Time For Some Good Ole '60's-Era Hallucinations?

I never understood why, but one of my nicknames in college was "Tripmaster. I only took something like 65 or 75 trips. I had friends who took tons more. I never thought of it as anything beyond a journey into my spiritual side but now Paul Tullis wrote about a medical aspect relevant to the age of pandemics. And, I guarantee you, this coronavirus won't be the last, whether it was made in a lab-- now viewed as likely-- or not. He reminds his readers that "Switzerland is the only place in the world where use of psychedelics in limited cases-- as medicine-- is allowed... That would be for cluster headaches, based on research being done at Matthhias Liechti’s institution, the University Hospital of Basel. Though LSD has been illegal in the U.S. (and, effectively, everywhere else) since 1970, Liechti and a few others, in Basel and at the University of Zurich Psychiatric Hospital, have since the 1990s been ­quietly researching how psychedelics act on the brain, looking at LSD specifically since 2012. And that is why New York–based MindMed is working in Basel. "In March it became the first among several psychedelic pharmaceutical companies to go public, listing on Canada’s NEO exchange. You are not hallucinating: Psychedelic drugs, demonized by politicians, prosecutors, doctors, parents, and virtually everyone else for the last 50 years, are showing remarkable promise as a treatment for a host of significant health conditions, including depression, PTSD, addiction, inflammation, and more." But not specifically COVID-19.

Venture capital is rushing in. [Billionaire Trump crony] Peter Thiel’s Breakthrough Ventures, and Able Partners, an investor in Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness brand, Goop, are behind a London-based company that has patented a formulation of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, for use with treatment-resistant depression. The evidence for psychedelics as medicine far exceeds the evidence for CBD, a compound in marijuana that companies are selling, based on basically nothing, to relieve ills ranging from Parkinson’s to Crohn’s diseases.

Liechti hopes to collaborate with MindMed soon to test whether sub-perceptual doses of LSD are an effective treatment for ADHD in adults-- and there is actually some indication that it might work. “We’re using chemicals to enhance neuronal connectivity in the brain, opening different parts of the brain to talk to each other,” Freeman says.

...MindMed is also working on a compound derived from ibogaine, a psychedelic that comes from the bark of a tree that grows in central Africa, to treat opioid addiction. Ibogaine was extolled by the late banking heir and Bitcoin billionaire Matthew Mellon, ex-­husband of Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon; he said it cured him of his opioid addiction.

Meanwhile ketamine, which at certain doses is used as a general anesthetic for children (and as a club drug by slightly older children), is already available by prescription for-- treatment-­resistant depression. MDMA (aka ecstasy or molly) has been used illegally in psychotherapy for decades, but it can now legally be given to select patients with PTSD outside a clinical trial-- even though it’s still a DEA Schedule I drug “with no currently accepted medical use.”

...Compass Pathways, the London company testing whether psilocybin helps with ­treatment-­resistant depression, seems to be on the brink of something too. “The best available evidence” of whether it works, or whether previous studies conducted without a control group taking a placebo were a fluke, “will come from this study,” says Metten Somers, a psychiatrist who runs one of the trial’s 21 sites, at University Medical Center–Utrecht in the Netherlands.

...In 1953, British author Aldous Huxley took mescaline, a compound that occurs in peyote and other cacti and has effects similar to those of LSD, and he described his experience as overwhelmingly positive. Two years later Manhattan banker and mushroom fanatic R. Gordon Wasson traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, having heard reports from a Harvard ethnobotanist of a species that caused “visions.” He wrote up his experience in Life magazine.

Reading reports that sounded similar to descriptions by the severely mentally ill of what was going on in their minds, researchers began to wonder if what drove mental disorders was chemistry—a question that eventually led to the development of Prozac and other antidepressants, which have helped millions. By 1961 researchers at Stanford and other universities were studying the effects of LSD and mescaline on healthy volunteers under permits from the FDA.

Could these compounds be the key to unlocking the mysteries of psychosis? Sandoz supplied LSD to researchers all over the U.S., from Maryland to California, and Hofmann would go on to identify psilocybin as the active ingredient in magic mushrooms and synthesize it.

But psychedelics would quickly spill out of academic and institutional control. In 1960, LSD started showing up as a street drug. The same year, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg took mushrooms together. Leary and a colleague (Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass) began to evangelize about psychedelics and their potential to expand human consciousness.

As hundreds of thousands of young people decided to see for themselves, media reports, many of them false, started telling horror stories about kids who had taken the drugs and ended up in hospitals, or dead. In 1966, Sandoz withdrew its supply from scientists, and the FDA ordered 60 psychedelic researchers to halt their work. The first wave of psychedelic research came to an abrupt end nearly everywhere. California banned LSD that year, and the federal government followed in 1970.

...When scientists started looking at psychedelics, it was for insights into the mechanisms of mental illness, but they soon discovered that the substances could also be cures. Psychedelics had been studied as treatments for alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and OCD, among other conditions. Though not well designed by today’s standards, many early studies showed impressive results.

Moreover, there appeared to be no such thing as a lethal dose-- something that cannot be said even about many over-the-counter medications. People who freaked out and went to a hospital after taking too much acid walked out several hours later. Wellness guru Andrew Weil, volunteering at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in 1968, developed a protocol for San Franciscans on bad trips: Leave them alone.

...[I]n light of the fact that the latest class of psychiatric drugs, a category that includes Prozac, are ineffective in 30 percent of the patients who take them, and rates of serious mental illness and suicide are climbing, it will be hard, as the data accumulates, for the FDA to deny patients access to psychedelics-- whatever middle-aged guys are selling on the Santa Cruz wharf.

“When I was a resident, if someone had told me there could be a treatment you could take once and immediately feel better from severe depression,” Woolley says, “I would have said that’s impossible.”

Why bring this up now? Depression. I don't get that and "cabin fever" hasn't been a problem for me during this pandemic. But it seems to be a big problem for millions of Americans. I wonder if we'' ever see them tripping their brains out and listening to-- well even to early Ted Nugent-- instead of running around dressed as terrorists with assault weapons.

