chesh's stepmom posted:

Hope all is well with the new living arrangements! I wasn't sure, but thought I'd ask if you were thinking about sending your dad anything for his birthday.
He gave me 2 ideas last week. I have another idea of my own but may use one of these if mine doesn't work out.

1- A membership to heritage.org ( I'm pretty sure it's org not com) Rush Limbaugh promotes it
2- Stuff from oreilly.com

Let me know if you are or are not using any of these. Maybe you're just sending a card.

XXOO

chesh's response posted:

I will not be getting him these things.

BullitNutz posted:

Send him Mein Kampf (or if you can find it, the Kloran) and say it's pretty much along those lines.

the posted:

I don't think I'd ever speak to my parents if they were diehard conservatives.

Keshik posted:

Yeah, that's the part where I was being way more polite than I felt was appropriate because my friend, who'd accused me of ignorance, clearly had no understanding of the concept of the social contract or of any political philosophy.

But yeah, that really does represent the best of the arguments being produced by the right-wing. My friend works in our nation's capitol for a non-profit that specializes in training conservative political operatives. His mindset is what is being taught to hundreds of people who will work in the political arena and on the staffs of major policy makers.

That is frightening to me.

Pungent Mammy posted:

Oh my god my dad is insane. I'm actually scared now.


This is after I sent him a clip of Glenn Beck screaming at a caller. He's insane. I didn't want to believe it but he is.

quote:

This morning, I was awoken by my alarm clock which is powered by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I took a shower in the clean, safe water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the channels regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration had determined the weather was likely to be, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast, consisting of food inspected by the US Department of Agriculture and taking medicine determined to be safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US Congress and kept accurately by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I got into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and set out to work, driving on roads built and maintained by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, stopping on my way to purchase additional fuel of a composition and quality level determined and inspected by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and the US Mint and regulated by the Federal Reserve System. I also stopped to deposit my mail to be delivered via the US Postal System, before I dropped my kids off at the public school, operated by my local government under guidance from the US Department of Education.

After work, I drove my NHTSA-approved car back home on the DOT roads, to a house which had not burned down in my absence thanks to state and local building codes and the fire marshal's inspection, and which had not been plundered of its valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then logged onto the Internet, which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense, and posted about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government CAN'T DO ANYTHING RIGHT.

FronzelNeekburm posted:

Originated in LF, courtesy of randomnoise.

publicblast posted:

So that's where these e-mails are coming from.

chesh posted:

President Barack Obama made good on his promise on postpartisanship as people from every ideological and political stripe regard his Nobel Prize and unite in asking "what the gently caress?"

crazy aunt posted:

I'm tellin' ya honey . . . it's all part of a bigger 'global' plan! I mean . . . give me a break ~ even SNL has been dishing on just how much Mr. Obama HASN'T accomplished during his first 10 months in office!!! If this bestowal of such prestigious honor isn't a misappropriate disgrace, I don't know what is!

chesh posted:

Can't we just agree it's silly without invoking a global conspiracy headed by the utterly useless Norwegians?

crazy aunt posted:

I find 'conspiracy' to be a tired out, overused term and a back-door for people who don't like to delve into Biblical prophecy . . . and by the way I said NOTHING about the Norwegians ~ And frankly ~ something of this magnitude, my love, doesn't deserve the label 'silly' - it's TRAGIC. However, by the reaction of the general masses, at least on this continent, I think we can all agree that this award had no merit.

dorquemada posted:

This email is a beautiful, shiny diamond. It gets the first two of its list exactly wrong. Sirhan Sirhan was a Christian, as was Issa. Hell, Issa is Jesus in Arabic.

EDIT: The Achille Lauro hijackers were extremists that happened to be Muslim, not Muslim extremists. I'm not sure on this point, though--they might have been Christians. The PLF (to which they belonged) included Christians and all flavors of Muslims, from Alawi to Sunni, and was at one point led by a Christian.

dphrag posted:

edit2: this guy is classy, calling for the permanent quarantining of HIV positive people,

dphrag posted:

Interestingly, this point is debatable:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/babyrape.asp

However Snopes' article is dated, and wikipedia links to a couple medical papers that describe single instances of an individual having been raped under the pretense it would cure aids, but I cannot find a wider based statistical study that confirms this is a widely held belief.

