The world is wacky and zany in GOP politics: Rush Windbag has ordered a fatwa on Newter Gingrich.

Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush Limbaugh today, happened to notice that none of the current GOP candidates is worthy of running for the office. Seems they’re either not crazy enough or they support RomneyCare or they’re just wingnuts. Who knew? It’s time for Elmer Fudd to go hunting.

My husband played me about a 3 minute video of Mr. Limbaugh complaining that children expect to be fed during the summer. I kid you not. The man is complaining about feeding needy children.

I encourage readers to purchase two copies of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism – one for themselves and one as a Christmas present for their right wing uncle. That uncle might well stay with Skocpol and Williamson’s highly readable and well-crafted study to the end without throwing it down in anger – something I can’t say with much confidence about my book with DiMaggio.

From athena1 at The Dissenter, a roundup of Occupation stories and pictures from around the country and beyond.

When Willard let it slip last week that he agrees with 90% of the world’s climate scientists about global warming, I was wondering how long it would take before the Two Minutes of Hate would commence.

Well, it’s arrived.

American politics has taken a bloody turn. Much of the Right’s agenda is punitive and built upon vengeance against those they have defined as domestic enemies. They seek to disenfranchise their political foes, deny health care to “others,” leave the elderly to die alone in the streets, and abandon public schools so the privileged can use the tax money for their exclusive private schools.

Hell, at this point, maybe El Rushbo or Sean Hannity should jump in.

Actually, the problem is, while Rush may be used to downing ribs with that many calories, the rib–yes one rib– enjoyed by the First Lady at Kelly Liken in Vail, Colorado with her daughters, while tasty, carried less than half that caloric load.

Right now, the public isn’t ready to believe an argument that Jared Loughner was motivated by right-wing rhetoric. Fortunately, nobody has said that, because it’s the wrong claim to make. Nobody has claimed that crosshairs on a map or talk of “Second Amendment remedies” is specifically to blame (some on the right have blamed heavy metal music and a skull in his backyard, and that’s just as silly). The main claim is that the toxic stew of noxious rhetoric, particularly in Loughner’s home district and home state of Arizona, creates an environment that amps up a lunatic fringe. Loughner couldn’t help but trip over that, and indeed his writings do have a cockeyed resonance to some of the really far-right groups like Posse Comitatus and the Patriot movement. That doesn’t make those practitioners of angry rhetoric culpable, but it sure doesn’t mean what they’re doing helped, either.