Monday, March 30, 2009

Gingrich is a Catholic Now?

Directly from our WTF? file is the news that our old buddy Newtie G. converted to Catholicism on Sunday.

Yeah, I thought it was a joke at first myself, something out of The Onion ("the news" in general is now so bizarre that it threatens to drive The Onion out of business), but no, there it is.

This three-times-married and two-times-matrimonial-loser, former corrupt Speaker of the House, full-time Georgia cracker and self-described "historian" apparently had to make that fatal leap into the arms of the Great Whore of Babylon because his current squeeze, third wife Callista, stopped putting out unless he submitted to the will of the Pope. I'm just saying...

And almost simultaneous to his conversion, Newtie started railing against Notre Dame for having the fucking nerve to invite the President of the United States to deliver its commencement address.

Plus it turns out that Newt is a Twit. Okay, we knew that already, but he has, of all things, a Twitter presence, wherein you will find this deathless piece of prose:

It is sad to see notre dame [sic] invite president obama [sic] to give the commencement address Since [sic] his policies are so anti catholic [sic] values.
Okay, come on. I realize that the rules of English have been relaxed somewhat with the advent of texting and such crap, but this fucker is supposed to be smart. I mean he supposedly has a PhD for crissakes. Anyone who commits that many errors in a single sentence is desperately in need of some remedial education.

And it kind of makes me wonder what ghost writers he used for those books he supposedly wrote himself. And his doctoral dissertation? If he can't write a single declarative sentence without fucking it up this bad, then he had to have a ghost writer for that as well.

But back on topic. How is Newtie, if he really plans to run for president, going to justify this leap of bad faith to the Fundo-Xians who make up the core of the Rethug base? After all, no lesser a personage than über-evangelist John Hagee has been making the claim for years that the Catholic Church is, in fact and in prophecy, the Great Whore of Babylon.

I just don't see it happening that the Fundos will ever, when the chips are down, elevate the Newtster to the exalted status of Rethug standard bearer and banner boy.

So what the fuck is really going on here? Can it really be so simple, can it really be that presumptive presidential candidate Gingrich is willing to throw away his only chance to become president because the old lady has cut him off from sex until he was willing to take on the mantle of Catholicism?

Actually, given his past history with women and his insatiable inability to keep it in his pants, it wouldn't surprise me at all.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Tonight's the Night

You may recall that a week ago I called on everyone to just say no by turning out the lights on Saturday March 28.

That's today.

Earth Hour has already started in many parts of the globe. For those of you in the USA, depending on where you live, you still have anywhere from an hour-and-a-half to four-(or five- ... I get confused with all those farflung outlying possessions; you know, like Alaska and Hawaii...)-and-a-half hours to make it happen. At exactly 8:30 in each timezone turn off your lights.

Of course it has been snowing all afternoon (yes, I said snowing!!!) here, so I may have to remind She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed how much she likes winter camping in order to make it happen on schedule...

What Kind of Liberal Are You?

These things are always kind of fun. Drop by Guide to Liberal Breeds, take a short quiz, and it will tell you what kind of liberal you are.

My score: I am a "Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite ... a proud member of what's known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme."

Be prepared, though, for a disgusting image to be pressed into your brain. If you are a visual person (like me), it may haunt your dreams.

The image? Okay, here goes. One of the questions is "If you could pile any three people into a naked pyramid, who would you choose?" One of the choices is "Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh" ...

Now that's just fucking sick...

Friday, March 27, 2009

Yeah, This is Smart...

Lawmakers in at least eight US states are considering legislation to force the weak, the poor and the disaffected, who are also the economically, socially and legally disenfranchised (i.e. those on welfare, unemployment insurance, food stamps, etc) to take mandatory drug tests in exchange for receiving that massive amount of largesse from the state.

Okay then. Let's look at this with the jaundiced eye of reality. Let's say one of these poor saps flunks the test because he has marijuana in his system. He's immediately cut off whatever poor excuse for a living stipend that he has coming in, which means that in order for him to get some money to make up for that loss, he'll most likely turn to crime of some sort (if it's a male, it's usually burglary and if it's a female it's usually prostitution, but sometimes they go to something more hostile and with more potential for mayhem, like armed robbery) to make up for it. Immediately you have created a real criminal where only a "paper" criminal existed before.

And to go a step further, let's say that his neighbor is smart enough to know that marijuana stays in your system and is drug-testable for something like four weeks. So, knowing that he's going to be drug-tested in order to keep his unemployment benefits, he turns to something that metabolizes and disappears out of the system in 24 hours or less. Something like crack cocaine or heroin. He gets to keep his benefits as long as he's more than one day away from the test (and who isn't smart enough to pull that one off?).

