HOW DO WE KNOW XENOPHOBIC TENDENCIES AND/OR OVERZEALOUS NATIONALISM AREN'T FIGURING PROMINENTLY in the emergency appeal by some State of Indiana pension funds to the United States Supreme Court vis-a-vis the bankruptcy of Chrysler, in turn explaining its Gretna Green marriage to Italian automaker Fiat?

(Not to mention the prospect of certain extreme "patriot" groups seeking to file amicus curiae briefs as are little better than screeds rehashing their pathetic nationalistic patsies about the defence of free enterprise in a "pure" form [think Ayn Rand here] being one with that of Our Antient and Peculiar Sovereignty and Sovereign Identity, and that the two must be interconnected and intertwined For Mutual Benefit.)

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THE DALAI LAMA, THE TIBETAN SPIRITUAL LEADER-IN-EXILE THANKS TO CHINESE "OCCUPATION" THEREOF for some 50 years now, has been overheard recently as suggesting that ongoing Chinese Government actions in what Beijing considers as Tibet Province are essentially "destroying an ancient nation and homeland" such as Tibet.

Doesn't this sound a little bit like certain "patriot" groups suggesting that certain actions of President Obama are somehow "destroying" Our Holy, Antient and Peculiar Sovereignty and Sovereign Identity, not to mention the inevitable patsy suggesting that G-d is about to "send various signs" as a "warning" that He is soon to Withdraw His Special Blessings Upon America, and that All Right-Thinking Americans should see these "signs" as a Warning to Reclaim America in His Image--as in a theocratic police state dominated by weird and unwholesome types passing themselves off as "religious" (Low Church more than anything) to cover up for their various "aberrations."

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IN WHAT MAY BE A FIRST FOR THE SO-CALLED "PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA," AS ONLY DECRIMINALISED HOMOSEXUALITY IN 1997, a week-long Gay Pride Festival is being held in Shanghai ... howbeit with a couple of concessions to prevailing local sensitivities conditioned by the Communist Party's overbearing influence:

1. There will be no "gay pride" march through Shanghai, out of concern that authorities might view such as being of the Tiananmen Square stylee (which still carries raw nerves in certain quarters around the Great Hall of the Peoples).
2. Promotional material therefor will be entirely in English--or should that be "Chinglish"?--to avoid attracting suspicions in conservative circles especially rooted in misinterpretation.

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HOW MANY OF YOU HAVE SEEN THE ADVERTS FOR ELATIONS GLUCOSAMINE AND CHRONDOITIN JUICE DRINK on TV in the guise of a "news" segment called "Brand Power--Facts and Value" (itself qualified by on-screen disclosure stating that BRAND POWER ADVERTISES NATIONAL BRANDS) ... and have been left wondering if consumers viewing the "Brand Power" ad for Elations are actually getting facts as much as value for money, or so implied?

Talk about claims getting obnoxiously nuanced....

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AND COME TO THINK OF IT: How does the Government of the Cayman Islands, itself a major offshore banking and financial centre as much as a popular dive tourism resort, substantiate its notion that they have no taxation of any kind to the point of its being, as it were, self-financing?

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STUDIES HAVE SUGGESTED THAT TAKING A MORE GRAPHIC, THOUGH STOPPING SHORT OF EXPLICIT, APPROACH when it comes to public-service messages for the likes of drugs can quickly tend to backfire.

Case in point: Graphic public-service messages on radio and TV, in both English and Spanish, airing in the Western states warning teenagers about the effects of methamphetamines for and on behalf of The Meth Project.

Considering the potential for where graphic messages, even if done in a careful and tasteful manner, can risk backfiring upon the target audience, some are probably wondering if the desired message should be toned down without losing its impact. For those thinking along these same lines, may I offer the following suggestion, vintage 1975 Southern California:

If the preceding doesn't produce the desired results--?

