As a follow up to yesterday’s piece on Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s selective memory of the civic activities of the  Yazoo Citzen’s Councils, I’d ike to direct Stinquers to Atlantic Monthly blogger Ta Nehishi-Coates’ must-read posting on the true activities of the local chapter Haley Barbour’s favorite gathering of good ol’ boys. Coates writes:

In 1954, the NAACP determined to bring five test cases to force integration in the Mississippi public schools. Yazoo County exhibited some of the worst disparities in the state, spending $245.55 on every white child, but only $2.92 per black pupil. So the NAACP gathered fifty-three signatures of leading black citizens of Yazoo City, the county seat, on a petition calling for integration.

Their courage was met with outrage. Sixteen of the town’s most prominent men called for a public meeting, to form a White Citizens’ Council and respond to the petition. Several hundred turned out on a hot June night, including journalist Willie Morris, who watched in mute disbelief as the best men of the town outlined their response: Read more »

Remember when the BP oil spill was being touted as “Barack Obama’s Katrina“? Despite the fact that Coast Guard vessels were on site working the spill from day one, and the Federal government mobilized heavily to contain the disaster, partisan critics of the Obama Administration insisted that not enough was being done to prevent oil from reaching Lousiana shores. And because it is an article of faith among the news media that every instance of Republican incompetence, corruption or greed must be counterbalanced by a corresponding incidence of Democratic incompetence, corruption or greed much of the new media and the chattering classes seemed perfectly happy to go along with the idea that the BP oil spill was, indeed, “Barack Obama’s Katrina.” Of course, to sucessfully argue this point it was necessary to show that there were effective countermeasures available that the administration, either through sloth or incompetence, was failing to implement. Enter Lousiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Always ready to savage the government for doing too much useless volcano monitoring, Jindall took to the airwaves to denounce the administration for not doing enough useful berm building. Berms, we were told over and over again, were the immediate, desperately needed, effective solution to the oil spill problem that the Administration was, for inexplicable reasons, failing to implement. There was only one little problem with this urgent claim: the experts disagreed. The building of berms, they told us, was an expensive way to accomplish very little. But never mind. All we heard from Jindall, the right-wing talks shows and much of the media was berms, berms, berms… and so under pressure from local legislators and the relentless, right-wing message machine, the Obama administration relented and pressured the Army Corps of Engineers to approve Jindal’s dubious project.  Read more »

Jim DeMint recently had some choice words for Harry Reid and Senate Democrats. Incensed at Reid’s plan to keep congress in session until several key spending bills and an arms control treaty had passed, DeMint noted just how un-Christian a thing this was to do:

We shouldn’t be jamming a major arms control treaty up against Christmas; it’s sacrilegious and disrespectful,” he told POLITICO. “What’s going on here is just wrong. This is the most sacred holiday for Christians. They did the same thing last year – they kept everybody here until [Christmas Eve] to force something down everybody’s throat. I think Americans are sick of this

As logically unassailable as DeMint’s brilliant analysis of the sacreligious underpinnings of Reid’s move is, we think his most salient and insightful revelation is just how sick the American people are of Jim DeMint being forced to go to work right on up to Christmas Eve itself. This new insight piqued our interest and made us wonder: what other things does Jim DeMint think that the American people are sick of? So we did a little research and came up with the following. After the jump:  Five Things the American People are Sick of (according to Jim DeMint) Read more »

If you haven’t seen it yet, you should. This video should be required viewing for anyone who is preparing to go on Fox News:

[ Crooks & Liars Flash video not available. ]

Sadly, I have a pretty strong feeling Rep. Anthony Weiner won’t be invited back on the network any time soon.

Via: Crooks and Liars.

“And, you know, they live in this fantasy world where it’s always 1945. America’s always number one… Marc Rubio, who’s the new teabag senator from Florida, the new — the new Bobby Jindal, I think, he made a speech, it was astounding. And this is not uncommon for a Republican to talk about this at the CPAC Convention. He said this is the only country in the world where an idea that started out as an idea on a cocktail napkin could wind up being traded on the stock exchange. No, other countries have napkins and stock exchanges. But you see, this is their room full of balls at Chuck E. Cheese. Their fantasy world they live in.”

–Bill Maher, on Fareed Zacharia’s GPS (12/5/2010). 

Remember Sarah Palin’s infamous death panels lie which was intended to derail the Health Care Reform Act? The charge was that under so-called “Obamacare” government burocrats would have authority to determine which needy patients live and die based on an economic calculus that weighs those individuals’ potential benefit to society against the cost of their treatment. The lie grew out of a dishonest representation of the President’s call for comparitive effectiveness studies on medical treatments that would save the government money by identifying and steering patients towards the most effetive treatments for their ilnesses. The theory was that ineffective treatments are simply a waste of money, and patients will most likely benefit from avoiding them. The death panel lie was so outrageous yet so pervasive that it was crowned Politifact’s Lie of the Year for 2009.

Well, fast-forward a year and guess what: we’ve finally got those death panels Sarah Palin warned us of. But don’t expect Palin, the GOP leadership or Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks to raise a fuss. That’s because these death panels are in Arizona and are a result of the GOP led legislature deciding that discontinuing Medicaid funding for certain organ transplants –even though this would mean almost cetain death for some 100 indigent patients–  was well worth the $4.5 million a year savings it would bring:

Read more »

The National Air and Space Administration‘s announcement that it will hold a news conference tomorrow to speak on a discovery of “astrobiological significance” has got the blogs and news media a buzz. Theories on what NASA is about to reveal vary wildly, from speculation that the Space Agency will annouce that signs of life have been discovered on one of Saturn’s moons, to talk of newly discovered exotic life forms here on Earth that portend possible future discoveries beyond our planet. Having perused the vast literature and spoken with mulitple experts in government, academia and industry we here at Stinque have weighed the evidence, eliminated the impossible, pushed the improbable off to one side and come up with a list of what we believe are 10 plausible discoveries that NASA might reveal at tomorrow’s press conference. And here they are, in no particular order: Read more »