I’m sure Jonathan Chait is grateful to the Heritage Foundation’s Jim DeMint for sharing his wisdom about ‘people of faith” ending slavery, not ‘big government.” It shows the extent to which the mainstream right is still fighting the Civil War. I never bought Chait’s false equivalence between the way the left and right use race in the age of Barack Obama, but DeMint surely didn’t advance Chait’s cause.

It could seem unfair to link DeMint to Chait, just because Chait’s reply to his critics, myself included, came the day DeMint’s ludicrous remarks became public. But Republicans are stepping in it every damn day, so if Chait had published his reply on a day ending in ‘y,” I probably could have found a toxic GOP statement on race. DeMint’s emancipation denialism just shows how thoroughly race is baked into the modern Republican Party, and anyone who’s trying to insist ‘Democrats do it too” has to answer for the former senator from South Carolina’s invidious revisionism.

Here’s exactly what DeMint told a Christian radio show last week, courtesy of Think Progress:

Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American […]

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Two researchers from the Department of Psychology and Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University demonstrated that the more white Americans know about the changing demographics of the United States, the more likely they are to endorse conservative policy positions.

Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson conducted three studies in which white Americans were presented with information about the racial demographic shifts that have led the U.S. Census Bureau to project that ‘racial minority groups will make up a majority of the U.S. national population in 2042, effectively creating a so-called “majority-minority’ nation.”

In the first study, self-identifying political independents were randomly asked to learn about the majority-minority racial shift in California or about how the number of Hispanics in the United States is now roughly equal to the number of African-Americans. They were then asked questions about their political party leanings and ideology.

The result was that, ‘[d]espite being self-identified political independents, respondents who were asked about the [majority-minority] racial shift reported being somewhat more conservative than did respondents” who were asked the less salient question about Hispanics being roughly equally to African-Americans.

In the second study, Craig and Richeson had participants read either about the majority-minority racial shift or a non-racial national shift […]

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Sometimes the news is just so drearily awful that you have to sit back and almost appreciate the pure comedy induced by it.

Take this item from Washington, Iowa, where the local police have recently acquired an MRAP vehicle (short for Mine Resistance Ambush Protected) through a Defense Department program that donates excess vehicles originally produced for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to local police departments across the United States, including other Iowa towns such as Mason City and Storm Lake.

The MRAP weighs an impressive 49,000 pounds, stands 10-feet tall, and possesses a whopping six-wheel drive. Originally designed to resist landmines and IEDs, it sure seems like the MRAP will come in handy for the notorious war zone otherwise known as Washington County, Iowa.

If you’re having a bad day, I highly recommend watching a video produced by the Des Moines Register in which Washington police officials try to justify the possession of a vehicle it clearly has no use for. The excuses range from school shootings (which are an actual concern but an MRAP seems like overkill) to a terrorist attack happening in central Iowa (because if there’s any place that seems ripe for a high-profile terrorist attack it’s Washington, […]

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Conservative pundit Ben Stein suggested that only government-sanctioned religion could save poor Americans from their own ‘self-sabotage,” reported Right Wing Watch.

‘What will make the genuinely poor stop sabotaging themselves?” the actor and TV host asked Friday in The American Spectator. ‘Maybe, just maybe, if we let God back into the public forum it would help. I have seen spiritual solutions work miracles.”

Stein argued that anyone concerned about wealth inequality was just jealous of billionaires, whom he described as necessary and beneficial to American society.

‘They fund symphonies and ballets and schools for inner city kids,” he argued, while recovering from an illness and listening to Big Band music. ‘They are a bulwark against tyranny because they can afford lawyers to fight overweening government.”

The wealthy are actually good for democracy, Stein argued.

‘We want for there to be a high number of rich people who function as a brake on government just as the nobles did on the crown in long ago England,” he said.

On the other hand, Stein argued, poor people dragged down society with their slovenly habits and appearance.

‘My humble observation is that most long-term poverty is caused by self-sabotage by individuals,” he argued. ‘Drug use. Drunkenness. Having children without a […]

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None of the three major cable news networks have a perfect record on portraying climate science, but Fox News was the most inaccurate of all in 2013, according to a new report.

The report, released Monday by the Union of Concerned Scientists, looked at segments on the cable networks’ prominent evening and weekend programs that mentioned ‘global warming” or ‘climate change” in 2013. Researchers found that segments on MSNBC were the most accurate, with just 8 percent of the segments containing misleading statements about the science behind climate change. CNN was next in terms of accuracy, with 30 percent of segments containing misleading statements, and Fox was last, with 72 percent of segments containing misinformation or misrepresentations of climate science.
UCS report.

The nature of the misleading statements differed from station to station, with CNN’s inaccuracy growing from debate guests who doubted certain aspects of climate science, such as the relationship between climate change and extreme weather. Fox hosts and guests, on the other hand, would more often accuse climate scientists of hiding or misrepresenting data, and were also more likely to state outright that climate change was not occurring. Accurate coverage of climate science on Fox came primarily from Special Report […]

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