FINALLY! AN HONEST ADMISSION (FROM SO-CALLED "PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA," @ LEAST) THAT "PAY-TO-PLAY" COMES HEAVILY INTO THE PICTURE when it comes to scams in the "419" stylee, as actually received of Your Correspondent just moments ago (emphasis added):

Dear Friend,
First, I must insist on your confidence in this transaction. I am Mr. Ding Xiangsheng making this contact with you based on reliable
information available to me courtesy of internet business index and
confirmed by our local chambers of commerce and industry. Thus I
believe that you maybe be capable to provide me with a solution to a money transfer transaction of huge sums of money (amount not stated for security reasons) SOURCE: Please note that I would require a
measure of guarantee prior to commencement, as I am hoping to build our trust on sincerity of purpose and mutual understanding. Please also do not under estimate the need for total confidentiality throughout the course of this transaction.

dawned on us that we were paid barely enough to feed our families
while top Government officials control billions of dollars. The bank along with regulatory authorities from China and Hong Kong started an investigation into the losses of money and as a result a few of my colleagues and I went into hiding and have settled ourselves and our families. Due to our positions as being involved with the initial investigation, we cannot receive this money by ourselves or in our names at this time. Furthermore we had decided to remove this money and divide it accordingly pending when the investigation dies down.

This has occurred and I cannot leave the money unattended for much
longer for fear that it might be discovered. I here by solicit your
assistance to help take delivery of my share of these funds into your custody, and you will be adequately compensated with 20% of the sum. Suffice it to say that the total monies involved between my friends and I totaled over Four hundred and eighty five million United Statesdollars. It is my intention therefore having your understanding and co-operation that you invest 75% of these funds in your country in commercial real estate as well as low risk stocks and bonds on my behalf for a few years while the balance 5% will cater for all local and foreign expenses incurred in facilitating the transfer of this funds.

My projection is to conclude transfer of funds latest 14 working days from date of receipt of the following information by email (Your full name and address, your telephone and fax numbers and a brief profile of yourself to assure me of your capability). Our perfected modalities are remittance of stated funds appearing as you or your company's entitlement to your nominated account. The requested information will enable me commence the transaction and the paperwork from here. Please contact me immediately you receive this mail via my confidential email address thus signifying your capability and willingness to enable me give you additional details on our proposed course of action for getting these funds to you 100% risk free. Again I look forward to doing business with you and solicit your utmost confidentiality in this transaction.

Please respond via my confidential email account.

Yours faithfully,

Ding Xiangsheng.

So how much exactly is this "Ding Xiangsheng" asking for as a "measure of guarantee" beforehand? And is he insisting that such be wired to some out-of-the-way address in Macau, and more than likely near the casino district?

And Another Thing: Doesn't he realise all the while that his real intent is to bankrupt the vulnerable and easily-influenced, in particular such with limited savings they can ill afford to part with to corrupt and evil elements of the community?

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"I WANT PEOPLE TO STOP AND THINK: IT IS NOT ANTI-GOVERNMENT, IT IS ANTI-CORRUPT GOVERNMENT." Thus does Scott Roeder, suspect in last Sunday's infamous murder of Wichita abortionist Dr. George Tiller, attempt to "stack the deck" for The Associated Press in the name of "winning hearts and minds" over to his defence among especially the easily-led who see themselves, in their hubris, as "Real Americans" thanks to the corrupting influences of Fox Prolefeed in particular.

And attempt to nuance the whole so as to avoid "dropping hints" about the clear and present likelihood of his trial being on the same par as that of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for Crimes Against Humanity, characterised as it was with frequent outbursts from the defendent "himself" to such an extent that the proceedings were frequently in recess for extended times ... especially if Mr. Roeder resorts to such displays of contempt for the court and/or Justice as would make Saddam Hussein's such look like a day's trip to Six Flags or some Wisconsin Dells-model waterpark.