Now it comes down to this: Who do you want living next door to you? That pot smoker who is always laid back and groovy, or the guy on the other side who's cranked up on crack cocaine and thinks that your dog is working for the CIA and your cat is taking secret spy-camera x-ray photos of his testicles?

This is what the so-called War on Drugs has gotten us after 40 years: A bad investment in time, money and resources. If you ask me, we should just do what Paul Harvey (yes, that Paul Harvey) suggested about Vietnam, also 40 years ago: Declare a victory and get out.

I don't know how many billions of dollars, all told, are squandered on this phony "war", but it's a hell of a lot when you count up all of the time and equipment and salaries and man-hours squandered in the areas of Coast Guard interdiction, on-land law enforcement, the overworked court system and the overcrowded prison population. We'd have a much small budget crisis if we diverted all that cash into something where we actually had a chance of making the money work for us. Like universal health care or expanded Head Start programs.

It's about time that we realized that after 40 years of stalemate, the so-called War on Drugs is over. We lost. It's time to take a new direction, and penalizing the poor, the weak and the disaffected even more is a losing proposition from the get-go. Legalize drugs, tax the hell out of them, and recognize finally that no one -- I repeat NO ONE -- has EVER died from a marijuana overdose.

Because there ain't no such thing...

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

And While We're On the Subject of Gay Marriage...

... here's a heartfelt apology from Portia DeRossi, who is taking the responsibility for all of those people who were harmed -- really harmed! -- by her marriage to Ellen:


Vermont "Gets It" -- Catholic Bishop, Not So Much

Up in its little corner of the US Northeast, tiny Vermont "gets it".

The Catholic bishop of Burlington doesn't.

I'm talking about the legislation that is about to become law in Vermont which would allow so-called "same sex marriages".

Here's what the good bishop had to say about the whole thing in his testimony before the Vermont legislature prior to their vote:

The union of husband and wife is a distinct vocation and using the law to alter or to redefine marriage is an injustice to those who have embraced this state in life and negates its long history of benefit to society and the justified acknowledgment that it has received from the very beginning of history.
A fucking injustice! Got that? All of you gay people out there who want to get married: What the fuck are you thinking? Don't you fucking know that if you do, it will be an injustice to me and everyone else who is married to someone of the opposite sex? What is wrong with you people?

Okay, back to reality. I'm willing to bet that no one asked the good bishop for some details on exactly how this "injustice" would affect people like me. The whole "defense of marriage" thing is a fraud from the Religious Right, aided and abetted by their allies in the Catholic church (whose members, of course, from a Fundo-Xian point of view, are slaves of the Great Whore of Babylon -- but the fundos are not above using the Catholics when it serves their purposes, such as opposition to gay marriage and abortion).

Like I've said before, a REAL defense of marriage would include all of the Biblical requirements, including shit like no divorce ever, the woman (and the woman only, naturally) has to be a virgin, etc etc etc.

It's kind of too bad that I live in a liberal bastion here on the Left Coast, where both of my senators and my congressman are all strong Democrats who are on record as supporting civil rights. Otherwise I could have some fun at one of their "town meetings" asking them to support a real Defense of Marriage Act and then watch them squirm.

Monday, March 23, 2009

From Our "Nut Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree" Files

These are my grandchildren. Need I say more?




Update: A good friend of mine said that this video was "amusing and disturbing"... I asked her what part of the nut not falling far from the tree didn't she understand, since that describes me to a "T".

Sunday, March 22, 2009

The Post-Rapture Emails

Ya gotta hand it to those Fundo-Xian folks. They're nothing if not thoughtful -- downright thoughty, as my old Granny used to say. They even have a website where the faithful can have a post-Rapture email sent to their friends and family who are "left behind".

Here's the URL: http://raptureletters.com/letter.html -- I didn't make it a clickable link because I don't want to drive up their Google stats. In it you will see the following:

This message has been sent to you by a friend or a relative who has recently disappeared along with millions and millions of people around the world. The reason they chose to send you this letter is because they cared about you and would like you to know the truth about where they went.
This may come as a shock to you, but the one who sent you this has been taken up to heaven.
Etc etc etc blah blah blah
They promise to send out this letter on the first Friday following the Rapture, and every Friday thereafter until...well, I guess until Hell freezes over. Or whatever. And, of course, "free will donations" to the cause are gladly accepted (checks, cash, major credit card or PayPal).

I'm pretty sure I won't be needing to add the email addresses of my friends and family to that list. I'm also pretty sure I won't be getting any post-Rapture emails myself.

But look on the bright side. The vast majority of those self-designated Rapture-ites have oodles of money that they suddenly won't be needing, some plush luxury cars they won't be driving, and some fancy cribs that they won't be living in. For those of us who are "left behind" there ought to be a huge post-Rapture dividend.