Interestingly, it may have been the very media that threw up a storm about it that created the folk belief, not the other way around. From Snopes: "Their study found 60% of participants first heard of the cleansing theory in the media"

HipGnosis posted:

I'd love to see the person who reads this and says, "Yeah! gently caress Obama's ice cream!"

Like...what do things like this even mean. It's like they took literally every annoying aspect of a chain email (bullshit, wistful anecdote, vague connection to politican of the moment) and created a brand of supercrazy.

cumsitter posted:

Regarding H1N1:


At first he uses smart people words and that makes me begin to agree, but then he pimps out his favorite fish oil, like a bodybuilder who is being sponsored by a supplement company. Tell me why it is bullshit.

He also wrote this article, which uses medical terms and is thus persuasive:
http://www.newsmax.com/health/vaccine_swine_flu/2009/07/07/232717.html

quote:

NOTE: Has anyone ever heard a new government official being identified as a devout Catholic, a devout Jew or a devout Protestant...? Just wondering.

Gripen5 posted:

I still don't understand at all, the libertarian definition of the word tyranny. I suppose it is like the conservative use of the word liberal. A catch all word for stuff/people I don't like.

Heatmonger posted:

And we have to watch an American elected leader, who has sacrificed nothing himself, but has taken handouts for college, housing, and everything else he has, apologize to Europe and the Middle East that our country is "arrogant"! That’s on-the-job training for you America!

Toasticle posted:

Sorry I'm a retard, meant at-will not right to work state. When you can be fired for no cause it's that much harder trying to prove you were fired for the wrong cause.

Plus to be honest I'm half relieved. There is a limit for listening to daily venom filled rants like that before it really does start to affect you.

Childlike Empress posted:

No signs or anything indicating that it was a student project. Not that that means any ornaments on the tree represented the Obammunist Atheist Gay Death Panel Plans for America, but I just remember thinking, "With all this nice, elegant stuff around, wtf is up with Crazy Tree?"

quote:

“I was doing some volunteer work with SAGE at the Gay Community Center in NYC. SAGE is an organization that helps elder gay people by providing them social activities and a community space to hang out with their peers," says Hedda Lettuce.

He continues, "It was a festive afternoon for our task of the day was decorating Christmas ornaments for the Presidential tree in the White House. As it turns out, the White House sends ornaments to various organizations, so the job is to make them dazzle in hopes that they will be proudly displayed at the big white mansion in our nations capital.

"So a few of us gathered around pots of glue, brushes and torn paper to decoupage the afternoon away. After I was done with my ornament, I discreetly signed it-xoxo Hedda Lettuce, let it dry, and then placed it in a box to be shipped to Washington. I completely forgot about it until yesterday when I received an excited phone call from Bertis, one of the executives at SAGE,” writes Hedda Lettuce.

Wiles posted:

It's basically one of the most egregious emails I have ever received and it absolutely baffles me that people even bother to make up this crap. I'm working on a refutation right now but I've almost given up hope. When the Iraq War started my mother started getting emails about a "prophecy" in the Qur'an of a eagle attacking "the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates". I whipped out my copy and showed her the surah listed in the email didn't even exist, to which she replied, "Maybe your copy is just organized differently." Not to mention the weirdness involved with a bunch of christian women talking about how the Iraq War was the fulfillment of islamic prophecy.

crime fighting hog posted:

Be honest, have any of YOU ever met the man?

Intel&Sebastian posted:

poo poo I didn't realize we elected Omar from the Mars Volta.

quote:

ESPN.com Helps Launch False "Obama Wants To Ban Fishing" Rumor

Conservative websites are up-in-arms this week over the Obama administration's new takeover plan that would outlaw recreational fishing in America. It's an egregious abuse of executive power, slightly mitigated by the fact that it's not remotely close to being true.

It all starts with an opinion piece written by Robert Montgomery for ESPN Outdoors, that opens with this ominous sentence: "The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing some of the nation's oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters." Which almost immediate led to this headline on the website Gateway Pundit:

quote:

Obama's Latest Assault on Freedom– New Regulations Will Ban Sport Fishing

The only problem is that these "regulations" don't exist. What Montgomery was writing about is the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force that has been charged by the White House with developing a comprehensive federal policy for managing the nation's waterways. Yes, they are interested in conservation and they are interested in setting new guidelines for fishing policies -- commercial fishing policies that are threatening to deplete our food supply. Except they haven't even gotten that far yet. All they've released is an interim report [PDF] that discusses what their goals are, none of which involve a ban on fishing. In fact, from what I can tell it's completely generic legalese that contains no actionable policy recommendations in it all. It says zip about recreational fishing, never mind any sort of plan to curtail it.

