Such effing bullshit. Such liars. Conservatives live in a completely manufactured reality, which is why their ideas and actions are so destructive and poisonous.

MLK and conservatives

by digby

Judging by a cursory look at the news this morning I see that the right wingers are fully engaged in the annual airbrushing of their real relationship to Martin Luther King. It’s sort of become a tradition.

Here’s Perlstein to set the record straight:

‘When Martin Luther King was buried in Atlanta, the live television coverage lasted seven and a half hours. President Johnson announced a national day of mourning: “Together, a nation united and a nation caring and a nation concerned and a nation that thinks more of the nation’s interests than we do of any individual self-interest or political interest–that nation can and shall and will overcome.” Richard Nixon called King “a great leader–a man determined that the American Negro should win his rightful place alongside all others in our nation.” Even one of King’s most beastly political enemies, Mississippi Representative William Colmer, chairman of the House rules committee, honored the president’s call to unity by terming the murder “a dastardly act.”

Others demurred. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond wrote his constituents, “[W]e are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case.” Another, even more prominent conservative said it was just the sort of “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.”

That was Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, arguing that King had it coming. King was the man who taught people they could choose which laws they’d break–in his soaring exegesis on St. Thomas Aquinas from that Birmingham jail in 1963: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. … Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.”

That’s not what you hear from conservatives today, of course. What you get now are convoluted and fantastical tributes arguing that, properly understood, Martin Luther King was actually one of them–or would have been, had he lived. But, if we are going to have a holiday to honor history, we might as well honor history. We might as well recover the true story. Conservatives–both Democrats and Republicans–hated King’s doctrines. Hating them was one of the litmus tests of conservatism.’

More

he does watercolors. mostly landscapes, but a few nudes…

‘Git ‘im offna stage! He’za soshulisd!’

The robots are roaring. Signifying the will of the one percent. It is all they do; all they are. I wonder how that feels, to be that character. Real-life Stephen Colberts, owned and operated by greedhead orcs.

‘There is no redeeming value to shame or guilt,’ unless you’re a conservative, and then it’s all that keeps you from serial rape and murder. Thanks, religion.

Alan Grayson posted on Democratic Underground. This is what he wrote:

Santorum: Selling the Law to the Highest Bidder

It’s getting really hard to be topical. In the issue of New Yorker magazine dated January 9, 2012 – that’s today — the lead article is about the rise of Newt Gingrich.

Newt who? Newt Gingrich? Is he the guy who thought that if he stuck four fingers between the buttons in his shirt, he actually became Napoleon?

(By the way, America, Newt Gingrich is very disappointed in you. I just thought you should know that.)

But this note is not about Newt Gingrich; it’s about Rick Santorum. Who remains topical until 8 p.m. tomorrow, when the polls close in New Hampshire. Because New Hampshire Republicans are finding it difficult to square a Santorum state ban on contraception with the motto “Live Free or Die.”

But this note is not about contraception; it’s about weather forecasts. Which are always topical.

Rick Santorum tried to ban weather forecasts. Actually, not all weather forecasts. Just government weather forecasts.

I realize that you could possibly be a little skeptical about that, so here is the bill, at the official Senate website. Sections 2(b) and 2(d) of the National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005, S. 786, 109th Cong., 1st Sess.

By the way, Santorum introduced this bill a few months after four different hurricanes hit Central Florida, where I live. In one of those hurricanes, a big chunk of my roof collapsed, right into the living room. So weather forecasts are sort of important in my community. A matter of life and death, you might say.

Now you must be thinking, “Wow, that guy Santorum is a REAL conservative.” Santorum recognizes that government weather forecasts are meteorological socialism; they are a serious infringement on your constitutional right not to know whether it will rain tomorrow. Santorum sees that weather forecasts are a government takeover of the skies. In fact, Santorum is such an astute and profound conservative thinker that he probably realizes that traffic lights are a government takeover of the roads.

But this note is not about traffic lights. It’s about Rick Santorum and government weather forecasts. And why Rick Santorum tried to ban them.

Here’s why. It’s because AccuWeather is a commercial weather forecasting company, and AccuWeather employees gave Santorum more than $5,000 in campaign contributions. Then he introduced the bill. Which subsequently and consequently led to Santorum being named as one of Congress’s “most corrupt politicians.” Which is saying a lot.

I can picture the conversation:

AccuWeather lobbyist: “Here is $5000 in bundled contributions from AccuWeather. Now introduce a bill to ban government weather forecasts.”

Santorum: “OK. Sure. Why not? Whatever. I love this cheesecake.”

And that is what I’ve seen over and over again. This thing called “conservative ideology” has degenerated to the point where it exists simply to spew out rationalizations for something else entirely: whatever the corporate lobbyists want.

A topic that will remain topical, I’m sure, well after the polls close in New Hampshire tomorrow night.

Courage,

Alan Grayson

I hope I get a chance to vote for this guy someday. For any office, period. Preferably President, 2016.

oh, lilly.
she’s dying behind me
perhaps already gone
the old feral patch-cat
breathing her last
pitched into the bowl
nose spraying water
now she lies down.
don’t want to take her
to sterile steel table
she’s never been
i’m letting her go
this way, her own.
two years of comfort
a lifetime of hard street
i’ll turn around soon
and she’s gone.

Source

SETI

We’ve started searching our Kepler SETI observations and our analyses have generated some of our first candidate signals. Each of the signals below is shown in a pair of plots, one from an observation of Kepler Object of Interest (KOI) 817 and one from an observation of KOI-812. During an observation, we alternated between targets to enable us to rule out signals seen coming from two different places in the sky. If we see a signal coming from multiple positions on the sky, like the ones below, it is very likely to be interference. The signals below are undoubtedly examples of terrestrial radio frequency interference (RFI).

What do these plots represent?

These are plots of electromagnetic energy as a function of frequency and time. Brighter colors represent more radio energy at a particular time and frequency. For example, a radio station transmitting at 101.5 MHz would produce a large amount of energy near that frequency.

Why are these signals interesting?

These signals look similar to what we think might be produced from an extraterrestrial technology. They are narrow in frequency, much narrower than would be produced by any known astrophysical phenomena, and they drift in frequency with time, as we would expect because of the doppler effect imposed by the relative motion of the transmitter and the receiving radio telescope.

What’s next?

These first results are tests of the algorithms we’ll apply to all our observations of Kepler planets. During the coming weeks, we’ll be posting more of our results as we process the nearly 50 TB of data we collected in early 2011.

By choosing Only Mildly Crazy With A Dash Of Cruel.