As if that weren't weird enough, the Southern Poverty Law Centre's Hatewatch blog is reporting where racist and white-supremacist forums and portals on the Information Stuporbahn are awash in rejoicing over Dr. Tiller's murder, as follows:

TALK ABOUT POTENTIALLY IMADMISSABLE LEGAL DEFENCES THAT THE COURTS ARE UNLIKELY TO BUY, even for The Pearl of Great Price: Witness what Richard A. Clarke had to suggest in an op-ed from last Sunday's Washington Post about certain prominent figures from His Fraudulency's Misadministration invoking what could best be called "9/11 Trauma" to excuse their trampling the Constitution underfoot to justify ur-RAHOWA on flimsy pretexts:

Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.

"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. "Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America."

I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years--on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping--were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock--a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.

I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote--which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission--and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.

The first response they discussed was invading Iraq. While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Somehow the administration's leaders could not believe that al-Qaeda could have mounted such a devastating operation, so Iraqi involvement became the convenient explanation. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea. Charles Duelfer of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group recently revealed in his book, "Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq," that high-level U.S. officials urged him to consider waterboarding specific Iraqi prisoners of war so that they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks -- a request Duelfer refused. (A recent report indicates that the suggestion came from the vice president's office.) Nevertheless, the lack of evidence did not deter the administration from eventually invading Iraq--a move many senior Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11. 

On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. courts and prisons would not work. Before the terrorist attacks, the U.S. counterterrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others around the world and had a 100 percent conviction rate in the U.S. justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available. Camps were established around the world, notably in Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners were held without being charged or tried. They became symbols of American overreach, held up as proof that al-Qaeda's anti-American propaganda was right.

Similarly, with regard to interrogation, administration officials conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures--such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times--would be the most effective.

Finally, on wiretapping, rather than beef up the procedures available under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the administration again moved to the extreme, listening in on communications here at home without legal process. FISA did need some modification, but it also allowed for the quick issuance of court orders, as when President Clinton took stepped-up defensive measures in late 1999 under the heightened threat of the new millennium.

Yes, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001--but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques--but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.

"I'll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities," Cheney said in his recent speech. But this defense does not stand up. The Bush administration's response actually undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the Constitution, which the vice president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.

The possibility of which was not lost upon Jon "Daily Show" Stewart three days later on his Comedy Central show, as thus:

In any case, the "9/11 Trauma" defence is something the courts may want to study for possible legal precedence under both common and statute law vis-a-vis legal applicability, especially where those in positions of power, confidence and trust came into the equation.

SO MUCH FOR THE CLAIM AMONG CERTAIN DISREPUTABLE GOLD-COIN DEALERS that gold is "the only asset as is not someone else's liability" in their advertising of late suggesting gold as a "safe harbour" investment in the face of Clear and Present Danger of Major Socioeconomic Dislocation Within Measurable Distance.

As in the kind targeting especially unsophisticated, ignorant, easily-led and socioeconomically-dispossessed elements of the community (the Great Unwashed, by and large) by way of media outlets so catering.

Mein Innkeeper Friend offers this "food for thought," which I present in the vein of a commercial for a major gold dealer fond of using subtle scare tactics in their advertising: "Imagine you were in the middle of the desert, miles from civilisation ... and you were given the choice of ten pounds of gold [120 troy ounces; gold, along with other precious metals, is measured by troy weight, where 12 ounces make up a pound] and ten pounds of fresh water.

"Which would you choose?"

*************

THE ZEALOTS AND TRUE BELIEVERS IN "STATES' RIGHTS" (AS PER THE TENTH AMENDMENT, UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION) vis-a-vis Federal socioeconomic stimulus funds may have had the last laugh with the South Carolina Supreme Court ruling that only the South Carolina Legislature, and not Governor Mark Sanford, has the power to delegate authorisation for use of Federal stimulus funds so allocated.

(Remember that Governor Sanford wanted to use said stimulus funds allocated to The Palmetto State to refinance its outstanding debt, consistent with his hard-wired Zealotry and True Belief in the discredited "low taxes=jobs=social stability and order" platitude. And @ the expense of its schools, its roads, its infrastructure and its unemployed.)