But that didn't stop other websites from running with the idea of Little Billy getting hauled off to Leavenworth for catching a minnow down by the crick. And, of course, tying it directly to Barack Obama's insatiable lust for power, even though he's probably forgotten that he even created it. (Read between the lines, sheeple! Just look at the contempt for sportsmen written all over his face!)

One blogger muses: "That a bill like this could even get this much serious consideration is an indication of just how far left Obama has shifted the federal government." Again ... there's is no bill, so it's kind of hard to consider it seriously. Most of these outraged complaints make reference to the ESPN column, but none seem to notice that it contains no evidence supporting their claims.

Montgomery even admits in his piece that the report makes no mention of sport fishing and that "the task force has shown no overt dislike of recreational angling." But it doesn't stop him from assuming that this is due to a secret plot to wipe out private fisherman, rather than complete indifference to something they have no interest in regulating. (You'd think a conservative would be thrilled to know the government doesn't care about his hobby.) The Bassmasters Tournament isn't really a threat to the dolphin population. In the mind of the anti-government paranoid, however, there's a straight line from "marine spatial planning" in the Gulf of Mexico to FBI agents putting police tape around your backyard pond.

Will the task force eventually recommend a lot of things that conservatives hate? Probably. Should they have kept the public comment period open longer to allow sportsman to have their say? Maybe. But even the snootiest of snooty liberal elitists isn't stupid enough to ban fishing. After all, once all grandmothers and disabled kids are shipped off to their Aleutian Islands concentration camps to save money on medicine they're going to need some way to feed themselves.

Skallagrimsson posted:

Robert A. Hall is a Marine Vietnam veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts State Senate.

quote:

So we just passed a health care plan written by a committee whose chairman says he didn't understand it, passed by a Congress that exempts themselves from it, signed by a president who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, ... and financed by a country that's broke?"

quote:

Not true. Information about the statuses of both Barack and Michelle Obama's licenses is readily retrievable, both show no record of any disciplinary actions or pending proceedings, and the elapsed time for searches we performed on their information was comparable to that for searches on information about other names in the Illinois ARDC database.

ApathyGifted posted:

Someone just posted the Walk Naked in America Day bullshit on my facebook. There's been a fuckload of just stupid, uninformed Conservatism coming out of my facebook friends lately, but this has finally initiated a great purge of idiocy from my friends list.

And 90% of this retardation is my extended family. Next family reunion is gonna be fun! And we have 3 family reunions a year!

RagnarokAngel posted:

Can someone clarify this to me? Never heard of it.

Mordiceius posted:

A new one from my step dad:

Taerkar posted:

It amazes me how these people claim that the postal service is 'broken'. It's pretty much the summation of how little they understand things.

Mordiceius posted:

Oh god! Obama is taking away our guns!

tek79 posted:

God wants New Orleans wiped off the planet because it's infested with welfare queens, details at 11:00!


The image, and some additional commentary are located here: http://www.thesniper.us/?tag=larmondo-allen

OrangeKing posted:

I still hate using this as an example of...well, anything, since it just picks two photo captions out of thousands taken during Katrina and both photographers think the verbs used were accurate. Obviously, it works as an easily digestible example of larger issues, but it always made me uncomfortable since it doesn't appear that anyone involved with the captioning or photography did anything wrong.

jackpot posted:

I'm so jealous of you people sometimes, goddamnit I never get any good emails. I have conservative relatives, but they don't send emails. The best I can do is an occasional mother-in-law email about Al Qaeda hacking FarmVille or something, but that's pretty rare.

quote:

The suspicion that Obama is an outsider

quote:

Perhaps the clearest evidence for this "foreigner in our midst" mentality

quote:

Perhaps subconsciously, Obama does remind Americans of when the U.S. was really occupied by a foreign power.

notcreativeenough posted:

Wasn't it Muslims who slammed the movie clamming they would never do that sort of organized terror campaign? Plus the movie had some important messages that were actually sort of anti-terrorist as well as anti-overreacting. Such as kidnapping a target and illegally detanining him as well as the overreaction by the military that would create a future generation of terrorists.

Hardcore Phonography posted: