Thursday, May 05, 2011

Interview Today at Criminal-E

I'm being interviewed today by the phenomenal Scottish writer Allan Guthrie, at his blog, Criminal-E. Check it out!

Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Minnesota Republican Hates Neil Gaiman, Capitalism (UPDATED)

Here's the story in a nutshell:

Neil Gaiman is a writer. He's a very good writer.

He's also a very entertaining speaker. He's so good that groups pay him to come speak.

He is, he freely admits, expensive.

A group who receives an arts subsidy from the State of Minnesota had access to some state arts money.

They offered to pay Neil Gaiman his market rate to come speak at a small library. He accepted. He did the job he agreed to do, was paid the agreed-upon price and, as it happens, donated the money to a couple of worthy charities. Everyone was, it seems, quite pleased (see "very entertaining speaker," above).

A particular Republican state legislator, however, was apparently offended by a talented and successful person getting paid the price he'd bargained for, for work he agreed to do, and accused Gaiman, whom "he hates", of being a "pencil-necked weasel" and "stealing" from the State of Minnesota.

Neil Gaiman delivered an epic, yet gentle smackdown: The Opinions of a Pencil-necked Weasel-thief.

Check it out.

Update: Said legislator has now "apologized for the name calling" because his Mama told him to. But he still has a problem with Gaiman getting paid his usual rate because, and I quote, "he's extremely financially successful."

Wouldn't Dean be calling this "Class Warfare" if a Democrat said someone rich should be working for free just because he was rich?

Sunday, May 01, 2011

The Birther Circus Never Ends

The Next Birther Hero?

Latest Newspaper Column:

President Obama provided irrefutable evidence this past week that 25 percent of Americans, and 45 percent of Republicans, are blithering idiots.

Those are the percentages of both groups, according to to a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, who don’t believe the president was born in the U.S. and who therefore believe he is ineligible under the Constitution to hold the office.

Members of that group have held on to this belief despite the fact that President Obama has previously released his “certificate of live birth” from the state of Hawaii. They’ve held on to it despite the fact that the state officials responsible for public records have stated numerous times that the birth certificate is genuine.

They’ve held on to it despite the evidence that the archives of local papers from the time of President Obama’s birth show that birth announcements ran in those papers of a son born to Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama of 6085 Kalanianaole Highway in Honolulu.

Nothing will satisfy us, the so-called “Birthers” insisted, but the “long-form” birth certificate, something which I’ll wager the vast majority of Americans had never even heard of until the Birthers turned it into the gold standard for proving you were One of Us.

“Obama isn’t an American citizen” has become one of those Zombie Lies, the ones that just won’t die. When one right-wing politician ends up being forced to admit that yes, he or she actually believes that Barack Obama is, indeed, an American (which they usually do only after being cornered like a rat in a trap), another one springs up, ready to start the whole tedious process over again.

The media bear a great deal of the responsibility here, because they’ve given a platform, not only to what the president described as “carnival barkers,” but also to enough kooks, charlatans, hucksters and grifters to staff a dozen sideshows, and all under the guise of being “objective.”

Make no mistake: There are some statements and positions that, in a rational world, would entitle you to nothing more than being mocked and jeered like a sideshow geek. Calls of “Where’s the birth certificate!?” mark you as a clown just as clearly as if you were wearing a red nose and big shoes, and any news outlet who gives any hearing whatsoever to that sort of nonsense ought to just admit that they’re just there to entertain, hire some tigers and elephants, and start broadcasting from under a big striped tent.

You want proof that there’s no such thing as the “liberal media”? Liberal media wouldn’t show people like Orly Taitz or Donald Trump spouting their drivel without a laugh track running underneath it.

Finally, President Obama did what he does far too often, in my opinion: He caved in to the demands of the crazies. He released the “long-form birth certificate” they’d been demanding. It showed, as everyone sane already knew, that he was born right here in the good old U.S. of A.

Did that settle the matter? Of course not. Nothing will ever satisfy the wingnuts, and Obama was foolish to try. Remember that, to the obsessed conspiracy theorist, any evidence that contradicts the the theory is itself part of the conspiracy.

Cries of “forgery!” went up from the swamps of the right wing blogosphere, with one blogger purporting to have proved the inauthenticity of the document by examining it online. Ask any legitimate document examiner if such a thing is possible, and see how long it takes him or her to stop laughing.

Some took the path of sheer chutzpah, like GOP Chairman Reince Priebus.

“Unfortunately,” Priebus sniffed, “[the president’s] campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our No. 1 priority — our economy.”

Well, Rance old son, maybe if you’d shown some of that “leadership” you people are always on about and helped quash this lunacy in your own party, including some of your potential nominees like “Mau Mau Mike” Huckabee, we wouldn’t have had to go through this rigmarole. If this twit beaned the president with a baseball, he’d complain about the time it took to put a bandage on the wound.

Then, of course, there’s the time-honored tactic of moving the goalposts, like CNN commentator Erick Erickson, founder of the right-wing blog RedState.

“Once the birth certificate issue is dispatched,” Erickson wrote, “will he release his college transcripts? That’s the issue for me.”

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.