Is There A Correlation Between Trumpf Fans And Ted Nugent Fans? I'll Guess Yes, A Strong One

Last night I was invited to be a guest on WBZ's NightSide with Dan Rea, to talk about why so many people are urging President Obama to replace Debbie Wasserman Schultz as chair of the DNC. I've been doing these Wasserman Schultz interviews on TV and radio for the past two weeks and they're kind of routine for me now. Tuesday wasn't. I was unaware that I was going on a right-wing radio show. Now, as it turns out, Rea is a knowledgeable guy and a gentleman, and a genial host. I had just been reading Glenn Greenwald's report at The Intercept that asserts, quite correctly, that "Wasserman Schultz is the living, breathing embodiment of everything rotted and corrupt about the Democratic Party: a corporatist who overwhelmingly relies on corporate money to keep her job, a hawk who supports the most bellicose aspects of U.S. foreign policy, a key member of the 'centrist' and 'moderate' pro-growth New Democrat coalition, a co-sponsor of the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was 'heavily backed by D.C. favorites including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the music and motion picture industries' and which, if enacted, would have allowed extreme government and corporate control over the internet." So I was all fired up and ready to go-- even if I was hooked up to an IV tube pumping antibiotics into me for the entire hour-long interview.

I'm no stranger to Boston radio. Back in the day I had been a guest at WBCN many times and once or twice on WFNX, as well as a couple of the local college stations. I love the Boston accent and I always feel at home with Bostonians. What I was less prepared for, though, were the crackpot callers. I had forgotten about callers. I though Dan would ask me questions and we would have a discussion about how bad Wasserman Schultz is. And we did-- until he opened the phone lines. And then came the deluge; you can see why Herr Trumpf has a following. These self-referential, deluded sad-sacks were all certain Hillary Clinton would soon be in prison for e-mails and servers. And they really believe it-- 100%. One guy, who ostensibly wanted to ask me a question about Wasserman Schultz, kept calling Hillary a "witch," until I interrupted and explained that I wasn't going to pay any attention to his ad hominem name-calling and that he had to stop. He seemed stunned. Apparently, calling Hillary Clinton a witch on right wing radio is nothing out of the ordinary.

Hate Talk Radio may take a certain "bad boy" perverse joy in snubbing political correctness but it has coarsened and brutalized American politics and is turning off people entirely from politics. Today on his Facebook page, third rate former rock musician and right-wing crazy person (and Trumpf supporter) Ted Nugent was spreading the manure around, in a "review" of a widely panned film GOP fantasy film about Benghazi, for his poor deluded fans: "Our unholy rotten soulless criminal America destroying government killed 4 Americans in Banghazi. Period! What sort of chimpass punk would deny security, turn down 61 requests for security, then tell US forces to STAND DOWN when they were ready to kickass on the allapukes & save American lives! Obama & Clinton, thats who. They should be tried for treason & hung. Our entire fkdup gvt must be cleansed asap." Will be get a visit from the Secret Service? I hope so. Calling for the lynching of presidents and presidential candidates is a no-no even most Republicans haven't been crossing, at least not publicly.

I guess the country is strong enough to survive this onslaught of willful ignorance and stupidity. I hope so. I will say, though, that when I went to work for Warner Brothers I did all I could to get Nugent's excruciatingly bad band dropped from the label. His was the only band in my life I was happy to see crash and burn and fail miserably.

Crackpot Utopia: The Year in Republican Crazy, Part 2

• Repugs wonder why normal people call them racists
• Sean Hannity wants to self-deport
• And the First Annual Mr. Burns Award

Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 2 --
The Rockin' Racist, Ted Nugent

Crackpot Utopia: A dream world as envisioned by republicans; a manifestation or expression of the deranged, warped alternate universe inhabited by republicans, at least in their minds. See also: Bachmannism, Boehneresque.

by Noah

1. And Republicans claim to wonder why normal people call them racists (featuring Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 2: the Rockin' Racist, Ted Nugent)

I always tell them that the best way to stop being thought a racist is to stop saying and doing racist things.

As promised in Part 1, here's the Rockin' Racist, Ted Nugent, vying for his Republican Crazyspeak of the Year Award. Ted is a very commercially successful recording artist, and, like most successful recording artists, he has a way of expressing the thoughts of his constituency; in this case, his fellow republicans. There's a reason why he's a star on FOX. Even Anderson Cooper, on FOX-Lite CNN, enjoys having him on as a guest from time to time.

I have obviously failed to galvanize and prod, if not shame, enough Americans to be ever vigilant not to let a Chicago communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel like the ACORN community-organizer gangster Barack Hussein Obama to weasel his way into the top office of authority in the United States of America.

Nugent was just warming up.

A lotta people call that inflammatory speech. Well, I would call it inflammatory speech when it's your job to protect Americans and you actually look into the television camera saying what difference does it make that I failed in my job to provide security and we have four dead Americans. What difference does that make? Not to a chimpanzee or, a, to Hillary Clinton. I guess it doesn't matter.

Yep. "Subhuman," "mongrel," "chimpanzee." When republicans talk like this about our first African-American president, they are still, no doubt, seething with frustration that they can't just scream out the N-word from the rooftops. A couple of years ago I posted a list of 30 or so words that republicans use because they can't scream the N-word. I hadn't thought of "subhuman mongrel" or "chimpanzee." Maybe those were just too old-fashioned to make the list.

I also missed out on "thug," but so did Ted. "Thug" is the new N-word. It's become the latest buzzword on FOX. If viewers were watching FOX and playing a drinking game where one took a shot of booze every time some cretin on FOX spat out the word "thug," they'd be dead of alcohol poisoning in no time. Note to repugs: Please play the drinking game!

The Rockin' Racist even managed to mention ACORN and the other new FOX buzzword of the year, "Benghazi." Never mind that the real Benghazi cover-up is the fact that it was the Republican Congress that stripped away the money ($79 million) for our embassy security, thus enabling the murder of those four Americans in Benghazi. It's all about the misdirection game.

One wonders where Nugent and his fellow FOX vermin were when 6o Americans died in 12 similar attacks under Bush's watch. Not much calling for hearings then, eh? Gee, Ted. You also forgot "secret Muslim."