Let it be hoped that someone in Columbia's corridors of power considers having Governor Sanford removed from office for mental incapacity and incompetence, as provided for in the relevant sections of the South Carolina Constitution.

*************

ONE OF THE WORST IDEAS CONSERVATIVES WOULD HAVE AS AN IDEAL HERO AND ROLE MODEL FOR "RIGHT-THINKING" AMERICAN YOUTH, especially so the sort being brainwashed through National Christian Homeschooling, to study and emulate would have to be Anthony Mozilo, founder and chairman of the now-disgraced "sub-prime/Alt-A" mortgage lender Countrywide Home Loans.

I say this in view of Mr. Mozilo's indictment by a Federal Grand Jury on charges of Wire Fraud Involving a Financial Institution, Defrauding and Misleading Shareholders, Submitting False Financial Statements and Insider Trading vis-a-vis Countrywide's operations in service to the warped ideology of His Fraudulency's Misadministration calling for a Classless Ownership Society targeting in particular the Lower Classes heretofore deemed "chronically and habitually dependent on State welfare" to the point of "developing unhealthy tendencies towards State socialism or other un-American beliefs" through State welfare's "subtle influence."

Thus does Anthonly Mozilo join the Capitalism with American Characteristics Hall of Shame and Disgrace, alongside such other discredited "heroes and role models for American Youth" as Samuel Insull, "Tiny" DeAngelis, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Bernard Madoff, Ivar Kreuger, Bernie Cornfeld, OPM Funding and ESM Government Securities, among other honourees.

*************

STEREOTYPES ARE, TO THE CONSERVATIVE PROPAGANDA MASHEEN, AN EFFECTIVE "WINNING OF HEARTS AND MINDS" TOOL when the Lower Classes and others easily-led are in the target audience ... and the stereotypes can be made all the more crudely negative.

One such being the notion of undischarged bankrupts (the fact of which affects their credit histories for ten years) being somehow "fiscally or morally irresponsible" Joe Sixpack types not showing a "healthy respect" for Thrift based on Cash Economy and a Wholesome and Simple Home Life rooted in poverty, fecundity and stupidity (or so the conservative platitude in this case would suggest), which has been deflated by a newly-released study showing that the vast majority of undischarged bankrupts are well-off middle class and better types with good educations and health insurance offered through their employer, yet wind up with substantial medical expenses thanks to high deductibles and/or co-payments, or having conditions not covered by insurance without first exhausting the deductible.

Which brings up the crudity of numerous offers by so-called "debt negotiation" and "debt settlement" companies theoretically having "secret, inside contacts" vis-a-vis creditors as would (in theory) help those with substantial debts lower them to the point of settlement for only pennies on the dollar, and without recourse to costly bankruptcy proceedings--for a price, it turns out (not to mention "advice" against further contact with creditors to--in theory--improve the likelihood of negotiations with creditors towards final settlement, to be regarded as payment in full; in fact, such "negotiations" are unlikely to take place, which causes creditors to refer past-due accounts to collection agencies, said creditors claiming not to have heard of the "debt settlement" company in question).

If tempted to fall for such "debt negotiation" offers by third-party channels, or get high-pressure solicitations therefrom, may I suggest instead talking with your creditors directly about an ur-Offer in Compromise, which you can easily do for the cost of letter postage to the Customer Service Department of your creditor(s) politely explaining your circumstances. (For helpful advice, visit this website beforehand.)

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MEANWHILE, IN ZIMBABWE, THE SITUATION UNDER ROBERT MUGABE'S OUTRIGHT STATE OF DICTATORSHIP HAS BECOME SO CRASS that a South African television crew last year found where Zimbabwean prisoners were suffering from the effects of malnutrition, starvation and disease thanks to the rampant hyperflation as political weapon, food shortages and wholesale corruption.

