" National Review has published an editorial urging everyone to disassociate themselves with Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County sheriff who is questioning whether President Obama is a real American. "

" This man presided over a police force that violated the Constitution, intimidated political opponents by abusing his legal authority, misspent funds, saw an increase in crime, paid out millions in taxpayer dollars when his underlings brutally terrorized inmates... and through it all, he was, as Radley Balko once put it, a right-wing darling, "winning praise and defenses from conservative outlets such as Fox News, National Review Online, the Washington Times, and Newsbusters." It's good that his birtherism is being rejected, but it's important to remember that it doesn't even make the top ten list of his most egregious behavior. "

" But as we grind through the Republican primary process, it seems like the debate over morality in America has less to do with moral outcomes and more to do with a vision of how society should look based on idealistic remembrances of how things were. So people like Mr Munro and the Republican candidates believe America is in a moral slump. The odd thing is, people on the left might actually agree, though for very different reasons. They are upset by the perceived greed of the 1%, and the broad acceptance of torture and war as foreign-policy tools. In the end, the debate over morality more closely resembles two distinct monologues. "

" Using the Tea Party’s database of organizations (online at TeaPartyPatriots.org), the scholars dispute the group’s claim that the growth of their movement is a direct response to increased government debt and higher taxes. Fetner and King told conference attendees that the facts reveal the opposite: lower-taxed counties have a greater propensity to give rise to Tea Party organizations. "

" The conservative gay rights group, GOProud, was banned this year, but two prominent white nationalists were allowed to appear on a panel opposing multiculturalism.

" And they were hardly sent packing. Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa fawned over Peter Brimelow, founder of the white nationalist site VDARE, saying, “I read your books!” Tomorrow, white nationalist Bob Vandervoort is scheduled to appear alongside two other Republican members of Congress. "

" Fallows responds:

"...Newt Gingrich knows exactly what he is doing when he calls Obama the "food stamp" president, just as Ronald Reagan knew exactly what he was doing when talking about "welfare Cadillacs." There are lots of other ways to make the point about economic hard times -- entirely apart from which person and which policies are to blame for today's mammoth joblessness, and apart from the fact that Congress sets food stamp policies. You could call him the "pink slip president," the "foreclosure president," the "Walmart president," the "Wall Street president," the "Citibank president," the "bailout president," or any of a dozen other images that convey distress. You decide to go with "the food stamp president," and you're doing it on purpose.

" If Joe Lieberman had been elected, I would be wary of attacks on his economic policy that called him "the cunning, tight-fisted president." If Henry Cisneros had or Ken Salazar does, I would notice arguments about ineffectiveness phrased as "the mañana administration." If Gary Locke were in office, then "the Manchurian candidate" jokes that had been used on John Huntsman would have a different edge. And so on. "

" “Most Israelis at the time assumed the Haredim would die off in one generation,” said Jonathan Rosenblum, a Haredi writer.

" Instead, they have multiplied, joined government coalitions and won subsidies and exemptions for children, housing and Torah study. They now number a million, a mostly poor community in an otherwise fairly well-off country of 7.8 million.

" They have generally stayed out of the normal Israeli politics of war and peace, often staying neutral on the Palestinian question and focusing their deal-making on the material and spiritual needs of their constituents. Politically they have edged rightward in recent years.

" In other words, while rejecting the state, the ultra-Orthodox have survived by making deals with it. And while dismissing the group, successive governments — whether run by the left or the right — have survived by trading subsidies for its votes. Now each has to live with the other, and the resulting friction is hard to contain.

" “The coexistence between the two is breaking down,” said Arye Carmon, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem research organization. “It is an extreme danger.”

" Mr. Carmon compared the strictly religious Jews of Israel to the Islamists in the Arab world, saying that there was a similar dynamic at play in Egypt, with tensions growing between the secular forces that led the revolution and the Islamic parties now rising to prominence. "

" In Beit Shemesh and elsewhere across the country, some ultra-Orthodox Jews have tried to impose a kind of communal piety—a strict code of behavior that includes gender segregation on buses, with men in the front and women in the back. For most Israelis, this zealousness is off-putting. Founded by secular Jews who envisaged a modern, egalitarian state, Israel has all the trappings of a liberal society: progressive laws and cutting-edge universities, women in bikinis and women in business and politics. But it also has a fast-growing community that shuns modernity and views the world through the narrow prism of biblical warrant. Once a tiny minority, ultra-Orthodox Jews—also known as Haredim—now make up more than 10 percent of Israel’s population and 21 percent of all primary-school students. With the community’s fertility rate hovering at more than three times that of other Israeli Jews, demographers project that by 2034, about one in five Israelis will be ultra-Orthodox. "

" It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant. "

" West sounded downright moderate as he explained his new reasonableness. “One of the things that I think conservatives have a problem with is what I call incrementalism,” he told the students. “We believe that when we run a marathon and we start at mile zero, we’re automatically supposed to be at 26.2, but I tell you there are miles in between. . . . What are those incremental steps that get us there?” "

" Compared to his father, he said that Mr Gingrich would stand "in some dank little basement somewhere or some fantasy world in his own head". "

" "I don't even know if you understand what conservatives are anymore, Billy," Beck said in his extended, sarcastic attack on Kristol. "People like Bill Kristol, I don't think they stand for anything any more. All they stand for is power. They'll do anything to keep their little fiefdom together, and they'll do anything to keep the Republican power entrenched." "

Beck, the John Birch Society, and Welch

For the next time Horowitz comes to UC Irvine. Horowitz: " What he should not be doing as a conservative leader is demonizing Glenn Beck, who has done more to educate Americans about the unholy alliance between the secular left and the Islamic jihadists than anyone else. "

" But hysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s. "

Candidate who decried miscegenation and wrote for a white separatist mag got 38% in his NY district.

" Like many other movements, the Catholic Right is not monolithic. But within the diversity, there are nevertheless two main schools of thought: Paleo-conservative and neoconservative. "

Ray Bradbury: tea party primitivist

"We, black American citizens of the United States of America and of the National Black Republican Association, do hereby declare that our fellow white American citizens are now, henceforth and forever more free of White Guilt."

and other articles re: biotechnology and neoconservative critiques