YouTube

Today on his radio show, Glenn Beck showed off those powerful reasoning faculties for which he’s famous, with a theory that President Obama is actually inviting all this crazy talk about impeachment in order to pass immigration reform. How does impeachment talk help pass immigration reform? He leaves that as a thought exercise for you, dear viewer.

But Beck does articulate a clear reason why Obama is now moving on to the impeachment thing — because “the birther thing is over, and the black thing is over.”

Yes, the raving freakazoid nut sandwich comes through again.

Have you noticed that for all the promotion and hype and promises, there hasn’t been a lot of… journalism happening at Pierre Omidyar’s very expensive journalism project, First Look? Not to mention the weeks that often go by before lonely articles appear at Greenwald’s branch, The Intercept?

Well, Pierre would like you to know it’s no big deal, because it’s probably going to take years before they figure out what they’re actually doing over there. Yes, years.

I expect we’ll be in this planning, startup and experimental mode for at least the next few years as we explore how to become integrated into people’s lives in meaningful ways. During that time, we’re going to continually test new ideas and approaches to use technology and journalism to achieve our mission.

A quarter of a billion dollars in funding and no need for advertising income sure takes the pressure off. No rush, folks. I’m sure it will be incredibly awesome some time around 2018.

YouTube

Voter apathy is a huge problem in the United States, and this year it’s an especially critical issue; the Republican Party has gone completely off the rails into non-stop obstructionism, with an agenda set by the reactionary religious right and the deeply destructive far right forces of the Tea Party.

I confess I don’t have any great ideas on how to overcome the apathy problem, but here’s one small thing I can do — present Michelle Obama’s video plea to get out the vote in 2014.

You may not think things can get much worse in our broken political system, but if the GOP gains control of the Senate this year all bets are off.

The religious right continues losing their reactionary culture war, as a federal appeals court strikes down Virginia’s ban on marriage equality.

And this ruling will also affect conservative bans on same-sex marriage in West Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, so it’s a significant defeat for the forces of atavism.

“We recognize that same-sex marriage makes some people deeply uncomfortable. However, inertia and apprehension are not legitimate bases for denying same-sex couples due process and equal protection of the laws,” the divided three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit in Richmond concluded.

[…]

The 4th Circuit opinion also will affect marriage laws in other states within its jurisdiction, including West Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Only Maryland has legalized same-sex marriage.

Israel and Hamas are trading accusations today; the informal cease-fire collapsed when explosions hit a Palestinian refugee camp playground and an area near Gaza City’s main hospital. Both sides are blaming the other for the blasts; Israel says they were caused by misfired Hamas rockets, while Hamas blames Israeli shelling.

The official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that at least 10 children were killed as they played in a park in the Shati refugee camp on the western edge of Gaza City. The Palestinian agency attributed the explosions to Israeli missiles.

But Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, denied that Israel had carried out any attacks at Shati or near the main Gaza City hospital, Shifa, saying those blasts “have absolutely nothing to do with us.” He suggested that the explosions had been caused by militant rockets aimed at Israel that had gone astray.

The missile or rocket explosion near Shifa hit an outside wall of the compound and caused damage but no casualties. Plainclothes security officers barred reporters from entering the compound to get close to where the rocket or missile fell.

YouTube

Here’s a great song from East LA’s own Los Lobos, performed live on eTown.

Dreams wash down the gutter
All my hopes in vain
Crows up on the rooftop
Laughing out my name

Here I am on the short side of nothing
Here I am on the short side of nothing

We danced all night as life stood by
We told another lie
Found a spot down by the roadside
There I closed my eyes

And here I am on the short side of nothing
Here I am on the short side of nothing
All alone, all alone
Can’t find my way home

Summer has come and the heat hangs low
No escape in sight
Sirens scream and lovers moan
Just like any other night

And here I am on the short side of nothing
Here I am on the short side of nothing
All alone, all alone
Can’t find my way home

The half-governor is ranting about impeachment again, and today she demands that the Washington Post get on board the Impeachment Express, just like they did in the good old days with Richard Nixon, or risk being “a bunch of wusses.”

Of course, if Palin had been around when Nixon was President, she would have been totally on his side, denouncing the “lamestream media” for persecuting this hero of conservatism. But let’s just gloss over that inconvenient appetizer, and get right to the word salad main course.

The list of Obama abuses and impeachable offenses is long. I challenge you to lift a finger and help protect democracy, allow justice for all, and ensure domestic tranquility by doing your job reporting current corrupt events fairly. If not, you prove yourselves incompetent and in bed with Obama, not caring one iota about media integrity.