Yeah, we've all met republicans that claim to not be racists, that they know some African-Americans, etc. I've heard people say that Sean Hannity isn't a racist because he sometimes has black people on his show. But that's like the KKK saying it isn't racist because they once booked the great Solomon Burke to provide the entertainment at one of their famous twilight picnics. That, however, was accidental. They had thought he was white, but they had him sing anyway, as all the guests arrived in full KKK garb. How nice of them. They even paid him. See, no racism!


When they were somehow hired by the KKK, Solomon Burke and his band played "Down in the Valley" (as they do here at Norway's Notodden Blues Festival in 2005) for "at least 45 minutes," wondering, "Are we gonna get out of here alive?"


2. Sean Hannity wants to self-deport

From The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Jon and the gang pulled out all the stops to implore Sean H to "Stay, Mr. Hannity, Stay."

Almost a year ago now, Sean Hannity went on a semi-literate rant about how he didn't like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. He finished up by threatening to self-deport to Florida or Texas.

Hey, I don't like Andrew Cuomo either. He's cut from the Conservadem cloth and has tried his best to ruin New York's famous drinking water by letting his Big Gas buddies frack all over the state. Eventually, he got the message, after New Yorkers managed to tell him where he can stick the idea, no matter how much was being paid in "campaign contributions" to push it.

Hannity's problem with Cuomo? He doesn't like paying state taxes. Like any republican, he'd rather be a freeloader. Hence, the proposed move to the "taker" state of his choice. Go ahead, make our day, you whining, crap-stirring buffoon! In Texas they don't have state taxes, but what they do have is an ever-growing mountainous shortfall that's so serious, they are literally letting many of their paved roads revert to dirt roads.

I suggest Sean choose Florida. May he be gobbled up by a sinkhole or one of the state's huge constrictor snakes. If he chooses Texas, someone should get him high, dress him up as a stereotype Mexican mariachi musician and leave him along the highway to play frogger with a bunch of bigoted Texas truck drivers bearing down on him. Benghazi that, moron!


3. The First Annual Mr. Burns Award



An award given not just for being an insensitive assclown -- the winner must also exhibit extreme callousness, a dangerously low IQ, and, a measure of contempt for humanity that, at the, borders on psychopathy. At this time, I would like to nominate one Kevin O'Leary, one of the "sharks" of ABC's Shark Tank.

When told, on the CBC's Lang and O'Leary Exchange (which he cohosted with Amanda Lang from 2009 until his departure this past August), that the wealth of the world's 85 richest people was equal to the wealth of 3½ billion of the world's poorest people, venture capitalist O'Leary revealed his insanity, his Romneyesque contempt for others, and his downright psychopathic tendencies by stating:

It's fantastic! And this is a great thing because it inspires everybody, gets some motivation to look up to the 1 percent and say, "I want to be one of those people. I'm going to fight hard to get up to the top." This is fantastic news, and of course I applaud it.

Knowing he wasn't being very convincing, he paused while viewers and on-air partner Amanda Lang cringed, then added:

What could be wrong with this?

I'm surprised he didn't say the poor should kiss his feet too. This is why I should have a button on my remote that inflicts instant migraines or dumps buckets of blood à la Carrie on such "people" when they appear on my TV. How long can this world tolerate not having a fair and legal remedy for people like Kevin O'Leary? I'd put this assclown on one of those big rotating wooden wheels that circus knife-throwers use. Then, after fastening him securely, I would declare it "Amateur Night" and invite throwers from the studio audience to come on up to the stage.


TOMORROW IN PART 3: Using fear, loathing, and paranoia to sell stuff; Arizona legalizes crack!; and the next Crazyspeak of the Year nominee (an old reliable)

NOAH'S 2014 IN REVIEW --
Crackpot Utopia: The Year in Republican Crazy

Part 1: Princess Liz Cheney tries for the Smoothie of the Year Award; "Miss Beck regrets" -- Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 1: Glenn Beck; and the Crackpot Party reacts to President Obama’s State of the Union speech [12/19/2014]
Part 2: Republicans wonder why normal people call them racists; Sean Hannity wants to self-deport; and the First Annual Mr. Burns Award, to ABC "shark" Kevin O'Leary [12/20/2014]
Part 3: Using fear, loathing, and paranoia to sell stuff; Arizona legalizes crack!; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 3: Bill O’Reilly [12/21/2014]
Part 4: A celebration of Michele Bachmann: Pray away the crazy?; What "War on Women"?; and the "Obama angle" on Malaysian Flight 370 [12/22/2014]
Part 5: The GOP and the kiss heard 'round the world; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 5: Joe the Plumber [12/23/2014]
Part 6: A word about South Carolina; Pat Robertson and his magic asteroid; and I'll have a pack of Twizzlers and an IUD to go, please [12/24/2014]
Part 7: And so it begins: The running of the buffoons; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 7, George Will has no idea what rape is; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 8, Rick Wiles calls for a coup [12/29/2014]
Part 8: Things to come: Forward into the past! (11 Presidential Dream Tickets); Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 9: Former republican VP nominee Paul "Crazy Eyes" Ryan; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 10: Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association [12/30/2014]
Part 9: Pompous Blowhard of the Year Award: Bill O’Reilly; FOX "News" announces new spinoff: the "FOX Benghazi™" Shopping Channel!; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 11: DiGiorno Pizza [12/31/2014]
Part 10: Newsmax -- Beyond Drudgery; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominees Nos. 12 and 13: Michele Bachmann, Kimberly Guilfoyle [1/1/2015]
Part 11: GOP and FOX whip up the hate over a POW exchange; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 14: Iowa asylum escapee Rep. Steve King [1/3/2015]
Part 12: Arizona Republican protests busload of YMCA campers; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee(s) No. 15: the Impeachment Variations (group nomination); Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 16: NM Rep. Steve Pearce [1/4/2015]
Part 13 (and last): TV for Dummies: Sarah Palin launches her own channel; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 17: Arizona schools superintendent John Huppenthal (rhymes with Neanderthal); and the final Crazyspeak of the Year nominee -- and also the winner! [1/5/2015]

NOAH'S 2013 IN REVIEW --
A Prayer to the Janitor of Lunacy

For listings and links, see Part 1 of this year's series.

