As TPM closes down the reader blogs, I would like to invite bloggers, lurkers, and other denizens of the TPM Cafe to join me at dagblog.com.

I co-founded dagblog two years ago in order to provide myself and others a rich blogging platform where we would have more control over the content, features, and traffic information than we had at TPM Cafe. Since the launch, I've worked hard to develop blogging tools, recruit writers, market the site, and build an audience. Dagblog now has a couple hundred regular readers, and with the help of google news, which indexes us, we receive several hundred visits a day. In the two years since we launched, we've received over 250,000 unique visitors. As many of you know, I have a book coming out in October, and I hope that it will help to bring even more readers to dag. (I put TPM Cafe into my acknowledgments, but it seems that no one will be blogging here when the book comes out.)

Yet even as dag has grown, we've maintained a close-knit and congenial community of regular writers and commenters. I'm proud to say that we've avoided the flame wars and grudge matches that so often blaze across web forums. Instead, we favor witty repartee and spirited debate. Even the right-wing trolls who drop in on occasion tend to be polite, if irritatingly tenacious.

I'm inviting you to join us because of the quality of the writers here but also because of the spirit of the community. TPM Cafe has had its share of trolls and personal conflicts, but it has consistently attracted a level of discourse and thought far superior to other popular liberal websites. I want to see that spirit survive on the web, and I hope that it will thrive at dagblog.

In this past week, as members have gradually migrated over, dagblog has come alive with argument and wordplay. While I'm sad about the possible demise of TPM's reader blogs, it's been an exciting week for dagblog, and I hope that the enthusiasm will continue there as the election season unfolds.

Our technology is very simple. I am the tech staff, and the ad-generated income doesn't even pay for the server costs. But I think you'll find the features to be serviceable, and while I can't promise an instant response, I'll do my best to help you if you have problems or requests. Once you blog with us, I'll give you access to traffic information so that you can see how many people have read your post and how they discovered it. I can also help you to get set up with your own subscription feeds, including RSS, Facebook, and Twitter.

I realize that dagblog is not for everyone. We have a distinctive style, and we editorialize by promoting pieces that we appreciate to the front page. In addition to dag, TPM refugees have launched two new blogs, TPMAHOLICS and Once Upon a TPM, where you can join as a founder and make the blogs your own. I sincerely wish these blogs success and encourage you to consider cross-posting with two or even all three of us.

In any case, I hope to see many of you over at dagblog. To the others, it has been a great pleasure to read, write, and argue with you for the past few years. I'm grateful that I had the opportunity, and I wish you luck. Having already broken the wall of anonymity behind which I once sheltered, here's my facebook page. I'll be happy to friend anyone who wants to keep in touch. You can also reach me through the contact us page at dagblog.

And so, in the parting words of Opus the Penguin: Another day, another segue.

Update: Some readers have asked about migrating their archives to dagblog. I've communicated with Josh about automating the migration, and he said that he is open to it if there's a simple technical solution. I will continue to explore the possibility with TPM. If that fails, I can probably set up something to pull the content directly from the page. In the short term, as I understand it, our old posts aren't going anywhere, so please be patient.

In 2007, I was a bored software engineer. I had once aspired to be a writer, but I lacked the creativity for fiction, I was too shy for journalism, and I disliked academia. I had a talent for computers, and without really intending to, I became a programmer.

Ten years into an accidental career, I channeled my professional frustration into politics. I found an outlet in arguing with anonymous strangers about the political skills of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama at TPM's Election Central site.

In 2008, TPM upgraded its reader blog capabilities, and I decided to try my hand. The other members of TPM cafe responded warmly to my early attempts at blogging. My return to writing invigorated me. It was if someone had cut through the ice over my head so that I could breath the cool crisp air once again. I began to spend as much time as I could spare at TPM Cafe. My consulting practice suffered, but my spirit grew.

Read more »

Some Democrats have cheered the success of right-wing extremists in the Colorado primaries yesterdays. They have a point. Republican gubernatorial nominee John Maes, who called Denver's bicycle program a "well-disguised" plot to destroy the "personal freedoms" of Denver's citizens by transforming the city into "a United Nations community," will now split the crazy vote with famed xenophobe Tom Tancredo, who blamed immigrants for electing "a committed socialist ideologue" to the White House. If Tancredo stays in the race, Democrat John Hickenlooper will likely sail into the governor's house.

