I, ________________________, do solemnly swear to uphold the principles of a socialism-free society and heretofore pledge my word that I shall strictly adhere to the following…

I pledge to eliminate all government intervention in my life. I will abstain from the use of and participation in any socialist goods and services including but not limited to the following:

* Social Security
* Medicare/Medicaid
* State Children’s Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP)
* Police, Fire, and Emergency Services
* US Postal Service
* Roads and Highways
* Air Travel (regulated by the socialist FAA)
* The US Railway System
* Public Subways and Metro Systems
* Public Bus and Lightrail Systems

Read the whole pledge.

(thanks to Cindy for the link)

Need some irony? Thanks, Fox “News”!

All Americans should see this important PSA about the health care debate, and who the real victims are:

Levi Johnston is hardly the most trustworthy source, but the guy did essentially live with the Palins for quite some time. That’s why his tell-all in Vanity Fair is very bad news for anyone in the “Palin in 2012″ camp:

She only goes to church four or five times a year—mostly on holidays…

They’re good on television, but once the cameras would leave they didn’t talk to each other. In all the time Bristol and I were together, I’ve never seen them sleep in the same bedroom…

People think that Sarah likes hunting, fishing, and camping, but she doesn’t. She says she goes hunting and lives off animal meat—I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen her touch a fishing pole. She had a gun in her bedroom and one day she asked me to show her how to shoot it. I asked her what kind of gun it was, and she said she didn’t know, because it was in a box under her bed…

After Tripp was born, Sarah would pay more attention to our son than she would to her own baby, Trig. Sarah has a weird sense of humor. When she came home from work, Bristol and I would be holding Trig and Tripp. Sarah would call Trig—who was born with Down syndrome—“my little Down’s baby.” But I couldn’t believe it when she would come over to us and sometimes say, playing around, “No, I don’t want the retarded baby—I want the other one,” and pick up Tripp.

We are not the only nation troubled by immigrants pouring over our porous borders, creating havoc. This letter to the editor also advocates for stronger initiatives to stem the tide of illegal immigration.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post comes this profile in today’s Salon of revisionist and fundamentalist extremist W. Cleon Skousen.

Skousen’s former employer had a low opinion of him as an overzealous right-winger. Which employer? The FBI… during the J. Edgar Hoover years:

When Skousen’s books started popping up in the nation’s high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau’s answer was an exasperated and resounding “no.” One 1962 FBI memo notes, “During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing ‘professional communists’ who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes.”

Things didn’t get better.

By 1963, Skousen’s extremism was costing him. No conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had “gone off the deep end.” One ASC member who shared this opinion was William C. Mott, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. Mott found Skousen “money mad … totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends.”

When Skousen aligned himself with Robert Welch’s charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” the last of Skousen’s dwindling corporate clients dumped him.

So who’s the guy currently touting Skousen and his books? Who, forty years later, would consider this wingnut a reliable source of American history?

Glenn Beck.

Amidst all the Kanye kerfuffle, it was easy to lose track of this quote from the 2009 VMAs:

“English people are a bit different from you. Instead of truck, we say lorry; instead of elevator, we say lift; and instead of letting people die in the street, we have free health care.”
-Russell Brand

Jon Armstrong, of blurbomat.com, writes this editorial on “Why I Write So Much Against Fringe Conservatives”:

So here we are. Glenn Beck and the others talking about feeling like we did that day after 9/11, by inspiring divisiveness, cynicism and fucking with the very notion of what words mean. Obama is the scary “racist” “fascist” “socialist” “communist” that is going to kill grandma. Yet one of Glenn Beck’s heroes was found, by Mormons of all people, to be propagating thought that closely resembles the philosophical underpinnings of Nazism.

It’s time to call it. Smart people need to stand up and call this bullshit what it is: toxic waste hurled out across the public airwaves as pseudo-intellect and deep care for this great country. It’s dangerous. And it’s time to drop it.

GQ presents this fascinating yet appalling look inside the early days of the Bush Recession, as former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer talks of the dysfunction within the Oval Office during Bush’s last 22 months.

Rob Miller is a Marine and an Iraq War veteran from South Carolina. Oh, and he’s running against Rep. Joe Wilson in 2010.

You know what to do.