#

Texas Congressman Steve Stockman-- Domestic Terrorist?

Steve Stockman (R-TX), once again bringing disrepute to Congress

There was some buzz this week over Steve Stockman's bizarre choice of a date for the State of the Union. He brought violence advocate and loudmouthed right-wing clown Ted Nugent. As someone tweeted, they should have held the State of the Union at the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame and then Nugent could never have gotten in. When Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI), who is in a wheelchair and paralyzed from a shooting accident when he was a teenager, questioned Nugent's presence, Nugent responded exactly the way anyone who has paid any attention to him would expect him to respond: "He probably has shit for brains. I couldn't be more proud of myself, what I stand for, and for this pompous ass to claim that he cares more about a family that lost a child than I do is a perfect example of the brain dead critics of Ted Nugent." At the end of the clip below, Rachel Maddow, has the penultimate look into who exactly Ted Nugent is and why it was so inappropriate for Congressman Stockman to invite him. I urge you to watch it.

But what she didn't deal with is who Steve Stockman is. Many Americans think he's just some garden variety right-wing Texas yahoo who got elected to Congress in November. That isn't half the story. Yes, he kicked off the year threatening to impeach President Obama that earned him a lecture from his fellow Republicans to sit down and shut up. But neither that nonsense nor his grandstanding Tuesday night with Nugent was his first-- or worst-- demand for the national spotlight. And as Ken made clear last month, the wacky Steve Stockman of the '90s no longer sounds like an outlier. Ken quoted Dana Milbank on his background:

When I covered Congress in the mid-1990s, one of my favorite characters was Steve Stockman, a former street vagrant who somehow got swept to power in the Republican Revolution of '94.

Voters in his Texas district, realizing their mistake, swept him out two years later -- but not before he distinguished himself by demanding a federal investigation of the 1948 Kinsey Report on male sexuality and by claiming that the deadly 1993 assault on the Branch Davidians was a Clinton administration conspiracy to tighten gun control.

But that's not the worst of it either. No one wants to talk about the worst of it. Too horrible. In his quest to fulfill the Helen Chenoweth role as militia poster girl for the '90s, Stockman immediately started spouting paranoid anti-government slogans-- that some would define as treason and incitement-- as soon as he was first elected in 1995. Another homeless abused miscreant who turned to drug addiction, like Nugent, Michigan-born Stockman moved to Texas and fell prey to a religionist sect of unhinged snakeoil salesmen. He felt that qualified to help run the country and he started running for Congress in 1990. He won in 1994 and represented parts of Houston as well as Galveston, Chambers and Jefferson counties. Although he worked hard to develop a reputation as the militia's man in Congress, he wound up taking it a bit too far and got involved with the terrorists who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Another Michigan-Texas Republican dupe, a GOP chairwoman of Orange County, Texas, faxed him before they blew up the building and the FBI investigated Stockman's role and his relationship to domestic terrorists. He was defeated for reelection and they seem to have let the complicated and heavily disputed matter slide.

Since his defeat in 1996, he's held a series of right-wing movement make-work positions and has been especially close with another Texas sociopath, Louie Gohmert. He ran for Texas Railway Commissioner in 1998 and was defeated and then jumped at the chance to run in 2006 for Tom DeLay's old seat but couldn't find enough people to sign his petitions to put him on the ballot. Last year he jumped at the chance to run for a brand new seat created in a deeply red area of Texas, the new 36th CD, just south of Gohmertville, east of the Louisiana border and north of Beaumont. Obama only won 25.7% of the vote there, one of 8 of Texas's 36 districts where the president failed to break a third of the votes. Stockman won the seat against Democrat Max Martin 165,388 (71%)- to 62,052 (26%).

The MAN IS BACK-- a perfect representative for one of the saddest and least attractive parts of the United States. Stockman rolled up huge margins in every county, including over 80% in horrifying backward Hardin County where 91% of the people are white and where the per capita income is $17,962 (one of the lowest in America) and over 11% of the population lives below the poverty line. Stockman, of course, is a vehement opponent of raising the minimum wage. The biggest city Hardin-- and in the 36th CD-- is Lumberton, population 11,943. The town was nearly wiped out by Hurricane Rita in 2005 and then took another devastating direct hit Hurricane Ike in 2008. Although Stockman was tempted to vote with his pal Gohmert against authorizing aid for the survivors of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey... even he wasn't that stupid. It was the only intelligent vote he's made so far-- unless you want to count his vote of "present" when Boehner ran for Speaker again last month. At the time, he said "I will not vote for or support Congressman Boehner’s bid to remain Speaker of the House. This is not something I do lightly, but out of bedrock conservative principle and a dire need to save this nation from its current course. We cannot tolerate betrayal of conservative principle and economic reality... I have sharp disagreements with the manner in which he has handled President Obama and House conservatives. While he is all too eager to favorably negotiate with a liberal White House that has outmaneuvered him at every turn, he has been harsh and punitive in dealing with conservatives."

Boehner retaliated by putting him on the Science Committee. The first legislation Stockman offered, H.R. 35, is meant to repeal all ordinances against guns in or near schools and to encourage teachers and school staff to arm themselves. Stockman's top support group, Gun Owners of America (much worse crackpots than the NRA) is urging its members to contact their congressional reps to get them to co-sponsor Stockman's bill.

We told you that Rep. Steve Stockman would be the most aggressive defender of our gun rights on Capitol Hill.

He proved us right on Thursday, when he introduced the VERY FIRST pro-gun bill in the Congress, in the face of a tidal wave of anti-gun hysteria.

...It’s time to go on the offensive! It’s time to repeal gun control, rather than talk about “enforcing the gun laws on the books.”

We don’t want to enforce gun control laws-- that’s what makes innocent people, including children sitting in their classrooms, less safe.

Anti-gun zealots who have enacted one unsuccessful gun ban after another have come up with a slew of reasons why our nation’s lawmakers should be protected by an army of heavily armed guards, but our children should be vulnerable.

There is a word for this-- it’s “hypocrite.” It is time to protect our children with the same tools and the same zeal we use to protect our congressmen.

It is time to pass the Stockman bill and give real protection to our children.

