This gon’ get ugly, kidz…

A group of internet gun fetishists and survivalists known as “The Citadel” [insert dramatic sound effect] have purchased 20 acres of a mountaintop in Idaho with plans to purchase thousands more and are planning on building a walled compound to house 3,500-7,000 gun worshipping families. The requirements for acceptance into this community include demonstrating proficiency with the rifle of your choice by hitting a man-sized steel target at 100 yards with open sights at the Citadel range, demonstrating proficiency with a handgun of choice by hitting a man-sized steel target at 25 yards with open sights at the Citadel range, and that every able-bodied Patriot of age within the Citadel maintain one AR15 variant in 5.56mm NATO, at least 5 magazines and 1,000 rounds of ammunition. Not only do you have to love guns, you have to be armed whenever you go into the City Center. That’s their law.

It’s pretty easy to see where this is going to end up. Follow me over the jump for all the insanity you could ever hope to read about.

Think (and check facts) before you rage out

I was surfing Daily Kos a couple of days ago and came across a cross-post of a piece from Delaware Liberal titled “Outrage in Milford”. The piece was inspired by this sign:

The top sign says one thing in English but the bottom sign, in Spanish, says something entirely different:

You must have a permit to play on this field. Violators are subject to police action.

There were several of these signs at playgrounds across the city.

Hideous racism, right? Actually not. Read on (after the jump.)

Hmmm…imagine that

One of my favorite up-and-coming bloggers, Amy Kerr Hardin, has a piece up right now at her site Democracy Tree that shows the incredible hypocrisy behind Michigan Republicans’ efforts to “reform” Michigan schools. The piece, “Education Achievement Authority — NOT Fiscally Responsible”, shows that John Covington, the Chancellor of the Education Achievement Authority of Michigan, has applied for and received millions of dollars in federal grants in order to fund the EAA’s efforts to fix Michigan’s poorest performing schools. Seems he has found that the current level of per-pupil funding is inadequate.

Much more after the jump.

Let’s get some perspective on this, shall we?

One of the most widely prevalent myths being perpetrated on the right is that the federal budget should be seen as just a much larger version of a family budget. “American families are forced to live within their budget every day,” we’re told. “The federal government should do the same.”

Laura Clawson at Daily Kos has a marvelous piece up this morning that shows just how fail that argument is, mainly because it leaves out some very inconvenient truths about what our federal government looks like.

Her piece is titled “You want to compare the U.S. budget to a family budget? Let’s be real about it.” It stems from a piece making the rounds on Facebook that said it’s easier to look at the federal budget if you lop off eight zeros and then look at it like a family budget.

Much more after the Eclectacliff.

Yeeouch

After Secretary of State and Superwoman Hillary Clinton collapsed due to flu-related dehydration and exhaustion and bonked her head last month, conservative conspiracy theorists descended on Fox News and various right-wing failblogs to explain that she was making up her concussion to avoid having to testify on the attack at the Benghazi embassy on September 11th that resulted in the deaths of four Americans.

At a December 17th State Department daily press briefing, Fox News “reporter” Justin Fishel asked a question that seemed to imply that he was making this absolutely absurd accusation.

The response from the State Department after the fact is nothing short of epic. Check it out after the jump.

Sorry, Mitt. But you’re going to have to pay some taxes. With President Obama busy spending much of his time trying to stop House Republicans from purposely destroying the economy in order to get the kind of cuts to Medicare they’ve spent years campaigning against, most of America has missed that we now have what some experts are calling the […]

I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry…

Joshua Green at Bloomberg Businessweek has a hilarious piece about the utter fail whale that is the Tea Party caucus in Congress at the moment. In it, he details how utterly “hapless” (to use his word) the anti-Boehner contingent was when it came to their failed attempt to replace him as Speaker of the House.

He lays it out in three steps (which you can cackle at after the jump.)

Good for the goose but not for the gander

On December 22nd, The Journal News in an area just outside of New York City published an interactive map of those people in that area holding handgun permits. By clicking on the dots on the map, you could identify the name and address of the people with these permits. As the newspaper said in its piece, “Map: Where are the gun permits in your neighborhood?”, the data does not include owners of rifles or shotguns which can be purchased without a permit. It also “does not mean the individual at a specific location owns a weapon, just that they are licensed to do so.”

The gun fetishists went nuts.

“It’s an invasion of privacy!” they cried.

“It violates my rights!” they whined.

“It’s puts people in danger!” they warned.

Watching them fall all over themselves to put their 2nd Amendment rights above the 1st Amendment rights of the newspaper to share public information has been very illuminating.

Much more after the jump.

Thirty-fourth time’s a charm?

Republicans have been trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act since it was passed. The last time was in July 2012. That was the 33rd attempt.

Today, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann introduced legislation to try it again for the 34th time.

More idiocracy after the fold.

Wow

Before we head off into 2013, I wanted to take a moment to look back on 2012, a year that put Eclectablog on the map.

As you can see from the chart below the fold, Eclectablog had a stellar year in 2012. When we started the year, we were getting well under 100,000 pageviews per month. Not bad for a small blog but certainly not in the Big Leagues. By the end of the year, however, we had 3,307,857 pageviews and nearly 3 million unique visits. Our highest month was, not surprisingly, October, with well over a half million pageviews. Even in December, when people were sick of the election and politics in general, we had 272,000+ pageviews.

Much more after the jump.

Small government, my butt

As I wrote last week, the hypocritical “small government” Republicans passed 282 bills during the short inflamed duck session. So many, in fact, that when Governor Snyder took a holiday break outside of the state, Lt. Governor Brian Calley was enlisted to sign 50 of them.

More after the Eclectablog cliff.