Welcome to the weekend edition of your open thread. I hope you’re enjoying the wonderful weather!

We told you the Tea Party isn’t really a movement. You can’t have an organization of paranoid crazy people.

Something weird is happening with the tea party in Maine. In the past few days, tea party websites in the Pine Tree State have offered glimpses of what some are calling a coup at the one of the state’s largest tea party groups, The Maine Patriots.

On Tuesday night, Amy Hale — one of the leaders of the Patriots group — posted an odd message to the group’s website, suggesting that she’d been forced to give up control of the site, according to media reports (the post has since been removed):

I was cornered in the parking lot by 10+ people and told that bad things would happen to me if I did not give them the password and hand over Maine Patriots. Therefore, I no longer have control of Maine Patriots. Amy

…

Over at Maine Refounders, another tea party site, one tea partier offered up some more detail on what allegedly happened Tuesday night:

“Yesterday, a group of members of Maine Patriots extorted the passwword [sic] and took control of Maine Patriots’ website. Amy is working with the parent site Ning to correct this. A police report is being filed.”

Down in the comments to that post, other tea partiers offered their opinions on what happened. “We are clearly succeeding at restoring sanity to our country or hidden plants wouldn’t be so desperate to disrupt our communications openly and chance blowing their cover,” one wrote.

Apparently Amy Hale isn’t conservative enough for some of the Maine teabaggers. They accused her of being a liberal plant.

All I can say about this is good for Fareed Zakaria. He returned an award (including the cash award) to the ADL. Here’s the letter he wrote:

Five years ago, the ADL honored me with its Hubert Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize. I was delighted and moved to have been chosen for it in good measure because of the high esteem in which I hold the ADL. I have always been impressed by the fact that your mission is broad – “to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens” – and you have interpreted it broadly over the decades. You have fought discrimination against all religions, races, and creeds and have built a well-deserved reputation.

That is why I was stunned at your decision to publicly side with those urging the relocation of the planned Islamic center in lower Manhattan. You are choosing to use your immense prestige to take a side that is utterly opposed to the animating purpose of your organization. Your own statements subsequently, asserting that we must honor the feelings of victims even if irrational or bigoted, made matters worse.

This is not the place to debate the press release or your statements. Many have done this and I have written about it in Newsweek and on my television show – both of which will be out over the weekend. The purpose of this letter is more straightforward. I cannot in good conscience hold onto the award or the honorarium that came with it and am returning both. I hope that it might add to the many voices that have urged you to reconsider and reverse your position on this issue. This decision will haunt the ADL for years if not decades to come. Whether or not the center is built, what is at stake here is the integrity of the ADL and its fidelity to its mission. Admitting an error is a small price to pay to regain your reputation.

I doubt the Sarah Palins and Newt Gingrichs of the world care that innocent American Muslims also died in the 9/11 attacks. I thought the ADL and the anti-defamation league knew better. I guess not, and that’s disappointing.

Welcome to your Friday open thread. TGIF!

A conservative cabal is caught red-handed gaming Digg to bury articles from liberal/progressive websites. But, but, Journolist!

A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.

“The more liberal stories that were buried the better chance conservative stories have to get to the front page. I’ll continue to bury their submissions until they change their ways and become conservatives.”
-phoenixtx (aka vrayz)

Digg.com is the powerhouse of social media websites. It is ranked 50th among US websites by Alexa (117th in the world), by far the most influential social media site. It reached one million users in 2007 and likely has more than tripled that by this point. Digg generates around 25 million page views per month, over one third of the page views of the NY Times. Front page stories regularly overwhelm and temporarily shut down websites in a process called the “Digg Effect.”

…

The DP group searches Digg for any articles from websites they want to drown out, sites such as Salon, News Junkie Post, Talking Points Memo, FreakOutNation, Five Thirty Eight, ThePublicRecord, Rawstory, The Nation, Media Matters for America, PoliticusUSA, Alternet, Fire Dog Lake, Political Carnival, TruthOut, DailyKos, The Joshua Blog, The Brad Blog, Huffington Post, Science Blogs, Smirking Chimp, Down With Tyranny, Crooks and Liars, MarioPiperni, Buzzflash, Bob Cesca’s REALLY AWESOME Blog, and The New York Times.