Meanwhile, the senate nomination of Ken Buck, who wants to eliminate Social Security and the Department of Education and who supports an Arizona-style anti-immigrant law, will make life easier for Democratic incumbent Michael Bennet, though Bennet is currently behind Buck in the polls.

But Democrats who cheer the success of right-wing extremists are short-sighted. The extremist slate may lose a few elections this year, but history demonstrates that the success of the far right has not hurt the GOP in the long run. Instead, it has lowered expectations, turned fringe figures into viable candidates, and pressed the soupy gestalt of American politics ever rightward.

Read more »

Late Saturday night, the California Highway Patrol stopped 45-year-old Byron Williams as he sped towards San Francisco. Wearing a bullet proof vest and armed with three guns, Williams opened fire on the officers. After a 12-minute firefight, CHP troopers subdued and arrested Williams.

According to the police, Williams had hoped to start a revolution by killing employees of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Tides Foundation. The ACLU is a well-known bogeyman of the right wing, but the Tides Foundation, a progressive non-profit organization founded in 1976 to promote social change, is a less familiar name. Why did Williams target a little-known non-profit in order to incite a revolution? Just ask Fox News...

Read more »

June 16, 2030

Twenty years after President Barack Obama vowed to fight the massive underwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico "with everything we've got for as long as it takes," the U.S. government has formally surrendered to the spill. In a brief ceremony on a Louisiana hilltop overlooking a sea of black ooze, President George Prescott Bush signed a peace treaty that conceded almost 500,000 square miles of U.S. territory to the oil spill's dominion, including fishing and mineral exploration rights for the entire Gulf Coast.

Read more »

On June 4th, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) released an audio recording of a radio exchange between a flotilla ship and the Israeli Navy in which an unidentified crew member of the Mavi Marmara shouted, "Shut up, go back to Auschwitz!" Another unidentified voice with a distinctive Southern drawl explained to the Israeli Navy, "We're helping Arabs go against the US. Don't forget 9/11, guys."

The audio proves that the protesters were not peaceful human rights activists after all but rather Nazi-sympathizing, anti-American evil terrorist types.

Nonetheless, anti-semitic bloggers challenged the veracity of the audio clip, so the IDF released a new video that proves that the flotilla crew was even eviler than anyone had imagined. The disturbing video shows courageous Israeli marines armed only with maintenance equipment fearlessly defending the Jewish homeland from a horde of Nazi zombies. (WARNING: GRAPHIC SCENES OF ZOMBIE EMASCULATION)

Read more »

I've written a couple of posts recently about the phenomenon of right-wing projection. Projection is a Freudian concept according to which people project their own feelings of hostility onto the targets of their hostility. It is a psychological defense strategy that enables people to disown their feelings of hatred and intolerance by attributing them to the people they hate.

One of the most virulent forms of right-wing projection targets homosexuals. In the post civil rights era, homosexuals are the only minority that many Americans still openly admit to hating. In consequence, the level of projection against homosexuals is more extreme than against any other group. Conservatives may call Obama a racist, and they may accuse illegal immigrants of seeking to re-conquer the Southwest, but it's very rare for prominent right-wing leaders to accuse African-Americans or Latinos as a whole of malice towards white people.

But accusations that homosexuals are vicious and intolerant are still common. The most twisted of these projections is the myth of the Gay Fascist. Thousands of homosexuals died in the Holocaust, and the Nazis imprisoned some 50,000 others. Yet in 1994, two conservative writers, Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, sought to prove that Nazis were not intolerant of homosexuals; the Nazis were homosexuals. The Pink Swastika scrapes together a mound of alleged homosexual influences on Nazi doctrine, from Plato's Republic to Gnosticism to paganism--"In pagan cultures, homosexuals often hold an elevated position in religion and society."  This rambling collection of syllogistic fallacies is the likely inspiration behind Pat Robertson's claim that "many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were Satanists; many of them were homosexuals. The two things seem to go together." (It doesn't get any eviler than Homosexual Nazi Satanists.)

The myth of the Gay Fascist has just been revived in the context of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. Bryan Fischer of the 3.4 million member American Family Association expressed his concern that gay soldiers would be too vicious. He explained,

Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.