ACTION: Contact your Representative. Ask him to cosponsor H.R. 35, the Stockman repeal of the gun-free school zone ban.

So far 3 especially deranged crackpots, Paul Broun (R-Pit of Hell), Jeff Duncan (R-SC) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), have signed on as co-sponsors. Not even Gohmert! And govtrack.us rates its chances to ever become law 1%. Right now Boehner crony Bob Goodlatte has it bottled up in the Judiciary Committee, where it won't embarrass other Republicans trying, unlike Stockman, to pose as vaguely mainstream. Josh Marks pointed out at the National Memo that the Republican problem with violence-- which accounts for the widening gender gap-- is much bigger than one lone nut like Steve Stockman or even a pair of cuts like Stockman and Nugent. "Not only does the Republican leadership condone The Crazy, but also the violent tendencies associated with this type of dangerous ideology. Whether it is refusing to back the Violence Against Women Act, fighting against every single sensible gun law, promoting military force over diplomacy or failing to condemn violent rhetoric toward President Obama-- the GOP is gaining a reputation of a political party that cynically accepts violent language and behavior."

Flash Mob Targets GOP Rep. McKeon For "NRAcism"

Ticked off anti-gun activists targeted GOP House Armed Services Committee chair Howard "Buck" McKeon this weekend with a multi-front attack on his longtime support of the National Rifle Association (NRA). The activists took to the Web, the highways, and McKeon's campaign phone bank to express their concern.

As you may know, NRA board member Ted Nugent has a long history of inflammatory comments that have offended African-Americans, women, Latinos, immigrants and more. Other NRA board members have also made discriminatory comments, though Nugent is in a class of his own. To protest those comments, and to protest members of Congress who turn a blind eye by continuing to accept NRA money, the activists coined a new term, "NRAcist." According to the site, designed to look like a dictionary definition, an NRAcist is:

1. A member of the board of directors of the National Rifle Association (NRA), such as Ted Nugent, who believes that racist, sexist and anti-immigrant language is acceptable in public discourse; or

2. A member of Congress, such as Buck McKeon, who accepts donations from the NRA and fails to denounce its board members' racist, sexist and anti-immigrant comments.

The web site gives some examples of Ted Nugent's "NRAcism" including his comment that "I'm beginning to wonder if it would have been best had the South won the Civil War." His calling Hillary Clinton the c-word. And his suggestion that undocumented immigrants are "invading our country…. I'd like to shoot them dead."   

The activists also took to the local highways in McKeon's district, putting up "NRAcist" signs along the route where thousands of commuters are guaranteed to see them.

The third prong of the direction action was a song-and-dance flash mob at a phone bank for McKeon taking place at the local GOP party headquarters in Santa Clarita, California. They've got a video, posted up top, of the action that pretty much speaks for itself.

Tea Party Strategy: Is Obama Gay?

The video above is from the YouTube account of TeaPartyOrg. It's one of many (endless) crazed propaganda videos just like it inserted into the zeitgeist by this organization and others just like it. Clearly this Corsi guy is as whacked out of his mind as the neo-Nazi murderer who shot up the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin last week. That guy had a racist skinhead band called End Apathy. This guy is just raising endless lies about Obama that no one would believe. No one? What about the hard core of the Republican base... people like this? Both of these people are part of the Tea Party mindset that was sponsored and underwritten by a handful of cynical billionaires and drilled into the national consciousness by equally cynical, though often deranged, right-wing validators like Romney and NRA surrogate Ted Nugent. “Obama," he told the New Times "represents everything bad about humanity and Romney pretty much all that is good. It is really that stark.” These Koch brothers, Adelsons and Limbaughs and Savages, Nugents, Coulters and Becks want idiots-who-vote to concentrate on Obama's Kenyan gay Pakistani lover's wedding ring, not on, for example, Climate Change.

When facts prove the Republicans and conservatives were dead wrong about Climate Change, it will be to late to punish them at the polls. It will, in fact, be too late for humanity. Have you watched Earth 2100? Maybe you should-- especially if you've been poisoning your mind with right-wing propaganda. Here's Part 1 of 9:

Are Democrats Still Concerned With Guns... At All-- Even In The Hands Of Terrorists?

Deranged right-wing gun shill and ex-rocker Ted Nugent was on CNN with Piers Morgan the other night to rant and rave about how much he hates President Obama:

"Anybody that wants to disarm me can drop dead. Anybody that wants to make me unarmed and helpless, people that want to literally create the proven places where more innocents are killed called gun-free zones, we're going to beat you. We're going to vote you out of office or suck on my machine gun."

When Morgan told him that 80 people across America die each day from a gunshot wound, Nugent obfuscated and started spouting hackneyed NRA talking points, "...78 of those 80 are let out of their cages by corrupt judges and prosecutors who know the recidivism is out of control, know that they'll commit the crimes again, and they let them walk through plea bargaining, early release, and programs. Kiss my ass. Where you have the most armed citizens in America, you have the lowest violent crime rate. Where you have the worst gun control, you have the highest crime rate... More guns equals less crime. Period."

A couple nights ago I went to hear Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, the thoughtful and independent-minded progressive running against rubber stamp Republican David Dreier in California's 26th CD in the L.A. suburbs just east of the city. When Anthony spoke passionately about the need for keeping guns out of the hands of criminals it occurred to me how few Democrats ever bring this up any longer. Yet his audience roared it's approval. The mindless hatred, fear-monger and commercial hucksterism of the Ted Nugents of this country has been going unanswered for too long. I was proud to hear Anthony pick up the challenge, regardless of the fact that gun advocate thugs have advocated the murder of him and his family. Another Democrat, on the other side of the side of the country, who's addressing sane gun policy as an issue in his campaign is Blue America-endorsed Nick Ruiz in central Florida. Last week Nick penned an editorial, Don't Need A Gun I want to share with you:

They always say that truth is stranger than fiction, and that is because fiction, largely, with a few relative and often literary exceptions, simply dramatizes the truth.

