN’T possibly be both.
in fact, the attempts to prove he’s not a “real” Christian by citing some of his political beliefs would also discredit him as a real Muslim, unless you’re under the impression that abortion and gay rights are both widely accepted in Muslim countries.
The most disgusting thing I’ve come across is the claim that he had an “underage gay love affair” with an adult. That’s how it was worded. Most people would say, “he was molested at nine”(I’m not say he actually was, only that this how most people would describe such an experience). To use the word “affair” to describe sex between a child and an adult is pretty low.

Belmont Club has determined that asking your grandparents to vote for Barack Obama is akin to Satan’s temptation of Christ.

as rowmyboat noted, the group being pushed to talk to granny and gramps about Obama are the Jews.  we’re all going to Hell anyway and, come to think of it, aren’t we supposedly in league with the devil for murdering Jesus or something?  It makes me wonder how much the fundagelical vitriol against the Jews will increase after we’re blamed for an Obama win. . .

FlipYrWhig-
Michael Medved actually DOES believe that!
http://sadlyno.com/archives/9246.html

(The link is to the Sadly, No! takedown because the original Clownhall column takes to long to download, and isn’t worth the wait.)

One of the most frustrating things has been McCain and Palin playing on people’s ignorance of what socialism is. If you want to run against socialist policies then you better be promising to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. You should probably be looking to privatize the postal service and Amtrak too. I could easily list a dozen other federal socialist programs, but I won’t bother. Republicans will rail against the evils of socialism because they know their ignorant supporters hear communist when you say socialist. They don’t realize that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Labor Party is a socialist party.
Socialist policies are incredibly popular in the developed world. Republicans know this, so they will never even try to run on a platform that dissolves our incredibly popular socialist programs. At least libertarians are honest about their opposition to government programs.

penn:

Socialist policies are incredibly popular in the developed world. Republicans know this, so they will never even try to run on a platform that dissolves our incredibly popular socialist programs

Could it possibly be that people fear that your list is not comprehensive enough? Have you never heard people suggest we should nationalize the oil companies, the airlines, the telecommunications companies? You said you could easily list a dozen more. Proponents of socialism that I have talked to tend to lean towards the “nationalize it all” school of thought.

Simple question: “What should be left in private hands?”

My favorite is how Obama is both a pawn of Reverend Wright (a black nationalist Christian), Osama bin Laden (a Sunni takfiri) and Karl Marx (atheistic communist).  I’m waiting for them to accuse him of being a Zoroastrian next.

Simple question: “What should be left in private hands?”

Coca-cola and Pepsi. Hollywood. The entire IT industry, as the government has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt with the creation of the HIPAA standard that they don’t understand IT.

Basically, any industry that creates something we all *could* live without if it went bankrupt should remain private, and any industry that creates something we need, but that the government clearly has no comprehension of because it’s too cutting edge or requires too high a proportion of weirdos to work for you, should remain private.

I would not, BTW, nationalize “the” airlines… I would nationalize *one* airline, and let it compete with the others. That way they can continue to innovate in ways the government can’t, but if they all go bankrupt at least Americans can still fly. Ditto the oil companies. Telecom *was* nationalized and we got nothing good out of it after the initial phase of wiring everyone; I might, at this point, create *a* nationalized broadband Internet company to bring high-speed internet to every household in America, let it continue to run for 10 years or so after the initiative so it can earn back enough profit for the government to make back its investment, and then break it up and sell it to private investors, but with a regulatory structure that forbids lack of net neutrality or crap like blocking content from providers you aren’t partnered with. The existence of *one* regulated entity which has to be nice to its customers will work as a seed crystal in a free market to force all the others to comply; no one can be an asshole to their customers when there’s a cheap alternative that plays nice and is of equally high quality. But there’s no point to nationalizing the phone companies at this point; they’re dinosaurs.

Having one nationalized alternative which is totally 100% reliable and which won’t go bankrupt ever but which introduces sexy new services more slowly than the private alternatives, which are more expensive but may do the job quicker, works really well with package delivery—the Post Office being nationalized hasn’t prevented FedEx, UPS and DHL from existing. I think that any service vital to Americans should be provided by one nationalized company and a bunch of private competitors. Private industry can innovate faster than government can, but because it can take risks, sometimes it gets burned, and it is also more likely to introduce systematic abuse of customers in the lack of regulation to stop it. Having a nationalized version of important industries without preventing private versions from existing would pressure the private industries to treat customers better and would provide a safety net in event of market failure (such as the current disintegration of the airlines.)

Haven’t had a chance to talk about Obama with my family, but when Hillary became the senator of New York, my father asked me to move back to Indiana, because he literally thought she was an impending sign of the apocalypse and we wouldn’t be safe in NYC.

Michael Medved actually DOES believe that!

Demonstrating once more that Michael Medved is a yutz.  That’s kind of a “Coals to Newcastle” claim, I realize.

Bravo Alara!

I compliment you on your response. I disagree, but it is so nice to have someone explain their position without a single ad hominem attack, or calling into question the opposing posters sanity.

Under your scenario, if the Gov’t chooses to do so, it could kill any competitor by undercutting prices to the extreme until the competitor goes out of business. Not saying it would, but it could.