I’m sure you can guess what this group called themselves – Digg Patriots. Because censorship is patriotic!

Speaking of patriots, a church group that a game where you shoot at an image of Obama was a great idea:

In Roseto, Pa., a carnival company closed down a shooter game called “Alien Attack,” after complaints and news stories that President Obama was one of the targets.

The black “alien leader” is holding a scroll titled “Health Bill” and wearing a presidential seal belt buckle. He also has antennae and a troll doll with a KISS T-shirt on his shoulder.

The owner of the carnival company, Goodtime Amusements, dismissed a complaint, saying the figure is not meant to be Obama.

Of course the amusement group was shocked, SHOCKED that people thought that the target was Obama. It was just an alien! I wonder how they got that idea?

I’m just hoping that one day we’ll all look back at this era and laugh.

Welcome to your Thursday open thread. Yesterday was a pretty exciting day with the Prop 8 decision. I got polled last night! Some polling agency was really focused on Jack Markell’s favorables but the survey seemed to be probing support for a 10-cent-per-gallon increase in the gas tax for road maintenance funds and whether I would support cutting state workers benefits to “bring them in line with the private sector.” So, I expect these issues will come up soon. I didn’t catch the name of the polling organization but my questioner was from Indiana. Heh, one question they asked was whether I considered myself “Tea Party.”

Several commenters have been talking about Basil Marceaux. Here’s the Colbert Report where the nation was just introduced to Basil Marceaux dot com.

The Tennessee primary is today. Republicans in Tennessee have the choice between Ron Ramsey, who thinks that the 1st amendment doesn’t apply to Islam, Zach Wamp, who thinks Tennessee should secede from the union over health care and Basil Marceaux dot com. Between those three, I choose Basil Marceaux.

Marceaux’s become a sensation, sort of like those bad American Idol tryouts. Last night he was on Jimmy Kimmel’s show and he sat down for a long interview with Mediaite.

On the other hand, he doesn’t want to strictly be the butt of jokes. After speaking with him at length, I can say he’s definitely a character, the sort of which gives our country its character. A former marine, he has interpreted the several iterations of the Freedmen’s Bureau Act to mean that every US Marine is also a federal judge for life, and that DUI checkpoints constitute slavery. We all have our Captain Ahab-esque obsessions, and Basil has chased this whale through the courts for years. He told me he was even banned from entering a federal building for 3 years, which was used as justification to expel him from the Pachyderm Club.

If Basil has an overarching theme to his campaign, it is that most American ideal of correcting injustices. One of his campaign promises is to “give everyone dental,” because poor people like him can’t afford to have their teeth taken care of. This has left him with only 3 teeth, which partially explains his unusual manner of speech. Contrary to what Colbert and others have said, Basil not only wasn’t drunk during his TV debut, he doesn’t even drink.

He also told me that he attended Penn State, but then transferred to a non-accredited school that basically swindled him out of his Veteran’s Administration loan money.

While it has been established that Basil Marceaux is not one of our great communicators, he seems to deserve his metamorphosis from cruelly-mocked laughingstock to shrewdly-marketed, adorable eccentric.

Welcome to your Wednesday open thread. I’ve had a lot of trouble getting on today so this might be short.

Apparently Ann Coulter wannabe Laura Ingraham wrote an imaginary diary of Barack Obama and it contained a lot of offensive racial stereotypes. Stephen Colbert tore her apart.

Calling Ingraham a “banshee” is racism now. Yeah, I don’t get it either.

OK, I’ll admit that Sharron Angle so far wins the most crazy Republican candidate contest so far (the competition is fierce):

Nevada journalist Jon Ralston unearths an interview that Sharron Angle did with Christian radio that is perhaps her most eyebrow-raising contribution to the conversation yet. In it, she says that government expansion under Obama and Dems is an effort to make government into our “God.”