So when NRA darling, Republican Sandy Adams (FL-24) of Oviedo, Florida votes against a House Judiciary measure that would block those on the FBI’s watch list from buying guns, it should come as no surprise to Democrats. Such is the state of radical Republican disrepair. Are Republicans tough on terror? Yeah, sure, as long as it doesn’t interfere with selling guns, which is always-- so in other words, no, Republicans are not tough on terror or anything else-- except the poor and the unfortunate, who cannot adequately defend themselves.

It’s obvious to Democrats that federal law should be able to prevent a person from buying guns if that person is a terror suspect. It’s also a fact that the more guns a nation has, more murders and suicides as a result of gun sales will occur. The U.S. of course, is at the pinnacle of that list. In this regard, we outpace everyone.

On healthcare, we drag behind. On distribution of commodity necessities, we drag behind. On education, we drag behind. On jobs, we drag behind. On our social safety net, we drag behind.

But we sure know how to sell some guns.

According to the Orlando Sentinel-- “'Since 2004, over 1,300 persons on the terrorist watch list have been allowed to purchase firearms or explosives because federal law is so weak that being a known or suspected terrorist is not itself sufficient to prohibit someone from buying guns’ said Paul Helmke, President of the Brady Campaign, a gun control group, in a statement.”

Americans love our Second Amendment rights-- but this is ridiculous.

Sandy Adams of course, has nothing to say-- because she is wrong-- and voted against the gun control measure anyway. An America that allows gun sales to known or suspected terrorists to proceed unchecked by federal law, makes a mockery of justice and moral conscience.

America needs better gun policies-- put a progressive Democrat in Congress.

On his website, where Nick originally posted this, he illustrated it with a cool video clip of Billy Idol doing "Don't Need A Gun." Go take a listen here and please consider making a contribution to Nick's campaign, especially if you agree that law enforcement should keep guns out of the hands of terrorists. And, for your listening and viewing pleasure... here's a video of the Self Destruction Mix of Depeche Mode's "Barrel of A Gun."

Tewwible Ted (Nugent), Washed Up Old Rocker

Rightists send hidden messages in their music, except they're not usually hidden well

A music industry agent provocateur has a lively, entertaining newsletter and recently went backstage and did a hang with Ted Nugent and came to the conclusion, somehow, that Nugent is "brilliant," "embattled"... and "a star." Starts out well... for one line:

Sarah Palin can’t be President. She’s too divisive, she’s not qualified.

But we need a leader.

...Ted would end welfare tomorrow.

But what about underprivileged kids?

The Church can feed them, it’s sitting on tons of gold!

How about immigration?

Announce you’re gonna shoot illegals on sight, that’ll take care of the problem…

Phil Steir is a musician and a producer and a former DWT contributor who apparently caught the same newsletter. He responded:

Terrible...is an understatement .

All Ted Nugent talks about is hunting. Killing unarmed innocent animals. That's what turns him on. The more blood and suffering he puts his victims through the higher he gets. He is a serial killer who can't stop. He makes snuff videos of himself shooting animals with a bow and arrow and they never die immediately. You may not care about non human animals dying slowly but the fact that someone like Ted loves it and can't get enough says it all.

Ted Bundy was intelligent too..brilliant but had no empathy because he was a psychopath. So is Ted. listen to the way he talks. Right out of a Hollywood movie portraying a serial killer.

The fact that he told you he thinks illegal's should be shot gives you some insight into who he would be... if he could getaway with it.

200 years ago Ted would be in the outdoors killing native Americans. We all know it. 100 years ago he'd be head of the KKK in Michigan.

He's a true coward Bob who dodged the draft for the war in Vietnam because someone could actually shoot back at him. At the end of most of his killing videos he praises the brave troops and equates freedom with killing non humans. I've never heard anyone talk so much about war and how great it is yet would never actually participate in real combat.

He talks a lot of big talk but never backs it up unless he's shooting someone who doesn't even know they're being targeted. Most of his hunting is done on ranches where the animals have no way of actually escaping.

My dream would be to see Ted go into a UFC cage and fight the vegan Mac Danzig or Jake Shields. Can you make that come true? Imagine the PPV revenue of a vegan like Mac or Jake fighting Nugent?

He is the ultimate right-wing hypocrite and I can guarantee you he's not "friends" with Tom Morello. Tom has dignity, compassion and wisdom.

When I was running Reprise, Nugent had some wimpy hair-band on our sister label, Warner Bros. Man were the guys who ran WB ever embarrassed! In 1995, even before Atrios was blogging my head of online promotion put this up on the Internet. I doubt anyone's ever heard it before tonight. People have seen this though:

Far Right's Knives Come Out-- Threating Boehner, Slashing McCain

DeMint favors selling South Carolina out to Mormon cult

A few days ago GOP poet laureate Ted Nugent declared war on "moderates" (i.e.- mainstream conservatives) within his own shattered and bleeding party. He especially attacked the man he had been campaigning for 2 weeks ago, John McCain and decreed that McCain should have no role in determining the future of the GOP. Instead he'd like to see silly right-wing gossip columnist Michelle Malkin play a dominant role. And the following day, the very same Malkin, as if on cue, was calling the presidential candidate she had been urging her brain dead supporters to vote for McLame.

OK, granted, no serious people anywhere take either of these clowns seriously. Or do they? It wasn't that long ago that America's most reactionary senator, South Carolina lunatic fringe loudmouth Jim DeMint was planting stories in right-wing blogs that McCain was considering him as a running mate. No one ever invited him to any of the McCain picnics at any of the 13 or 14 homes. But DeMint, good little zombie and unprincipled partisan hack that he is, was stumping for McCain anyway. The it turns out that DeMint was less than truthful when he was urging his constituents to vote for McCain-- either than or he's had a sudden change of heart. Yesterday DeMint, telling a GOP planning session that the party needs to advocate more of a theocratic form of government, blamed McCain for dragging the party into ruin by betraying conservative values. According to CNN, "DeMint offered a long list of complaints about McCain's record in the Senate and on the campaign trail."

"McCain, who is proponent of campaign finance reform that weakened party organizations and basically put George Soros in the driver's seat. His proposal for amnesty for illegals. His support of global warming, cap-and-trade programs that will put another burden on our economy. And of course, his embrace of the bailout right before the election was probably the nail in our coffin this last election. And he has been an opponent of drilling in ANWR, at a time when energy is so important. It really didn't fit the label, but he was our package."

