Shorter Jonah Goldberg: Jerry Falwell’s insane paranoia about gay people would be unjustified if THE GAYS WEREN’T SO OBSESSED WITH TURNING OUR KIDS INTO HOMOS!!!!
Jonah Goldberg, author of “Liberal Fascism” and “The Protocols of the Homos of SanFran.”
Kevin Drum points us to this nifty dialogue between an economist and an anti-globalist. Here are some of the better parts:
[Economist]: “We say we need to use some of the gains from trade to help workers hurt by globalization, but beyond the broad acknowledgment of that point, we don’t have much specific to offer. There’s the usual list, unemployment insurance, wage insurance, job retraining, help with relocation, food stamps, minimum wage, EITC, etc., etc., but most of these have been around for awhile and don’t generate much excitement or interest.”
[Skeptic]: “That’s because things like job retraining don’t work, though they seem to make people who still have jobs feel better, and the rest of the things on the list just help you put off taking a worse job than you had before. […] Let’s get to the bottom line since I have to get going, so what do we do?
[Economist]: “I don’t have the answer. As I said, when costs were concentrated on small groups of individuals it was easier to help. Now, with the costs so widespread and the benefits so concentrated at the top of the income distribution, there will be more resistance.”
[Skeptic]: “So that’s it? The rich will be unhappy so we can’t do it? Figures.”
[Economist]: “We have to keep articulating to politicians and the public that the costs are different now, they are widespread, and that the gains are concentrated at the top.
Gee, who woulda thunk that globalization and free trade would create, to quote George Carlin, “a few winners and a whole lotta losers?”
Some vintage journalism from Martin Amis’s The Moronic Inferno, offered without further comment:
Above: Cup your ear to the ethereal disco’s door
and, tonight, hear the new sizzling beats in 4/4
— Burn, baby, burn!
The Rev. Jerry Falwell is the most powerful, most convincing, most committed — and the least vulgar — of all the electronic Evangelicals. He is without the messianic tendency of James Robison (with his talk of ‘prophets’ and ‘new Jeremiahs’), and without the frank hucksterism of Pat Robertson. Falwell will last when the others are too bored, frightened or mad to continue usefully on the political wing. And if you ask him about his colonial mansion in Lynchburg, Virginia, his private airplane and airport, his tax-avoiding loans within his corporation, his bodyguards and gofers, he will tell you that material wealth is ‘God’s way of blessing people who put Him first.’
Let’s see if Dan Riehl is angry about something tonight.
Instapundit’s Backassward Poll
Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 01:16 AM
Well smack my keister and call me chappy.
So I click over to Instapundit’s Debate Poll and when it opens up, I get this below. Fourteen hours of travel today and the whole world’s gone insane? Conservative, or not, I think I’d probably vote for Fattah before downloading a Republican Ringtone to my phone.
See, there he goes again, because we were rummaging through Dan’s stuff last week, and when he called his cell phone to yell at us for stealing his cell phone, this is what we heard.
Above: We also took a picture with the camera-thinger
There must be lots more of these Republican ringtones, too. One time when we were minding our own business hiding behind a planter, John Hawkins of Right Wing News came walking by and his phone started playing “Stolen” by Dashboard Confessional.
We figured it was Duncan Hunter calling, because a girlfriend seemed unlikely.
…imagine Max Boot stamping on the human sense of decency — forever.
Above: “I am the author! You are the audience! I outrank you!”
Over at the Weekly Substandard, Max Boot, America’s roughest, toughest frail, has some boffo ideas about how we can make the surge work. I don’t really understand the point of the article, because I thought the surge was working already. I mean, sure, there’s been a lot of deaths, but the ability of top American generals to eat ice cream in Baghdad is at an all-time high! But when Max speaks, I listen, so let’s see what he has to say.
Occasionally, the local daily’s meager national/world news section calls my attention to some ironic juxtapositions. From page A3:
Victims of Eric Rudolph, the anti-abortion extremist who pulled off a series of bombings across the South, say he is taunting them from deep within the nation’s most secure federal prison, and authorities say there is little they can do to stop him […]
Rudolph’s long essays have been posted on the Internet by a supporter who maintains an Army of God website. The Army of God is the same loose-knit group that Rudolph claimed to represent in letters sent after the blasts […]
U.S. Attorney Alice Martin, who helped prosecute Rudolph for the Alabama bombing, said there is nothing the prison can do to restrict Rudolph or the supporter who keeps posting his writings, anti-abortion activist Donald Spitz of Chesapeake, Va.
And from page A5:
The trial of suspected al-Qaida operative Jose Padilla opened Monday with federal prosecutors arguing the U.S. citizen and two co-defendants provided money, recruits and military equipment for nearly a decade to Islamic extremists involved in violence worldwide […]
Padilla, a former Chicago gang member, has been in federal custody since his May 2002 arrest at O’Hare International Airport. He was initially accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States and held for 3 1/2 years as an enemy combatant at a Navy brig, but those allegations are not part of the Miami indictment.
