This post originally appeared on Mother Jones.
Last year, the Family Research Council’s DC Values Voters Summit was about as establishment Republican an event as you can get. The entire GOP congressional leadership addressed the crowd of evangelical activists and Mike Huckabee, a longtime favorite of social conservatives, won the conference’s presidential straw poll in a landslide.
This article first appeared on Mother Jones.
For tea partiers, one of the great disappointments of Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally on the National Mall Saturday was the ban on political signs. After all, sign-making seems to be half the fun of going to any good tea party. So the Tea Party Patriots, a national umbrella group for thousands of tea party activists, decided to give folks from out of town a chance to wave their “NOBama signs” in the shadow of the Capitol. On Sunday morning, they convened a tea party, complete with fiery speeches from minor celebs and organizers, plus the requisite open mic session for anyone who wanted a chance to publicly call Obama a liar or read some bad poetry they’d written about liberty.
This post originally appeared on Mother Jones.
The Six Flags amusement park chain has had its share of bad press lately, what with kids getting decapitated or having their feet chopped off on roller coaster rides, filing for bankruptcy and other Dan Snyder-related disasters. But the latest flap is more political. Tea partiers and other anti-Islam activists are freaking out about a Muslim Family Day planned for several Six Flags parks around the country on Sept. 12, the day after the World Trade Center attacks. The event, sponsored by the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), offers Muslim families a chance to hang at the amusement park and be catered to by modestly dressed employees and halal food vendors.
This post originally appeared on Mother Jones.
Well, it’s about time. Today, ABC News reports that the city attorney of Santa Monica, Ca., in conjunction with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, has launched an investigation into Goldline International, the gold company that sponsors and is heavily promoted on Glenn Beck’s TV and radio shows. Apparently, California authorities discovered what Mother Jones readers likely already knew, which is that Goldline misleads customers into buying overpriced gold coins that they weren’t necessarily in the market for:
This post originally appeared on Mother Jones.
Have you got an extra $75,000 burning a hole in your pocket? Maybe you’d like to give it to Glenn Beck, who in return will fly you over New York City in a helicopter to the Westchester airport, where his chauffer will drive you to Beck’s house in Connecticut and Mrs. Beck will make everyone dinner. That all assumes, of course, that you can pass a stringent background check first. The helicopter ride and dinner with the famous talk show host is but one of the many Beck-centric offerings available for auction as part of Beck’s “Restoring Honor” extravaganza on the National Mall next month.
More than 1,000 members of the public tramped through the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room last week to catch a glimpse of the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. Strangely, not a single one of them leapt up to scream “Babykiller!” at her. The hearings, which finished late Thursday night, were a remarkably sedate affair. Throughout Kagan’s entire time in the hot-seat, I kept scanning the crowd to see which, if any, of the visitors might be an anti-abortion protester in disguise. But by Wednesday night, it was clear that Kagan was going to survive three days of hearings without suffering that particular rite of passage.
This post originally appeared on Mother Jones.
In May, AARP made headlines when its latest sex survey showed that the economy had taken a serious toll on the sex lives of the 45 and over set. Baby boomers are having way less sex now than they were in 2004, and even when they are, they’re enjoying it less, AARP declared. But now it looks like it’s not just baby boomers who aren’t getting any. The Centers for Disease Control Monday released the 2009 data from its Youth Risk Surveillance System, which showed that teenagers were just a tiny bit less sexually active in 2009 than they were in 2007 (a data point evangelical Christian groups are, naturally, promoting as a sign that abstinence education is working).
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has been fending off calls from around the country for a major boycott of her state for its passage of a draconian new immigration law. Last Friday, Brewer’s reelection campaign fought back with a new video that quickly went viral. (By Monday morning it had been viewed more than 260,000 times.) In it, a green puppet sings a little ditty about how reading “helps you know what you’re talking about,” mixed in with clips of various Obama administration officials acknowledging that they’ve never actually read the ten page Arizona statute they’ve been bashing. It doesn’t have quite the genius of Demon Sheep, but Brewer’s video does a decent job of making Attorney General Eric Holder and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano look pretty foolish.
Ever since its contract employee Jamie Leigh Jones went public with allegations that in 2005, she was drugged and gang raped by some of her co-workers in Iraq and then detained in a storage container, KBR/Halliburton has fought her efforts to sue in a public courtroom. Jones had been forced to sign a mandatory arbitration agreement as part of her employment contract, which required her to bring any work-related claims before a private arbitrator hired by KBR rather than a jury. Jones fought the agreement and in September, prevailed in one of the most conservative federal appeals courts in the country. Her story persuaded Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) to pass legislation to ban defense contractors from using arbitration agreements in cases of sexual assault.
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