The which has since attracted the attention of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which has begun to provide Zimbabwean prisoners with decent meals, blankets, soap and toiletries in the last few months; details of which have only now become made known in the media.

No wonder Mugabe's regime is in such desperate straits as they are....

IT MAY BE RATHER EARLY FOR INDECISION 2010 TO BE A MAJOR FACTOR IN THE NEWS, but if People For the American Way's Right Wing Watch has anything to say about it, such could be a major test of support for the ultra-right-wing Constitution Party in a mid-term campaign mostly dominated by Congressional and state races:

DO THE FOLLOWING REMARKS OF FORMER SENATOR RICK SANTORUM (AS QUOTED BY THINK PROGRESS) from Fox Prolefeed the other night reek of the condescendingly racist, with aspects of Archie Bunker/Alf Garnett-model crudity? (Emphasis supplied, know.)

And you have an African-American community, particularly in the poor inner city areas, we're looking at out of wedlock birthrates in three quarters to 75 percent (sic) of children being born out of wedlock. Marriage is an institution that's a bridge too far for too many African-American woman and is not desirable among African-American males.

Here we have a president of the United States who says that marriage is cool. You have respect for your wife, and you treat her with the respect and dignity that she deserves. And she is part of this team. And it's not just part of professional team, but it's also part of a personal, romantic team. I think that's all great. So I think it's important that he keeps having his date night. [...]

I think he has to realize that flying to New York is…self-indulgent. Go down to the corner bar and have a drink, a shot and a beer. It does not matter where you go with your wife, is that it's with your wife.

And when you get right down to it, boys and girls, such mindsets could be on the same plane of ideological crudity as apartheid South Africa's using beer halls in the black and "coloured" (mixed-race) townships as a means of controlling "inferior" peoples making up the majority of the population @ the expense of what the regime saw as a "privileged as of right" White Christian minority (remember the opening scene in A Dry White Season where some black rabble-rowser in one such beer hall before the 1976 Soweto Riots points out that the proceeds from said beer halls are turned over to the South African police and military as an ur-"Patriot Fund" for whipping up armed insurrection?).

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THE TIMING COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE INTERESTING, EVEN FOR RIPLEY TO TAKE NOTE OF: On this the 20-year anniversary of the Chinese government taking sadistic measures against pro-democracy student demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square (the which has been closed off by guards as a "preemptive" measure of the sort Machiavelli on steroids and amphetamines would certainly endorse), President Obama used an address @ Cairo University to the Muslim peoples of the world and the Islamic faith generally in calling for a renewed, healthy dialogue between our "morally superior" United States (heretofore regarded as a White Low Church Christian Nation now, tomorrow and forever) and the Islamic community of the world somehow strained thanks to His Fraudulency's Misadministration provoking ur-RAHOWA Against International Terrorism to distract the attention of the Lower Classes in particular (as love to see themseves as "Real Americans," remember) and appeal to their honest and simple feelings of True Patriot Love in All Thy Sons Command for as long as required.

And it was His Fraudulency's Misadministration more than anything as helped sow mistrust of America in the Islamic world (and, in return, having their right-wing propaganda droogs whip up distrust of Islam and Muslims among "Real Americans" Who Should Know Better, as if hard-wired in their insistence of America always having been, and always forever being, a White Low Church Christian Nation, never mind such a mindset having clear and present danger for corruption, waste, fraud, mismanagement, abuse of power and Maschienpolitik being excused as "perfectly natural [and yet] moral"--and all the more worse when you have alcoholics, drug addicts, sex fiends and maniacs, gamblers, chronic and habitual spendthrifts and the emotionally-disturbed in positions of power, confidence and trust).