Except that the Xian Bible does say that only 144,000 souls are going to get into heaven, so maybe that dividend won't be so big after all.

BTW, the whole concept of The Rapture is a fairly recent one, as these things go, the first usage of the word having been invented for the world's enlightenment no earlier than 1738.

The word "rapture" itself occurs nowhere in the Xian Bible, in either the Old Testament or the New Testament. Not in the "regular" King James Version, and not in any of the modern translations. Nowhere. And that in itself is pretty odd, since it seems to be an English transliteration of the Latin raptus, "borne up, taken away" (hence raptor).

But I digress. It must be the former English teacher in me.

Anyway, the fact that "The Rapture" is mentioned nowhere in the Xian Bible is a handy comeback for that IBIL* of yours who tells you that the phrase "separation of church and state" occurs nowhere in the US Constitution.

Besides all this, I much prefer the Blondie version of "Rapture"...

[*IBIL = Idiot Brother-in-Law]

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Earth Hour: Because It Has to Start Somewhere

...so why not with you and me?

I'm talking about Earth Hour, taking place next Saturday, a week from today, March 28 2009, at 8:30 in the evening. See the video:



Please join me and the millions of other people across this country and around the world who will be participating.

Like I say, it has to start somewhere... Let it be with us.

[Thanks and a hat tip to my friends Becky and Gary at EvolveFish.com for getting me involved -- please, drop by their store and show your support for fellow progesssives by buying something; they have a ton of neat stuff and their prices are great.]

It's Official: Hell Has Frozen Over

That's how my good friend BAC over at Yikes! calls it, and she's gotta be right.

Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the Vatican HMFIC of the Roman Catholic Bioethics Council, aka the Pontifical Academy for Life, overruled the Brazilian Big Guy Church Dude who excommunicated a couple of Brazilian doctors for ... get this ... performing an abortion.

In this unfortunate case, the girl getting the abortion was nine years old(!) and had been impregnated with twins by -- who else -- her stepfather. The poor little girl weighed only 80 pounds herself, and for her to be forced to carry this abomination of a pregnancy to term would have resulted in the untimely death of both the girl and the twins inside her.

That didn't matter, of course, to the local Brazilian archbishop, one José Cardoso Sobrinho by name, who excommunicated pretty much everyone in sight, including not only the doctors involved but also the girl's mother for authorizing the abortion. But, interestingly enough, not the girl herself. And I wonder about that...

Anyway, back to reality. This marks, I believe, the very first incidence in which the official Catholic hierarchy has even attempted to come to terms with what the rest of us out in the Reality Based Community have known forever: Abortion very often comes down to a choice between the already-born and the not-yet-born. As much as the Religious Right wants to pontificate, to strut and fret their hour upon the stage, to puff their collective feathers over it, the bottom line is that abortion is a decision to be made between a woman and her doctor. And no one else.

So this whole thing gives me some hope that, in spite of that tall-hat former Hitler Youth Pope Guy going around saying shit like condoms cause AIDS and reinstating that Holocaust-denying bishop, the Catholic Church may -- just may -- end up on the side of reason after all.

Okay, you're right. I won't be holding my breath...

Friday, March 20, 2009

The Dismal Science

Economics has been know for eons (i.e., since 1839) as "the dismal science" -- I mean really, who the fuck wants to digest all of those ugly mathematical statistical formulas and shit? Okay, I'm there...but for this: We ignore it at our peril.

I, along with a lot of my fellow citizens, tended to doze through Econ 101 in college. Who can really grasp the intricacies of all that wages plus demand minus supply times the square root of what-the-fuck-ever crap?

And that, pretty much, is what the fuckers in charge of our economy are counting on. The average American is as economically-literate as the average Bushman. That is how the Rethugs can still, to this day, get away with invoking Saint Ronald to the great unwashed, and that invocation -- amazingly to those in the Reality-Based Community -- covers a multitude of sins.

Don't believe me? Check out Why the GOP Nurtures Lies and Myths about Ronald Reagan over at the always-valuable Existentialist Cowboy and get yourself a little education on the subject.

Shocker of the Week: Some Gitmo Prisoners Are Innocent

Yeah, you coulda knocked me over with a fender (in the words of the late and much lamented Jane Ace) when I learned that a former high-level official with the NKVD Bush Administration came out and admitted -- shock, shock! -- that so many of the "enemy combatants" in Guantanamo Bay detention were, in fact, "non-enemy non-combatants".

In other words, fucking innocent of the "crimes" for which they were being detained.

I dunno, but sometimes it feels like those of us over here in Left Blogistan have been, on so many fucking occasions, the only ones in the whole fucking country to see this kind of shit. I mean what the fuck is up with that? I have in my life had neither the desire nor the impetus to become a political pundit -- and for that matter, I probably lack the requisite skillset, which is to be wrong 98% of the time -- but even I predicted this early on in the game.