Incidentally, Pink Swastika author Scott Lively argued against repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell last year on the grounds that it would lead to a mass exodus of heterosexuals from the armed forces and a "homosexual takeover of the military branches." (If that happened, it would certainly mean the end of khaki camouflage fatigues.)

Lively also participated in a conference in Uganda to warn its citizens of the threat from the gay agenda. In addition to the Nazis, Lively added Rwandan extremists to the list of genocidal homosexual movements. After the conference, he boasted that he had delivered "a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda." His boast proved apt, if somewhat anachronistic, when the Ugandan Parliament subsequently voted to increase the penalty for sodomy to death by stoning. That should stop those murdering homosexuals. (Fortunately, international pressure has been intense, Uganda is reconsidering the bill.)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm currently writing a book about right-wing paranoia, How Bill O'Reilly Saved Christmas, and Other Right-Wing Persecution Fantasies, to be published in October. For updates, click the I Like button on the book's fan page.

In light of Tea Party favorite Rand Paul's overwhelming victory over the Republican establishment candidate Trey Grayson in Kentucky yesterday, it's worth taking a brief trip with the Ghost of Republican Past back to the first of many conservative purges in the modern era.

[CUE PSYCHEDELIC FLASHBACK TRANSITION]

Once upon a time, rare and exotic creatures lurked in the fetid swamps of the District of Columbia and urban jungles of the northeastern seaboard. The scientific name for the species is Republicanus Liberalus, but most people called them "Rockefeller Republicans" after Nelson Rockefeller, a prominent Republican governor from New York who expanded his state's universities, parks, welfare programs, and subsidized housing. Rockefeller Republicans were pro-business capitalists who often espoused liberal principles on gun control, welfare, women's rights, affirmative action, abortion, education, and environmentalism. According to legend, these strange Republicans were known for civility, pragmatism, and human decency, though some cynics dismiss the possibility that such wondrous beasts ever existed.

The species was relatively plentiful in the 1960s but went into steep decline in the late 1970s and was all but extinct by the end of the 1980s. The last liberal Republican in the Senate, Jim Jeffords, mutated into an independent in 2001, after his Republican colleagues undermined the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which he had helped pass back in 1975.

Political analysts offer many explanations for the extinction of liberal Republicans. Some point to national disenchantment with large public social programs, some to a backlash against the cultural shifts of the 1960s, and some to the increasing conservativism of aging baby boomers. Most of these explanations place the impetus on the mood of the American electorate, suggesting that liberal Republicans died out because they failed to adapt to the changing political climate. I submit an alternative hypothesis: the liberal Republicans were hunted into extinction by an invasive right-wing cousin.

Read more »

As if its draconian immigration law weren't sufficient to demonstrate Arizona's profound appreciation for its Latino minority, the state has just enacted a second law to make the point. The new law prohibits Arizona schools from teaching "ethnocentric" courses that:

1. Promote the overthrow of the U.S. government
2. Promote resentment toward a race or class of people
3. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group
4. Advocated ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals

(The law threatens to eliminate popular courses like, "Future Marxist Revolutionaries of America" and "Torturing White People, Yes You Can!")

Read more »

If you have any doubt about the racist undercurrent driving right-wing immigration concerns, listen to Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh knows his audience, and when he discussed Arizona's immigration law on Monday, he gave them the red meat, or rather the black-and-brown meat, that they were looking for:

Obama says he's going to reconnect via the immigration bill, young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women for 2010 to help stem the tide of Democrat losses in November. He did not say he was going to reach out to white people...This is the regime at its racist best. What's the regime doing? Asking blacks and Latinos to join him in a fight. What is a campaign if not a fight? He's asking young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women to reconnect, to fight who? Who's this fight against?

Read more »

Who loves a Tea Party? A recent NYT/CBS poll punctured a couple of myths about the makeup of today's paranoid right-wing activists.

Myth #1. Tea Party supporters are motivated by economic anxiety

This myth has been widely embraced without challenge by media analysts, politicians, bloggers, taxi drivers, barbers, and pretty much everyone else with an opinion on the topic. Even President Obama said, "There have been periods in American history where this kind of vitriol comes out. It happens often when you've got an economy that is making people more anxious, and people are feeling as if there is a lot of change that needs to take place."

Read more »

Erick Erickson, the founder of political blog RedState.com, which CNN calls "the preeminent right of center community online," has threatened to drive off census workers with a shotgun if they ask him how many times he flushes the toilet and other highly classified information.