My hands-down favorite batshit Obama conspiracy theory will always be the one where he’s secretly actually the son of Lolo Soetoro. Because there’s obviously no way to even hazard a guess, looking at the guy, whether he’s the son of a Kenyan man or an Indonesian one.

I’m just going to ditto Alara (since she said it better than me anyway) but I would like to add one more thing:

Government should also control industries that tend to monopolies anyway (roads, power, et cetera).  In lots of places, power is a downright necessity, so there’s a little bit of overlap in that statement, and they already do this, so I highly doubt this will be a controversial add-on.

Under your scenario, if the Gov’t chooses to do so, it could kill any competitor by undercutting prices to the extreme until the competitor goes out of business. Not saying it would, but it could.

So could any big name businesses.  Walmart has made/ continues to make this their business strategy.  Why is it worse if the government does it?  Besides, in the industries that there a government competitor, there doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.  Bookstores still make tons of cash, even though they have the library to compete with.

Holy off topic, batman.  How did we end up on this?

Under your scenario, if the Gov’t chooses to do so, it could kill any competitor by undercutting prices to the extreme until the competitor goes out of business. Not saying it would, but it could.

And, that is supposed to mean what to us, exactly? Obviously, the Government, or indeed any sufficiently large corporation, could already do that, and in fact has.

Try to write clearly, and think clearly. What are you trying to say?

(a) Colin Powell endorses Obama, explaining his reasons with a well-considered 3-point (IIRC) argument; (b) McCain-supporting pundits—all of them white as the driven—spend the following week opining that Powell is motivated by race.  (Differences between us and wingnuts, #217: The concept of irony isn’t entirely lost on us.)

There’s also the thread on Free Republic about whether Obama is the Antichrist.

I’ve mostly been following the “feminist” McCain supporters, so here are my two favourites:

1) The Obama campaign, or Obama supporters, ordered the attack on Anne Pressly because she played a Republican in W, and only Fox News is reporting the story.  (Google Anne Pressly and you see just how true that is.)

2) This: “Any day now, I expect a group of Obamabots to rape a woman for real, and of course they will be chanting Obama slogans as they rape her. They will be so proud of their actions, and so justified in their belief that rape of McPallin supporters is valid, that they will videotape the whole thing and submit it to YouTube. Other Obamabots will post messages gleefully defending the gang rape of a McPalin supporter and insist that feminists are humorless.”

Eugene:

Under your scenario, if the Gov’t chooses to do so, it could kill any competitor by undercutting prices to the extreme until the competitor goes out of business. Not saying it would, but it could.

Two things:

1) There is no benefit to a government-run company pricing its competitors out of business.

2) What you say is also true of private industry. In fact, the problem is even worse in private industry, because there are dozens of ways to kill off your competitors (with varying degrees of legality), not just one.

Bookstores still make tons of cash

Um, no, they really don’t.  Pretty much no one in the book publishing process, from the writers to the editors to the publishers to the bookstores, makes much money.  But that’s the nature of the beast and has nothing to do with the existence of the library.

And airlines pretty much can’t survive without government subsidies and protection.  Perhaps another standard for nationalization should be, if an industry can’t survive without government handouts, the government should take it over.

My grandparents are already supporting Obama because they lived through the Depression.

Simple question: “What should be left in private hands?”

Not the College Board, certainly. FFS.

My favorite has been the breathless cries that Obama is both a secret radical Muslim and has a scary preacher who hates America. I’ve heard people claim both in the same sentence with nary a comma to separate two completely contradictory ideas that should otherwise cancel each other out. It’s like live fafblog on the Right these days.

FWIW, libraries around the country got a boost from Andrew Carnegie around the turn of the 19th/20th Century:

Carnegie libraries are libraries which were built with money donated by Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. More than 2,500 Carnegie libraries were built, including those belonging to public and university library systems. Carnegie earned the nickname Patron Saint of Libraries.

Of the 2,509 libraries funded between 1883 and 1929, 1,689 were built in the United States, 660 in Britain and Ireland, 156 in Canada, and others in Australia, New Zealand, Serbia, the Caribbean, and Fiji. Very few towns that requested a grant and agreed to his terms were refused. When the last grant was made in 1919, there were 3,500 libraries in the United States, nearly half of them paid for by Carnegie.

I didn’t know until recently, that the local library here was started as a Carnegie library, the same may be true for Alpine, TX…..........

What should be left in private hands?

That actually is a reasonable policy question to ask. Screaming about the socialist boogeyman is not reasonable. I don’t have a specific answer, but nothing Obama has suggested worries me. I don’t think that health insurance should be private because it’s a non-value added industry. If we combine the total health risk for the entire nation we will as whole be better off. If you have a large enough risk pool and enough money then private insurance doesn’t make any sense.

My favorite has been the breathless cries that Obama is both a secret radical Muslim and has a scary preacher who hates America.

I think the secret to that one was revealed by that dumbass woman from the video Amanda posted a while back: “[Obama’s Christianity is] not the Christianity I know.  That’s not the Christianity that’s in the Bible.”

Obama’s Christianity isn’t real, as evidenced by the scary preacher who hates America (criticising America is like criticizing Jesus!) and therefore he is a Muslim.

I had an asshat comment on my blog with the statement “Obama wants babies to die alone in buckets.”

“Obama wants babies to die alone in buckets.”

Better than having multiple babies in the _same_ bucket!

These last two comments are full of win.