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AND SPEAKING OF HIS FRAUDULENCY'S MISADMINISTRATION AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF ITS ACTS, DEEDS AND EXPLOITS upon our supposedly "morally superior" society and nation, Think Progress offers up the following transcript of an exchange between former Vice-President Cheney and Greta Van Susteren on Fox Prolefeed where the former Vice-President may have let slip An Inconvenient Truth which Fox Prolefeed's censors may have been ignoring all the while (emphasis added):

THE OLD COLLOQUIALISM THAT "GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE" COULD BE EQUALLY APPLICABLE to right-wing propagandists, especially the sort who specialise in "winning of hearts and minds" among especially the Great Unwashed in Podunk Center, Doo Wah Diddy and the Park & Flush Trailer Park, to cite the more obvious examples of "poor white trash" hubris made flesh.

Case in point, from the ConWebBlog adjunct of ConWebWatch:

One of the stranger sights we've seen lately is right-wingers' embrace of "news" sources, no matter how dubious, that reflect its preferred talking points--as illustrated by the ConWeb's embrace of an editorial on global warming published by a 9/11 truther on the Russian Pravda website.

That spectacle repeats itself in a June 2 CNSNews.com article by Fred Lucas that follows other right-wing media in embracing a Pravda website opinion piece lamenting "the American decent [sic] into Marxism."

Lucas claimed that the piece was "published in the once-official newspaper of the Soviet Union"; in fact, Pravda.ru, where the opinion piece appeared, is largely separate from the Pravda newspaper, with the website taking a much more sensationalist and nationalist approach.

Lucas fails to make note of the overall hateful tone of the opinion piece. For instance, it refers Rep. Barney Frank as "Senator Barney Franks [sic], a social pervert basking in his homosexuality." Moreover, the author of the piece has also attacked America as "a democracy where the rights of the minority, such as the homosexuals and Muslims, routinely trumps the rights of the Christian majority, who are viewed by the elites as a vast unwashed, ignorant economic unit to be taxed as needed, bled for the right causes ... in foreign wars and socially experimented on, at the elites' whim."

Are those sentiments Lucas and CNS endorse as well?

No wonder the right-wing media is as weighted with hubris as it is, not to mention a warped delusion of journalism being "the means which justifies the ends," no matter how vitriolic, crass or disrespectful for truth it has to be.

Remember Der Sturmer, as per one Julius Streicher back in Nazi Germany? (You know--the lurid and stereotypical depictions of Jews as filthy, perverted, greedy, sex-crazed; the whole lot ... cartoons depicting "Aryan" womanhood "under mortal danger" by Jews in the guise of snakes, rats and other vermin ... the motto @ the bottom of the front page warning that [in translation] THE JEW IS OUR MISFORTUNE!, not to mention the nameplate insisting they were "Germany's Weekly Newspaper in the Fight for Truth," notwithstanding an overzealously sensationalist tone bordering on the pornographic throughout ... Hitler himself admitting that it was the one weekly gazetta he read especially thoroughly, front page to back, and even a number of prominent Nazi Party leaders endorsing it as "essential" to the Peoples' Understanding of the Jewish Question....)

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CONSIDERING CONSERVATIVE ARTICLES OF FAITH FOREVER SEEING THE LOWER CLASSES AS A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER TO THE PREVAILING ORDER, you could just imagine them coming up with rather tasteless concepts galore by which to keep Kankerdom all the more pacified and in line long enough to keep their mouths shut and not "develop unhealthy interests in politics," among other Social Evils in the Conservative Playbook.

One especially likely such (though they don't want to acknowledge as much openly, For Obvious Reasons): A series of generically-packaged Adult Sex Videos priced ridiculously low to better attract the Lower Classes all the more, the sort lacking any sort of underlying plot, story or production values (as in little more than random sexual scenes, especially the sort where the "money shot" is drawn out to the point of unhealthy or obnoxiously unnecessary prominence); on occasion, such videos would likely include scenes of animal mating, bestiality, even pedophilia, "just to liven things up a bit," or so things will be explained internally, interspersed @ random.

And the background music being a rather bad insturmental arrangement of "Je t'aime ... moi non plus" which unintentionally becomes grating on the ears of Kankerdom reduced to so watching.