And McCain isn't the only conservative leader coming under attack by the clueless and power-hungry fascists in the Republican Party. One of California's most extreme right-wing members of Congress, Dan Lungren, despite nearly being defeated by a largely unknown and unfinanced progressive Democrat, has declared that he's going to hold John Boehner accountable by challenging him for the very diminished House Minority Leader position. Keep in mind that Boehner's two top lieutenants, Blunt and Putnam, have already fallen on their swords as the scapegoats for the catastrophe of 2006/2008.

The much disliked Lungren only managed to scrape by his own re-election bid with 50% of the vote, seriously under-polling McCain, and is likely to face a far more serious challenge in 2010. He blames Boehner's inept leadership for the problems he sees the Republican House caucus mired in.

“If we don’t admit our difficulties and address them aggressively, we not only run the risk of becoming a permanent congressional minority but we will do a disservice to our nation,” Lungren wrote. “If we choose by inaction to ignore the real challenges we face, then paraphrasing President Reagan, we deserve to be regulated to the trash heap of history.”

An extremist even by Republican standards, Lungren isn't likely to get more than a dozen votes if he pursues his challenge, which isn't likely now that he's managed to get his name in the newspaper for something other than being the California Republican incumbent with the smallest percentage of votes.

Yes, Voters Did Reject Bush, Corruption, Pork And Bad Governance-- And They Also Overwhelmingly Rejected Conservatives

South Carolina doofus Mark Sanford changes his tune

I guess I can re-write this story everyday for as long as the Republicans want to keep sewing their empty-headed lies. Far right kook, Mark Sanford from the Know Nothing wing of the Republican Party, the governor of a small, religionist-obsessed former slave holding state, says conservatives didn't lose the election last week. It was just two weeks ago that Sanford and his smarmy ilk were warning Americans, hysterically, that Obama was either the "most liberal senator in America" or a socialist. Yesterday South Carolina's Bible-quoting wingnut explained how voters were just punishing Republicans for not being true to conservative ideals and that the nation voted for "the socialist" to chastise Republicans for slacking off on the rigors of the road to pure Know Nothing fascism. And, anyway, it was all Ted Stevens' fault.

"[I]t goes without saying the Republican Party took a shellacking nationally. Some on the left will say our electoral losses are a repudiation of our principles of lower taxes, smaller government and individual liberty. But Tuesday was not in fact a rejection of those principles-- it was a rejection of Republicans' failure to live up to those principles. [And not knowing how to use them damn computer thingies and Teleprompters.]

I believe in the Biblical notion of taking the log out of your own eye before worrying about the splinter in someone else's. Accordingly, let me focus on my own party and the way Ted Stevens personifies what went wrong in the election.

As a senior ranking Republican from Alaska, he was a proud champion of pork barrel spending and bridges to nowhere, and stayed so long that he developed a blind eye to ethical lapses that would be readily seen by scout leaders and soccer moms alike.

Republicans have campaigned on the conservative themes of lower taxes, less government and more freedom-- they just haven't governed that way. America didn't turn away from conservatism, they turned away from many who faked it.

Sanford's theory doesn't stand up to another standard rejected by the Know Nothing wing of his party: the scientific method. Analysis of the election returns show that voters in every part of America did reject conservative values-- in the form of the far right politicians the GOP ran for office. See, we vote on politicians and on what they stand for-- or what we're told by their opponents they stand for, not on social or economic systems. Last Friday, when fellow rightists David Keene, Tony Perkins and Grover Norquist tried making the same point about how the election wasn't a rejection of true conservatism, we looked at the election results in congressional races where the GOP tried replacing retiring "moderates" with aggressive right-wingers of the Sanford mold.

In every single instance where the GOP tried slipping in a far right replacement for a retiring mainstream conservative Republican, the Democrat won. In New Mexico Pete Domenici has been a mainstream conservative, one of the dozen least extremist members of the Senate Republican caucus. Given the opportunity to run another mainstream conservative, his protege, Heather Wilson, the far right of the New Mexico GOP instead chose one of the most radical right members of Congress, Steve Pearce, whose extremism turned the entire state bright blue. Obama bested McCain by 15 points. Pearce lost his own race by 22%, one of the worst drubbing anywhere, and helped drag down 3 congressional candidates, clearing the way for a 100% Democratic congressional delegation for New Mexico-- like Massachusetts. And none of the races were close.

Similarly in Virginia, the retirement of mainstream conservative John Warner who was just a tiny bit less conservative than Domenici, led the far right radicals in control if the Virginia GOP to trash a mainstream conservative candidate, Tom Davis, in favor of a right-wing extremist, James Gillmore. That worked out great-- for the Democrats. Obama beat McCain by 6 points in a bedrock GOP state, Gillmore, of course, was defeated by a mainstream conservative Democrat, Mark Warner, by a startling 31 points! And 3 far right Republicans-- two of them incumbents-- were beaten in congressional races, Congresswoman Thelma Drake, Congressman Virgil Goode, and crazed religionist fanatic Keith Fimian (a 12 point landslide). Even the right-wing incumbents who won, all felt the heat-- all but one of them scoring less voter support than they had in 2006. Randy Forbes, for example, was challenged by Andrea Miller, an African American teacher who had headed Dennis Kucinich's presidential campaign in Virginia. In 2006 Forbes was re-elected with 76% of the vote. This year he was down 16 points. Goodlatte went from 75% to 61%. The new Minority Whip, radical right nut case Eric Cantor, dropped down a percent this year.

The Republican party-- particularly the more right-wing dominant faction-- suffered tremendous rejection at the polls. Only by keeping their heads firmly up their own and each other's asses could right wing hacks and their friends in the media deny that. And that's where they're comfortable keeping their heads... so they will.


