Jon Stewart nails GOP "bipartisanship"

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Sean Hannity finds his market niche

Yep, Conservative Victory is right between the douches. Via.

What's it like living near Roger Ailes? Not. Fun.

Jacob Weisberg writes about his experience living in the same town as the head of Fox News:

Twenty years ago, my wife and I bought a weekend house in the town of Garrison, N.Y... We love the place for its scenic beauty, its peace and quiet, and its old-fashioned sense of community... 

A few years ago, we found ourselves with a new neighbor. Roger Ailes, the chief executive of Fox News, seemed to be looking for something different when he moved to Garrison: not an escape, but a new arena for conflict. He bought the soothing local weekly, The Putnam County News & Recorder; named his wife, Elizabeth, publisher; and set about transforming it into The New York Post with field hockey scores. He fortified his hilltop property by buying up surrounding homes and installing an underground bunker with six months of survival rations. He began appearing at local meetings...with bodyguard and lawyer in tow, demanding to be heard in opposition to a zoning plan intended to limit future development. He drafted Republican candidates to run for town offices. 

...Ailes dealt with Richard Shea, the well-liked and, as it turned out, ­impossible-to-intimidate supervisor of the small encompassing jurisdiction of Philips­town, by threatening, “I will destroy your life.” Shea is a born-and-bred local who runs a contracting business — precisely the kind of “little guy” Ailes claimed to be representing against environmental elitists. Others who crossed the Aileses...reported being threatened with lawsuits or Fox News trucks at their doorsteps, or in one case, being trailed by News Corporation security officers. Without the restraining influences of his parent company, Ailes has acted out in ways that terrified even his minions. Sherman says a young conservative who was imported to edit The News & Recorder became so frightened by Ailes’s surveillance of the staff and creepy personal comments that he quit and fled town. His replacement as editor, a destitute man’s Sean Hannity, continues to denounce critics as “anarchists” and “anti-Christian.” 

Garrison is the key to understanding Ailes because it’s a microcosm of what he’s spent his career doing to the country. He could have moved there to live and let live. Instead...he recapitulated the culture war he was already busily inciting at a national level. Within a short time of his arrival, town meetings turned ugly. Issues of patriotism, religion and political correctness overtook the normal debates about road paving and property taxes. Single-handedly and almost instantaneously, he injected a peaceable civic space with an aggression and unpleasantness that weren’t there before.
 

Billionaire Tom Perkins is the Small Mind of the Day

Tom Perkins is a billionaire venture capitalist. And he had a doozy letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal: 

I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. 

There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a "snob" despite the millions she has spent on our city's homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?

Hey, I can make my own Coke label? Done!

Hey Mike Huckabee, who is "Uncle Sugar"?

This is the former Arkansas governor's nuanced view on how Democrats think of women:

“If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing them for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it.”

 Um ... "Uncle Sugar"????

Nothing provokes God like a civil union

Susanne Atanus (Republican) is an Illinois congressional candidate. She is also a moron:

"I am a conservative Republican and I believe in God first. God is angry. We are provoking him with abortions and same-sex marriage and civil unions. Same-sex activity is going to increase AIDS. If it's in our military it will weaken our military. We need to respect God." 

Joshua Black is the Small Mind of the Day

Who is Joshua Black? Oh, just a candidate for Florida House District 68.

Why do we care about him? I guess because he wrote this:

"I'm past impeachment. It's time to arrest [Barack Obama] and hang him high."

Is Joshua Black a Republican? Why, yes, he is actually. Why do you ask?

If there were a Hell, it'd have a special place for Oregon's GOP

Oregon's GOP really is a piece of work. Take its latest "gun raffle" idea. The GOP recently announced a dinner to honor Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln. And said party will award an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle to the lucky gun raffle winner.

Er, but weren’t Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln both killed by assassins using guns? Yes, they were, huh? Anne Marie Gurney, the GOP party's vice-chair, explains: 

"Every time we do this we get asked if we are trying to be provocative, and honestly we are not."

According to the Oregonian, Gurney “said it didn't even occur to the county party leaders that King and Lincoln had been killed by guns.  It's simply the time of year that the legacy of the two leaders is celebrated, she added.”

So we have two possibilities: either the GOP leaders are morons or lying morons.

But after a heap of negative attention, the gun raffle was called off! Now here’s my favorite part—get a load of the GOP’s “apology” for this boondoggle:

In our enthusiasm for celebrating Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln and the U.S. Constitution, our Multnomah Republican Party issued a press release that was unfortunately easily misunderstood. The GOP stands for individual liberty, lower taxes, smaller government and individual responsibility. We apologize if people were hurt by the message being marred by insufficient wording and/or cynical misinterpretations by those who disagree with us politically.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker

"What an asshole."

—House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), speaking of Rep. Steve King (R-IA)

Lady Theresa Thombs is the Small Mind of the Week

"We know we didn't come from monkeys! Ladies and gentlemen, they're using your tax dollars to brainwash our children into socialist issues and ideas and it is time for it to stop."

—Texas Board of Education candidate Lady Theresa Thombs (Republican)

Richard Venola is the Small Mind of the Day

Richard Venola is a former editor of Guns & Ammo magazine. What’s his nuanced position on gun control in America?

“The time for ceding some rational points is gone.”

Oh. It should be pointed out that Mr. Venola was charged with murder last year. It seems he got into an argument with a neighbor, so Venola shot him to death.