He was added to the Miami case in late 2005 amid a legal battle over the president’s wartime detention powers involving U.S. citizens. His lawyers had fought for years to get him before a federal judge.
They also had fought for years to get into contact with their own client. Maybe they should have just added a middleman and corresponded via the Army of God Web site.
From Jerry Falwell’s book, America Can Be Saved:
I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!
Sadly, No.
Falwell dies at age 73
LYNCHBURG, Virginia (AP) — The Rev. Jerry Falwell has died, a Liberty University executive said Tuesday. He was 73.Earlier, the executive said Falwell was hospitalized in “gravely serious” condition after being found unconscious in his office.
Above: Fall well, departed traveler
Steve at The Carpetbagger Report has assembled a collection of Falwell’s greatest hits:
August 1980: After Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith tells a Dallas Religious Right gathering that “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,� Falwell gives a similar view. “I do not believe,� he told reporters, “that God answers the prayer of any unredeemed Gentile or Jew.� After a meeting with an American Jewish Committee rabbi, he changed course, telling an interviewer on NBC’s “Meet the Press� that “God hears the prayers of all persons…. God hears everything.�
July 1984: Falwell is forced to pay gay activist Jerry Sloan $5,000 after losing a court battle. During a TV debate in Sacramento, Falwell denied calling the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Churches “brute beasts� and “a vile and Satanic system� that will “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven.� When Sloan insisted he had a tape, Falwell promised $5,000 if he could produce it. Sloan did so, Falwell refused to pay and Sloan successfully sued. Falwell appealed, with his attorney charging that the Jewish judge in the case was prejudiced. He lost again and was forced to pay an additional $2,875 in sanctions and court fees.
October 1987: The Federal Election Commission fines Falwell for transferring $6.7 million in funds intended for his ministry to political committees.
[…]
February 1993: The Internal Revenue Service determines that funds from Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour program were illegally funneled to a political action committee. The IRS forced Falwell to pay $50,000 and retroactively revoked the Old Time Gospel Hour’s tax-exempt status for 1986-87.
[…]
1994-1995: Falwell is criticized for using his “Old Time Gospel Hour� to hawk a scurrilous video called “The Clinton Chronicles� that makes a number of unsubstantiated charges against President Bill Clinton — among them that he is a drug addict and that he arranged the murders of political enemies in Arkansas. Despite claims he had no ties to the project, evidence surfaced that Falwell helped bankroll the venture with $200,000 paid to a group called Citizens for Honest Government (CHG). CHG’s Pat Matrisciana later admitted that Falwell and he staged an infomercial interview promoting the video in which a silhouetted reporter said his life was in danger for investigating Clinton. (Matrisciana himself posed as the reporter.) “That was Jerry’s idea to do that,� Matrisciana recalled. “He thought that would be dramatic.�
November 1997: Falwell accepts $3.5 million from a front group representing controversial Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon to ease Liberty University’s financial woes.
[…]
September 2001: Falwell blames Americans for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’�
[…]
February 2007: Falwell describes global warming as a conspiracy orchestrated by Satan, liberals, and The Weather Channel.
We wish the best to Falwell’s family and associates, noting in prayer that Pat Robertson remains at large.
Greatest-hits bonus tracks:
Falwell on Brown v. Board of Education: “If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made…. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.�
We look forward to encomia from Thomas Sowell, Alan Keyes, and other commentators of distinction.
Below: “Blow them all away in the name of the Lord.”
Here I go again, being worse than Hitler in that I am about to engage in Looksism — a practice which, as I have been lectured to “enlightened” by my betters, is “cut from the same cloth” as racism, sexism, etc.
Allrighty, then. So here in my evil, Looksist lab I have been hard at work the last few days tinkering with a fine program — the result of which is seen so often on myspace and facebook profiles — provided by some fellow-travelers in reprehensible, superficial Looksism, who like me also refuse to see the inner beauty of every individual, no matter who or how self-evidently awful. Here are the results of my first attempt:
Nice, huh? But a bit too scattershot. I’m willing to bet a yield of one or maybe two ‘Look-alikes’ will make the point just fine. So now I’m ready to reveal my results. Using their software but incorporating with it my own complex “righteously crass” and “deserving cheap shot” algorithms, I’ve adapted the ‘Celebrity Look-alike’ program for… wingnuts! Enjoy the face pollution!
Batshit Islamophobe Debbie Schlussel = Motley Crue vocalist Vince Neil
=
NRO hack Byron York = Guitarist Gary McDowell of 80s New Wave band Modern English
=
I’ll give Matt Drudge credit for one thing: he gets some of the awesomest ads on the Internets. This one in particular is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen:
Environmental porn stars. That’s wicked. Coming next week: “Debbie Doesn’t Do Deforestation.”
Kevin Millar, you’ll always have a spot on the Red Sox’ payroll. W00t! Go Sawx!
…that said: if we lose Josh Beckett for an extended period of time, we’re pretty much screwed…
