Is drug use among right-wingers perhaps even heavier than we've been imagining?

Yes, it's our old pal Rep. Steve "Nuttier Than Any Fruitcake" King (R-IA)! The Fruitcake Man opened his giant yap, so you know there must be trouble.

by Ken

The craziness is out there, and it's getting crazier. A few simple click-through's on Daily Kos's "Recommended" list brought me this daily sampling. Do I need to add that this almost random sampling could be multiplied by thousands?


THE HOUSE GOP'S NEW GO-TO GUY ON
IMMIGRATION? GOD'S REP. STEVE KING!

Daily Kos's Hunter notes ("Republican who crafted House border policy says our nation's borders were established by God") that a solid candidate for the title of Nuttiest Fruitcake in Congress, Iowa Rep. Steve King, is credited with having wrung concessions from the House Republican leadership on immigration which are credited with influencing the GOP's craziest to support the abominable bill they were rejecting because it wasn't abominable enough.

Steve King on immigration, eh? Hunter cites a RightWingWatch report that "during a conference call last month with the National Emergency Coalition, Rep. Steve King said that the U.S. needs to crack down on immigration because our nation’s borders were established by God. Disrespecting the borders, the congressman suggested, is disrespecting God’s will."

RightWingWatch

At 0:43: "I believe in the sovereign nation state. I believe that God gave us this country, He shaped it with the hands of the Founding Fathers, whom he moved around like men on a chessboard to build this nation. And we need to respect it, and revere it, and restore this country to its true destiny. That means we have to secure our borders, we have to restore the rule of law. We can't be rewarding people for breaking it. That's all pretty clear, and it's fundamentally, philosophically, and I think faithfully sound."

Even Nuttier-Than-a-Fruitcake Steve acknowledges, earlier in the clip, that he had to shop through a whole host of Bibles to find one that supports his preposterous proposition that God created all the present-day "nation-states," a proposition that I doubt he would tolerate being advanced in support of most of the world's "nation-states." His desperate Bible-shopping suggests that he has never actually read any of them, given his utter unfamiliarity with the way words "nation" and "nations" are used biblically, something that is utterly familiar to even the most casual actual reader of the Bible.

If Stevie is angling to lay the groundwork for some future insanity plea, he can count on support from most of the Founding Fathers, whose horror would by no means be confined to the nonsense about God moving them around like men on a chessboard. The time to have shut the borders tight -- locked them, and thrown away the key -- would have been when the life forms that spawned this creature slipped through.


MEANWHILE HOUSE GOP-ERS SEE RIGHT
THROUGH THE GODDAMN SOCIALIST POPE

Meanwhile Daily Kos's Scientistocrat calls attention to Molly K. Hooper's report for The Hill, "Will Speaker move bill on the pope?," which begins:

A popular piece of legislation that seeks to honor Pope Francis is stuck in Congress.

With time running out on the Capitol Hill calendar, the lawmakers who crafted the bipartisan measure are getting impatient with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

The resolution, written by Reps. John Larson (D-Conn.) and Pete King (R-N.Y.), congratulates Francis on his March 2013 election and recognizes “his inspirational statements and actions.”

The seemingly innocuous resolution was referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which hasn’t acted on it. The panel didn’t comment for this article.

The inaction and the lack of a white smoke signal from Boehner have sparked speculation that politics is at play.

Only 19 of the 221 co-sponsors are Republicans. The dearth of GOP members on the measure could be attributable to assertions that the pope is “too liberal,” according to a Republican backer of the legislation.

The source noted that Francis last year denounced “trickle-down economics.”

Some Republicans believe the pope is “sounding like [President] Obama. [The pope] talks about equality — he actually used the term ‘trickle-down economics,’ which is politically charged,” the GOP official said.

There is, of course, nothing any religious figure could say that would be considered too far right-wing to rouse the kind of anti-religious sniping apparently at play among House Republicans. As to the pope "sounding like Obama," and -- God help us -- "talking about equality," well, that could just mean that the president's and the pope's utterances have in common that neither is cripplingly insane.

Meanwhile, while we're rooting out crazed socialists who "talk about equality," it's about time we did something about whatever socialist wacko said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

By the way, I wanted to quote the portion of the pope's 50,000-word paper in which he makes reference to "trickle-down," because it's actually quite interesting, but I ran into a Scribd "Removal Notice": "The document Pope Francis's Nov. 24, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium has been automatically removed by BookID, Scribd’s copyright protection system." Hmm, is Scribd trying to "protect" the pope from himself?

Here, though, is the portion quoted in November by the Washington Post's Zachary A. Goldfarb and Michelle Boorstein:

“Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world,” Francis wrote in the papal statement. “This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacra­lized workings of the prevailing economic system.”

“Meanwhile,” he added, “the excluded are still waiting.”

Wow, talk about radical!


PLUS THIS JUST IN FROM UTAH: NO TALK ABOUT
HOMOPHONES AMONG THESE GOD-FEARING FOLK!

Not if you're in Utah, you don't.

Daily Kos's Richard Lyon ("Homophobic Paranoia in Utah") flags a piece by the Salt Lake Tribune's Paul Rolly, "Blogger fired from language school over 'homophonia'," which begins:

Homophones, as any English grammarian can tell you, are words that sound the same but have different meanings and often different spellings — such as be and bee, through and threw, which and witch, their and there.

This concept is taught early on to foreign students learning English because it can be confusing to someone whose native language does not have that feature.

But when the social-media specialist for a private Provo-based English language learning center wrote a blog explaining homophones, he was let go for creating the perception that the school promoted a gay agenda.

Tim Torkildson says after he wrote the blog on the website of his employer, Nomen Global Language Center, his boss and Nomen owner Clarke Woodger, called him into his office and told him he was fired.

As Torkildson tells it, Woodger said he could not trust him and that the blog about homophones was the last straw.

"Now our school is going to be associated with homosexuality," Woodger complained, according to Torkildson, who posted the exchange on his Facebook page.

Torkildson says he was careful to write a straightforward explanation of homophones. He knew the "homo" part of the word could be politically charged, but he thought the explanation of that quirky part of the English language would be educational.

Nomen has removed that blog from its website, but a similar explanation of homophones was posted there in 2011 with apparently no controversy.

Woodger says his reaction to Torkildson’s blog has nothing to do with homosexuality but that Torkildson had caused him concern because he would "go off on tangents" in his blogs that would be confusing and sometimes could be considered offensive.

Nomen is Utah’s largest private English as a Second Language school and caters mostly to foreign students seeking admission to U.S. colleges and universities. Woodger says his school has taught 6,500 students from 58 countries during the past 15 years. Most of them, he says, are at basic levels of English and are not ready for the more complicated concepts such as homophones.

Um, yeah, that's really an advanced concept, homophones -- like "to," "two," and "too." Why would students learning English as a second language want to worry their heads about stuff like this? When they figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, then maybe we can talk.

You say this man Woodger runs a "language center"? That's a joke, right?

#