Why has it taken so long for the rest of the US to catch up?

Thursday, March 19, 2009

The New White Face of Crime

Here's The Daily Show's Senior Black Correspondent Larry Wilmore on last night's show:





Whazzzzup???

Here's TJ and JC in another of the Blog Against Theocracy video spots:


Wednesday, March 18, 2009

What Happens to the Jews?

Ted Maher asks Tod Hagee in this video:



Hagee doesn't reply. Of course, the two aren't talking face to face, but it's still a valid question: After the big guy in the sky comes back at the End of Days and the fundos get their way, what happens to the Jews? (Hint: They all die and go to hell.)

Please join the Blog Against Theocracy April 10-12, 2009.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

"A Gay and Secular Fascism..."

That was the Newtster himself, Newt Gingrich, in this excerpt:



Please join the Blog Against Theocracy coming up next month, April 10-12.

And thanks to my blog buddy Blue Gal for the video. Watch for more in the coming days.

Monday, March 16, 2009

New Online Poll

Normally I don't think a whole lot of online polling. It's too easy to skew the results with repeat voters, you're not getting a scientifically valid representative sample, etc etc etc.

Okay, that said, I'm willing to pass along this URL to the MSNBC poll which purports to be a President Barack Obama scorecard/grade report.

As I say, ordinarily I don't put a whole lot of stock in these things, but when it appears that the Rethugs are doing exactly the kind of thing I abhor about these polls -- stacking the deck, so to speak, with multiple votes -- then it's time to do something about it.

Short of hunting them all down, smearing their genitals with lard and setting them free in a forest full of bears, the best thing we can do is to stack the deck the other way. So everyone, feel free to drop by the poll and, in the timeless words of somebody, vote early and vote often...

Oklahoma Takes Baby Step Towards (Gasp!) Gay Rights

Longtime readers of this blog know that I spent some of my formative youthful years in rural Oklahoma, so I tend to watch the goings-on in my sort-of-home-state.

Which leads me to this story: It seems that Oklahoma, like every other state, tends to open government meetings with a prayer. Yeah, big surprise there. Okay, putting aside the whole church-state issue, recently the Oklahoma House of Representatives session was opened with a prayer by United Church of Christ minister Rev. Scott H. Jones, of the Oklahoma-city based Cathedral of Hope.

The prayer itself -- which you can read here -- was one of those typically namby-pamby jobs calling on the big guy in the sky to bless the poor, help the homeless, cure the sick, blah blah blah, pretty much a by-the-numbers mainstream Xian prayer for a secular occasion. You've heard it all before.

So the ink wasn't dry, so to speak, on the prayer before several members of the Oklahoma House of Representatives started falling all over each other in a rush to keep the prayer from becoming part of the official record of the Oklahoma legislature.

Why? Well, it couldn't have been the content of the prayer itself (aside from the fact that it was one of those prayers that evoked that wimpy forgive-your-enemies Jesus, not the the Jesus of the flaming cross smiting the unbelievers...you know what I mean), so what was it?

Maybe -- and I'm just speculating here -- just maybe it was because the prayer was given by (gasp!) a gay minister!!! Who was asked to give this invocation by (another gasp!) the only openly-gay member of the Oklahoma legislature, Rep. Al McAffrey (D-Oklahoma City).

Naturally the theocrats were all over this like flies on shit, to the point of Rep. John Wright (R-Broken Arrow) calling for a vote on the prayer's inclusion in the official record. However, I am happy -- and proud -- to note that the final vote was this: 64 representatives voting to include the prayer, 20 opposing it, and 17 abstaining.

Sidebar: Of special note in all this was our old buddy, noted fundo-xian/gay basherRep. Sally Kern (R-Oklahoma City) who, naturally, voted in favor of exclusion.

Yeah, like keeping it out of the "official" written record is going to undo all the "damage" that this single prayer has done to the great state of Oklahoma.

Sorry, folks, the cat is already out of the bag, the damage has been done, and the fact that 64 Oklahoma state representatives can stick their necks out and vote for the inclusion of this prayer makes me feel good about one of the reddest states in the redstate continiuum. And about my home state.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Sunday Funny

Here's a video of notorious octomom Nadya Suleman giving birth:



Sometimes ya just gotta laugh...

Friday, March 13, 2009

Stewart 99, Cramer 0

I didn't know how else to score it. When full-time television financial guru and professional moron Jim Cramer came on The Daily Show last night to "set the record straight", Jon Stewart owned him.

Check out the full video over at The Daily Show and then ask yourself this simple question: Why does it take a comedy show host to be ask the kinds of questions that professional journalists used to ask, before they were completely co-opted by their slavemasters in the CPM*?

* * * * * *
[* CPM = Capitalist Pig Media]