We Don't Even Know What All Diseases They Have

Where the white women at? Via.

“Our schools cannot handle this influx, we don’t even know what all diseases they have. Our health care systems can’t withstand this influx.”-Louie Gohmert

It's Louie Gohmert week (month/year/decade/century) here at Keep Talking, Wingnuts, so I'm just going to have to amplify, again, Gohmert's disgustingly wrong and old "diseased immigrants" meme.

Via LOLGOP, we have more evidence that today's' wingnuts are just recycling old bullshit. Maybe they're lazy. Or maybe they like to stick with what they think are tried and true strategies for fueling xenophobia. Whatever their pitiful excuse is, their current fact-less tirades are so insulting to the kids fleeing violence in countries the US has funded right wing death squads in that I really do hope they keep talking.

Consider:

Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet, a Fox News commentator and former director of the ultra-conservative political group Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, writes in the McAllen Monitor that measles is among the “diseases the United States had controlled or virtually eradicated” that are “carried across the border by this tsunami of illegals.”

Fact check: UNICEF reports that 93 percent of kids in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are vaccinated against measles. That’s better than American kids (92 percent).

Furthermore, it’s absurd to claim that the U.S. has eradicated measles while Central America has not. In fact, measles outbreaks have resurged in some American cities. By contrast, according to the World Health Organization, neither Guatemala nor Honduras has had a reported case of measles since 1990.

From the 1896 Edition of the Rams Horn. 

And from Fox News contributor Marc Siegel (author of "False Alarm: Profiting from the Epidemic of Fear"--I shit you not):

...unaccompanied minors “are a likely source” of the mosquito-borne dengue fever spreading to Texas. Siegel ignores two key public health points: First, legal immigrants and travelers are a much larger group than undocumented folks, and just as likely to carry dengue. (I don’t know about y’all, but I’ve never been screened for dengue fever at the Texas-Mexico border.)  Second, mosquitoes can fly.

America is a lot more brown than it was when Eisenhower authorized Operation Wetback, so picking on brown people (or worse) isn't going to be as effective for getting people to vote for you as it used to be. But I'd have to review of a few of my history books to find a time when the xenophobes in America openly denigrated children. This kind of behavior probably won't stop many Jeb Bush Republicans from voting for a Louie Gohmert when given the chance. The question is, how many Democrats will get off their asses in a mid term and vote against one?

Louie Gohmert Just Won't Shut Up and That's a Very Good Thing

Congressman (!) Louie Gohmert

As I've said before, if I were a rich man I'd send Louie Gohmert, Sarah Palin, Steve Stockman, and Michelle Bachman on a speaking tour of swing states and congressional districts, especially along the US border with Mexico. You can keep up with a lot more of the crazy shit they say by watching #KeepTalkingWingnuts on Twitter. I can't post every crazy thing they say... Too busy trying to start another small business.

Today's bonus round of Keep Talking, Wingnuts is brought to you by Congressman (!) Gohmert (it's so odd that I shudder every time I write congressman before his name). It's one thing when a bunch of xenophobic voters show up to yell at a busload of kids trying to escape the violence in countries right wing US governments have been funding right wing death squads in for years. It's quite another when a US congressman suggests we stop the influx of these children by killing them when they cross the border.

Think I'm kidding?

“That’s why I’m hoping that my governor will utilize Article 1, Section 10, that allows a state that is being invaded — in our case more than twice as many just in recent months, more than twice as many than invaded France on D-Day with a doubling of that coming en route, on their way here now under Article 1, Section 10, the state of Texas would appear to have the right, not only to use whatever means, whether it’s troops, even using ships of war, even exacting a tax on interstate commerce that wouldn't normally be allowed to have or utilize, they’d be entitled in order to pay to stop the invasion.”

Yep. You read it right. Louie Gohmert wants to treat the influx of children (running from violence in countries that Louie Gohmert's wingnut buddies in the White House fucked with for decades by funding right wing death squads) like an invading army. He wants to use "whatever means" to stop this "invasion." Including troops. And since Congressman (!) Gohmert served in the US Army, he most certainly knows what troops do to invading forces. But maybe he didn't see combat while he was in the Judge Advocate General's Corps after Vietnam.

The congressman also said, "We don’t know what diseases they’re bringing in." I doubt any diseases they do have could be any worse than the outbreak of measles near Rep. Gohmert's district in North Texas that's a result of anti-vaccine wingnuts fueled by rhetoric from, you guessed it, Louie Gohmert, who agreed with noted I-lost-an-election-to-Barack-Obama-Republican Alan Keyes that it's a scary thought that liberals are using vaccines to kill off enough of the population so that they could control the rest.

Somebody please get this mental midget a bigger soapbox.

Minnesota House Candidate Wants to Tell Us about the AIDS

Bob Frey, Friend of Michelle Bachman, photo via Queerty

Please tell us more about the science behind AIDS, Bob Frey, candidate for Minnesota House district 47A in Carver County, Minnesota:

But when questioned about his position on social issues, Frey added that it “does certainly need to be addressed for what it is. It’s not about the gay agenda but about the science and the financial impact of that agenda. It’s more about sodomy than about pigeonholing a lifestyle.”   

Pigeonholio!

Frey then explained his view: “When you have egg and sperm that meet in conception, there’s an enzyme in the front that burns through the egg. The enzyme burns through so the DNA can enter the egg. If the sperm is deposited anally, it's the enzyme that causes the immune system to fail. That’s why the term is AIDS – acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.”

 The Minn Post story helpfully lets us know that this view, which Bob shares with his son Mike (scientific consensus!), has no scientific validity. Not that that matters one bit to the wingnuts who'll be voting for him.

These Gish Gallopers always make me think of On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt:

"...bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

Update: House district and county corrected. H/t to Ole Olson.

No Coal Mines on Mars

KT state Senator Brandon Smith, The Thinker

Via Hunter, I hear that the Kentucky State  Senate Majority Whip, Sen. Brandon Smith, is so worried about the just over 0.6 percent of total employment in the state that is coal mining jobs that he's taken to the halls of academia for proof of how silly this whole global warming thing is.

“As you (Energy & Environment Cabinet official) sit there in your chair with your data, we sit up here in ours with our data and our constituents and stuff behind us. I don’t want to get into the debate about climate change, but I will simply point out that I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here. Nobody will dispute that. Yet there are no coal mines on Mars. There are no factories on Mars that I’m aware of.”

Click on through for the fun scientific stuff, like the vast difference in average temperatures. But for the sake of an academic exercise, if we did find coal deposits on Mars, it would be proof of life on another planet, and it would be a handy way, assuming there's enough of it, for us to terraform Mars. You know, if you believe the physicists in academia who tell us that adding CO2 to a planet's atmosphere makes the planet hotter. Like what happened on Venus. Without any coal mines or factories. That I'm aware of.