Those running the Washington Post’s show now, compared to those during the Nixon era, are too afraid of being uninvited to the permanent political class’ cocktail parties and petty gossip fests, making you all a bunch of wusses. I challenge you to get to work.

- Sarah Palin

Enough has been written on the “who is who in Holocaust denial” edition of the Reason magazine:

Awful: Reason Magazine’s 1976 Holocaust Denial “Special Issue”
Reason Magazine Addresses That 1976 “Holocaust Denial Edition”

What follows is just a little footnote to that story.

On p.53 of that issue we see an ad for “The Veritas Reading Club”, a subsidiary of Devin-Adair Publishing Company. An assortment of various crackpot books is presented (Darwin was wrong! The Czar and his family weren’t executed! Coming race war in South Africa! etc.). One of the books on the list is Wilmot Robertson’s (John Humphrey Ireland’s pseudonym) The Dispossessed Majority.

Here’s a copy of the 1996 edition:
archive.org

On page 161 we learn that the author is a hardcore Holocaust denier.
On page 191 he faults Jews for everything, from communism to integration.
On page 234 he recommends deporting all blacks to Africa.

Lest you think that the earlier editions were somehow more moderate, one researcher described the 1972 edition of this book as “the new bible for the American racist right”.

David Duke called it “the most important book since the Second World War”.

Robertson-Ireland also published the infamous neo-Nazi magazine Instauration, which constituted regular “updates” to the book:

For those who approve of eugenics, historical revisionism, and discussions of the racial makeup of populations, the writing of Instauration was very pleasing. But many would characterize the publication as promoting racism and Holocaust denial. Instauration also published numerous articles arguing that Christianity was a contrived religion. [wiki]

All the issues of the magazine are available online, so it’s easy to verify that they are full of the most vulgar white supremacist and antisemitic tripe.

Hat tip: Randall Gross, Jaunte.

Reason magazine’s editor Nick Gillespie has an article up wherein he addresses that 1976 “special edition” featuring Holocaust deniers and contributors to neo-Nazi magazines. Let’s see how he acquits the publication:

If you want a preview of just how lame ideological mud-slinging is going to get […] take a look at this pair of articles penned by Mark Ames at pando.com, a Bay Area-based website that, among other things, aspires “to bring more civility into the blogosophere.” The pieces charge Reason with being not a libertarian defender of “Free Minds and Free Markets” but a hotbed for pro-apartheid Holocaust deniers who slavishly do the bidding of David and Charles Koch (cue the monster-movie music, maestro).

Yeah, seriously. A publication that just celebrated “Marijuana on Main Street: The long, hard road to safe, legal pot,” covers the police brutality beat like nobody’s business, and criticized George W. Bush’s “disaster socialism” and his stupid wars for the entire eight awful years he was in the White House, is really a stalking horse for reactionary politics right out of The Turner Diaries.

Those are the (slightly abridged) opening two paragraphs, and the “obviously we’re winning, they are attacking us more” stuff continues for another three paragraphs or so before Gillespie gets to the actual meat of the complaint against that 1976 edition.

(Before we continue, note Gillespie’s juxtaposition of Reason’s more recent positions with a possibly strawmannish claim that the current publication is a “stalking horse” and so on. That’s entirely separate from the issue at hand.)

Moving on:

In the newer post, Ames runs through Reason’s February 1976 issue that was billed as a “Special Revisionism Issue.” He has posted the entire issue, which I had not read before, online here (an incomplete online archive of Reason’s run can be found here at the invaluable unz.org site, which compiles hundreds of titles; we hope eventually to produce our own fully searchable, complete archive at our own site). Ames is correct that some of the contributors to that issue developed an interest in or were fellow travelers with that most pathetic area of study known as Holocaust revisionism or denialism. That scurrilous topic is not the focus of any of the articles in the issue, but the inclusion of contributors such as James J. Martin, who would go on to join the editorial board of the contemptible denialist outfit the Institute of Historical Review, is embarrassing.

Emphasis mine. More: reason.com

It’s a small point in Gillespie’s favor that he admits embarrassment over the association with (e.g.) James J. Martin, but overall it’s pretty much a non-apology if the people featured in that issue had histories of bigotry etc. before Reason invited them. Moreover, the real embarrassment is that nobody at Reason, or associated with the magazine, had the self-awareness to realize that maybe this would be a problem for them. Is it too much to expect an editor to at least have a passing familiarity with back issues?

And so, without further ado…

Continue reading…

Featuring an anatomically exaggerated cover by the great Jim Steranko, here’s the first “King-Size Special” (which means it cost 25 cents instead of 12 cents) of Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk series, published in October 1968, purchased by a younger version of me at a small grocery shop on Kaimuki Boulevard and then sealed in a wooden box for 45 years.