Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 10:50:45 am
Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com Remember when Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal called on the GOP to stop being the "stupid party?" It was laughably obtuse even then, but since that pronouncement Jindal has charged fearlessly into territories of mind-numbing idiocy heretofore uncharted by Republicans. Jindal is currently pandering to whoever he thinks might ...

Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 3:56:02 pm
Credit: @aussiecred The far-right propagandists at Breitbart "news" are denying it, of course, but BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins is reporting that he has sources inside the Breitbart fever swamp telling him Donald Trump is paying them for their non-stop glowing coverage of the rude, crude billionaire. According to four sources with knowledge ...

Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 1:31:37 pm
Well, there's another bogus, heavily edited James O'Keefe-style propaganda video being frantically circulated all over the right wing media and blogs, attacking Planned Parenthood. Yes, again. I'm not going to embed this deceptive video, but here's a link to it at YouTube if you really think you need to see it. ...

Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 6:17:24 pm
We noted earlier that GOP presidential candidate Rand Paul met with far right racist anti-government rancher Cliven Bundy yesterday in Nevada, but tonight it's coming out that Paul and Bundy actually had a private sit-down meeting for approximately 45 minutes. The Nevada rancher said that he had expected only to ...

Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 1:34:44 pm
Time to clear up some misinformation. 1) "It wasn't about slavery." It was totally about slavery. How do we know that? Because the Confederate States were very clear about that particular fact in their Declarations of Secession. Take Mississippi for example: Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- ...

Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 1:13:27 pm
Image via Shutterstock One of the most popular password managers, LastPass, announced today that their network has been compromised. In a blog post at their website, CEO Joe Siegrist stated they have no evidence encrypted user vaults were stolen, or that any user accounts were accessed. However, the attackers did manage to ...

Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 4:49:21 pm
The Daily Beast has advance word on a report coming out in The Sunday Times that Russia and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen from the NSA by Edward Snowden, and that intelligence agencies are now engaged in "rescue operations" in hostile countries. I've been saying ever since ...

Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 5:42:24 pm
That massive data breach we wrote about last week was apparently much worse than first reported; it now looks like the (possibly Chinese) hackers may have the personal data of every single US government employee, including retirees and former employees. If true, this will go down as the worst security failure ...

Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 12:23:52 pm
Bennett Elementary, where this person teaches, is in the Frenship Independent School District. This encompasses a large part of southwest Lubbock, as well as adjacent rural areas. Bennett itself and the Frenship district offices are located in the community of Wolfforth, which borders Lubbock on the southwest. My former business ...

Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 3:53:54 pm
Today we're learning that the FBI is investigating a "massive data breach" of the federal Office of Personnel Management, involving the personal records of approximately four million people. Officials suspect hackers based in China are responsible for this wide-ranging penetration of federal data systems. The hack of government personnel records came ...

Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 6:49:15 pm
In 2008, I wrote about the awful stealth creationist bill signed into law by Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, and predicted it would lead to a giant step backward for science education. It gives me no joy to report, via Zack Kopplin (who's doing an awesome job of bringing this awfulness to ...

Wed, May 20, 2015 at 3:40:18 am
OMG Y2K WTF? I stole this title from a bumper sticker I saw a while back that said something like OMG GOP WTF. ☺ I was looking through an old file recently and came across a pamphlet I saved to show my kids, called Y2K Citizen's Action Guide. Here ...

Wed, May 6, 2015 at 3:54:24 pm
In her recent Time magazine piece, Pamela Geller denies that she and her organization, American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), were "asking for it" when their "Draw the Prophet" contest was attacked by Muslim extremists on Sunday. She claims they were fighting for "freedom," but how does she feel about the ...

Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 4:23:02 pm
YouTube This is one of those stories in which everybody involved sucks. California Republican Rep. Stephen Knight was recently confronted by anti-immigrant protesters from the group "We The People Rising" at his office in Simi Valley, and the conversation got so heated that Knight threatened to fight one of the protesters. "You ...

Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 1:55:02 pm
The Los Angeles Times editorial board is calling out the state legislature for caving in to the demands of the deluded, selfish anti-vaccination movement: California Lawmakers Should Pass the Vaccination Bill. Anti-vaccination parents showed up last week in Sacramento threatening to leave the public schools en masse, and the Senate ...

Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 2:02:56 pm
I've been arguing for a while that the gun lobby's focus on mental illness as a primary cause of gun violence is nothing more than a diversion from the real issue -- the appalling prevalence of guns in the United States, where there are more than 290 million guns in ...

Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 12:20:48 pm
YouTube In this ridiculous video from Rand Paul's campaign site, he says he wants to abolish the Department of Education, because of course he does. But Rand Paul's site gives us our funniest inadvertent right wing comedy moment of the day, because whoever put this together actually misspelled the word "education" in ...

Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 11:17:08 am
Indianapolis Star's front page editorial today on the controversial "Religious Freedom" law We are at a critical moment in Indiana's history. And much is at stake. Our image. Our reputation as a state that embraces people of diverse backgrounds and makes them feel welcome. And our efforts over many years to retool ...

Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 8:06:41 pm
Apple CEO Tim Cook drops the mic at the Washington Post. It's rare to see the head of a massive corporation put himself on the line like this; good on ya, Tim. Tim Cook: Pro-Discrimination 'Religious Freedom' Laws Are Dangerous. I remember what it was like to grow up in the ...

Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 8:18:27 pm
Tomorrow is the opening day of CPAC, the yearly gathering of right wing nutjobs, once again featuring white nationalist sponsors: Civil Rights Groups to GOP Presidential Candidates: Distance Yourself From CPAC's White Nationalist Ties. Today, People For the American Way, America's Voice, and ColorOfChange.org released an open letter to Republican ...

Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 9:49:43 pm
YouTube Brandon Wall of the Chicago Sun-Times dug up the full video of that Barack Obama campaign appearance in Pennsylvania in 2008, and it's fascinating to see the complete context of his remarks about autism and vaccines -- because it makes it extremely clear that he was not saying the "science ...

Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 12:08:24 pm
Today we find "explanatory journalism" site Vox digging up a quote by Barack Obama from 2008 and using it to argue that Obama Supports Vaccines Now -- but Pandered to Anti-Vaxxers in 2008. Chris Christie has come under fire for remarks suggesting that parents should have a choice in which ...

Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 8:30:22 pm
Death and The Anti-Vaxxer This is one blog post I've held off writing because it angers me beyond bearing, and scares me to death. rawstory.com 15 years ago, Andrew Wakefield, then a doctor, presented a paper to the famous medical journal The Lancet. In it he claimed there was a link between autism ...

Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 3:28:45 pm
YouTube Media reports on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's "prayer rally" made it seem completely unremarkable. Just some religious folks praying, that's all. Good clean fun for the whole Christian family! But Right Wing Watch supplies us with a video clip that shows the true intention of this religious right crowd -- they ...

Sun, Jan 18, 2015 at 7:03:40 pm
British author/journalist Howard Jacobson is not impressed with The Mighty Greenwald. So how fare our investigations into what makes someone want to kill cartoonists? (I'm assuming we know why they want to kill Jews.) Maybe, before pondering the education of a jihadist, we should ask a prior question: what makes ...