In case you’re tempted to dismiss this as a figure of speech, Angle makes it clear that she’s being literal, adding that our dependence on government is “idolatry” and that this is a “violation of the First Commandment.” Here’s the key bit:

“And these programs that you mentioned — that Obama has going with Reid and Pelosi pushing them forward — are all entitlement programs built to make government our God. And that’s really what’s happening in this country is a violation of the First Commandment. We have become a country entrenched in idolatry, and that idolatry is the dependency upon our government. We’re supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and for our daily bread, not for our government.”

Cue the Blues Brothers, she’s on a mission from God.

Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. Feel free to post whatever’s on your mind and play nice!

The latest estimates on the BP oil spill agree with what outside experts were saying all along – the oil leak was much much bigger than BP was estimating. Now BP is on the hook for a $21B fine (that’s in addition to the $20B damages fund that’s already been set up).

BP’s blownout Deepwater Horizon well gushed up to 2.6 million gallons a day, the federal government now says, a total equivalent of 19 Exxon Valdezes. For months, BP insisted the figure of 5,000 barrels a day (less than one tenth the actual amount) was the “best estimate” — even as outside experts got it right. According to this new estimate, the oil giant liable for the Gulf of Mexico disaster will be responsible for a $21 billion fine — $4,300 for each barrel of oil. The subscription-only Energy Guardian notes that this figure for the oil disaster “reveals how far off initial estimates turned out to be”:

At its height, BP’s leaking well gushed 62,000 barrels of oil a day, the federal government said Monday in a revision of its figures that reveals how far off initial estimates turned out to be. The government and BP initially offered estimates of the leak at 1,000 and 5,000 of barrels a day shortly after it began in late April, eventually reaching an estimate of between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels a day after several revisions. The new estimate Monday by federal scientists means 4.9 million barrels of oil likely were released by the well before it was temporarily capped last month. BP hopes to complete an operation this week that will permanently seal the ill-fated well.

The Republicans are still filibustering a bill to lift the cap on damages and to tighten regulations on oil drilling.

Mother Jones has a really interesting article on Bob Inglis, a conservative Republican Congressman from South Carolina who refused to pander to the Tea Party and lost big in a primary.

It was the middle of a tough primary contest, and Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) had convened a small meeting with donors who had contributed thousands of dollars to his previous campaigns. But this year, as Inglis faced a challenge from tea party-backed Republican candidates claiming Inglis wasn’t sufficiently conservative, these donors hadn’t ponied up. Inglis’ task: Get them back on the team. “They were upset with me,” Inglis recalls. “They are all Glenn Beck watchers.” About 90 minutes into the meeting, as he remembers it, “They say, ‘Bob, what don’t you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.'” Inglis didn’t know how to respond.

He speaks with John Boehner, who basically tells him to pander. He recounts another meeting with conservative voters:

During his primary campaign, Inglis repeatedly encountered enraged conservatives whom he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—satisfy. Shortly before the runoff primary election, Inglis met with about a dozen tea party activists at the modest ranch-style home of one of them. Here’s what took place:

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, “You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!” And I said, “Please forgive me. I’m just ignorant of these things.” And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

Inglis keeps getting in trouble because he refuses to call Obama a “socialist” and this disappoints voters. In case you don’t remember, Bob Inglis used to be a conservative firebrand who pushed every and all conspiracy theories about Bill Clinton. He’s sorry he did that now.

Inglis acknowledges he’s intimately familiar with extreme politics. He was part of the GOP gang that went after Clinton and impeached him for the Lewinsky affair:

I hated Bill Clinton. I wanted to destroy him. Then I had six years out [after leaving Congress in 1999] to look back on that, and now I would confess it as a sin. It is just wrong to want to destroy another human being and to spend so much time and effort trying to destroy Bill Clinton—some of it with really suspect information. We went on and on about Whitewater. We had talked about the strange things about Vince Foster’s death. The drug dealing at Mena airport. So in the six years I was out, I looked back and realized, “Oh what a waste.”

We’ve already seen the return of the politics of fear and smear but it’s 10,000x worse because many don’t seem to be restrained by human decency anymore. I expect lots of craziness and vendettas if Republicans gain control of one of the House this year.