UPDATE: FORGET PALIN-- THE GOP TICKET FOR 2012 SHOULD BE TED NUGENT AND THE PLUMBER GUY

Yes, Nugent's a moron but we'll quote him anyway because there are loads of morons just like him who trust the same sources of information that are claiming its a center right nation and conservatives weren't defeated and all that hogwash. Nugent just declared open season on RINOs. With Chris Shays defeated and a dozen mainstream conservatives retiring because they couldn't stand being near the neo-fascists any longer, I'm not sure who he's advocating killing. Olympia Snowe? Snarlin' Arlen? At least with the stinking, treacherous Mormons, we know who they're teaching their brats to kill.

The elderly ex-rocker-- please don't tell me it was him who the Enquirer photographed in a lip-lock with Cindy McCain-- is out of step with the American people. Like many of the most hateful bigots on the far right of the GOP, the wing that has destroyed that party, he says "Consensus building is for wimps and soulless people who stand for nothing. Compromise is not about being tolerant: these days, it’s about giving up conservative principles."

RINOs reach across Fedzilla's aisle to cut deals and build consensus with the liberals. Consensus building means compromising values and cutting deals with the socialist prankster punksters whose goal it is to turn America into EuroAmerica.

Although he was campaigning for McCain aggressively last month, today he's demanding that the party's recent standard bearer be given no voice in the future of the GOP. His idea of the agenda-setters? "Conservative leaders and thinkers such as Newt Gingrich, Jed Babbin, Governor Jindal of Louisiana, Thomas Sowell, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, Governor Sarah Palin and others need to turn up the heat and bring this less government, more individual freedom and strong national defense revolution to a boil. It is time."

TED NUGENT: STILL BITTER, STILL CRAZY, STILL WRONG

Nugent, entertaining reactionaries at Texas Gov. Rick Perry's Inaugural

There were always two distinct groups of people interested in the 60s "drug culture." For some, pot, mescaline and LSD and the socio-political subculture that thrived around them were experiences in consciousness-raising, quests for enlightenment and spirituality, escapes from the dark tyranny that had enveloped America in the stultifying McCarthyite 50s. And then there were the mindless, soulless creeps who read about it all in Time, glommed on to what seemed to be happening and never had any clue about any of it whatsoever. Ted Nugent was one of those behind Door # 2. He has always tried to portray himself and his musical output as part of the creative cultural explosion that included The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Dead, Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, Cream, The Who, Pink Floyd... He wasn't... ever. Nugent had his own fans and he may mock the "dirty, stinky hippies" to his Republican pals today but the unpleasant smells Nugent is complaining about are far more likely to have emanated from the kind of crude and unwashed louts who were enthusiastic about his own high-volume/low-consciousness, uninspired commercial pap. In the 60s I booked every single musical artist mentioned above to play a concert at my college-- except one: Ted Nugent. Even though his 60s band, the Amboy Dukes, tried to capitalize on the drug culture, he was never taken seriously by anyone with more than a two-digit IQ. (To this day Nugent claims he never knew Journey to the Center of the Mind was about drugs.)

The most right wing of the quasi-respectible, neo-fascist propaganda sheets, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, has decided to celebrate Independence Day by inviting the washed up rocker to pen a story about dirty, stinky hippies. Before I go through Nugent's latest raging insanity with you, let me make a disclaimer. When I was part of senior management at Warner Bros-- a divisional president-- many of my colleagues were repulsed by Nugent's bombastic music, bad attitude and reactionary politics. By then he was part of a latter-day hair band called Damn Yankees. There was always a drumbeat of people who wanted to drop them. I wasn't among them. Well, I was among those who found his music, etc. beneath contempt, but my feeling was always that our duty to the company's shareholders, the owners, had to transcend our own sense of taste. Damn Yankees had two commercially successful albums, the 1990 eponymous debut and the less successful Don't Tread. They both sucked but there is always a market for music that sucks and Warner Bros was more famous for music that didn't suck.

In 1967 my friend Bob and I decided to hitchhike from New York to Mexico City. It was a wild, adventurous journey for two teenagers and after Mexico we wound up in San Francisco, in the midst of what is commonly called "The Summer of Love" and what Nugent has dubbed "The Summer of Drugs." I was way into the love part, too broke-- having been robbed of everything but the clothes on my back at the Alamo-- to get much into the drugs part. Nugent's typical publicity-craving outburst today was brought on by the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.

Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.

The Summer of Drugs climaxed with the Monterey Pop Festival which included some truly virtuoso musical talents such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, both of whom would be dead a couple of years later due to drug abuse. Other musical geniuses such as Jim Morrison and Mama Cass would also be dead due to drugs within a few short years. The bodies of chemical-infested, brain-dead liberal deniers continue to stack up like cordwood.

Still bitter about not making the grade as one of the "cool kids," Nugent is intensely jealous of the figures who became famous for their songs and music rather than for their gimmicks and empty outrageousness. (He spewed out over 30 albums, most unlistenable, and had one good song, "Cat Scratch Fever," in 1977. Find me a fan who would put Ted Nugent in a class with Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison or Mama Cass (I thought she OD-ed on a sandwich, not drugs), and I'll show you why Nugent thinks music fans have bad personal hygiene.

Nugent is a voice of ultra-reaction, something like Ann Coulter, with the craziest corner of modern day Republicanism. Like the Germans who blamed their predicament on everyone but themselves after World War I and constantly agitated for fascism, Nugent is incapable of learning anything from history.

The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.

A quick study of social statistics before and after the 1960s is quite telling. The rising rates of divorce, high school drop outs, drug use, abortion, sexual diseases and crime, not to mention the exponential expansion of government and taxes, is dramatic. The "if it feels good, do it" lifestyle born of the 1960s has proved to be destructive and deadly.

Nugent's next masterpiece, Love Grenade is about to hit the stores, where it is widely expected to flop, like all of his recent output. But he does have fans, although they're not likely to be people you would invite into your home. He was well-received when he spoke at the NRA's 2005 convention in Houston when he advocated killing suspects pulled over by the police. "I want carjackers dead. I want rapists dead. I want burglars dead. I want child molesters dead. I want the bad guys dead. No court case. No parole. No early release. I want 'em dead. Get a gun and when they attack you, shoot 'em." Gee, I even want Bush and Cheney to have fair trials first.

I'll be on with Los Angeles Air America host Johnny Wendell this afternoon around 4pm, discussing Ted Nugent's lack of musical talent and lack of political good sense.