Watchdogging Sarah Palin

It's too bad that it has to be done, but someone has to keep an eye on Sarah Palin. And no, I'm not talking about all those rightwing per-verts* who got huge boners when she scampered out of moose-murdering frozen obscurity onto the national stage in 2008.

As much as she's intentionally been in the "news" since then, we still don't know very much more about her than we did on that fateful day two years ago when Grampaw "You Goddam Kids Get Offa My Lawn" McCain elevated her to mock-celebrity status in front of a fawning media.

Well, that's changed. I just discovered a terrific blog called Palingates -- The Sarah Palin Watchdog Team. In it the team leaves no stone unturned (and, since we're talking about Alaska, no tern unstoned; sorry, I just couldn't help it...) in asking the hard questions and doing the hard research that the media in this country used to do for itself. You remember, back in the days before the media assigned itself the role of cowering ass-kissing lapdog lickspittle to the rich and powerful?

From Palin's fake pregnancy with little Trig (Obama "birthers", have any of you asked Sarah for Trig's birth certificate?) to her patently false story -- lying --about her Wasilla to Los Angeles in a motorhome road trip in less than three days, this blog has it all.

If the worst-case-scenario projections for 2012 hold true, and the Pit Bull With Lipstick actually does manage to become the Rethug nominee, I have a feeling that the Palingates crew will be providing the opposition -- that's us in the "professional left" -- with a lot of the ammunition to fire back.

We can even turn Mama Grisly's own words back on her: "Don't retreat -- RELOAD!"

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[* This mispronunciation, with the stress on the second syllable, is, of course, from Carl "Tony Soprano" Palodino's rant to the rabbis about those nasty homosessuals and their nefarious "agenda".]

Memo to Potential Candidates: Don't Dress Up As a Nazi

It's hardly believable, but here's the proof that a congressional candidate in Ohio, in his spare time, plays dress-up as a fucking Nazi SS Stormtrooper in order to play in "historical" reenactments.

He's named, on the ballot, Rich Iott, a candidate for the US House from Ohio's 9th District. Need I add that he's running as... a Republican...? In his alternate reality when he's playing a Nazi, he's named "Reinhard Pferdmann".

While there does exit such a pathetic and reprehensible phenomenon known as "Nazi chic" -- remember Prince Harry (the British royal family one, not the Harry Potter one) dressing up in a German uniform for a "party" -- the bottom line is this: If you are ever planning on running for office, you probably ought to show a little more discretion and judgment before you pose for pictures wearing a Nazi uniform.

RepubliCorp Mergers and Acquisitions Plan

RepubliCorp: We buy democracy, one race at a time.

This is too good:

The Cabal of Multinational Corporations is pleased to formally announce RepubliCorp^TM, a new combined entity following our complete merger with the Republican Party.RepubliCorp^TM combines the ethics-free campaigning savvy of the GOP with the limit-free spending power of Corporate America^TM. This merger is precisely timed: With the recent Citizens United ruling finally placing the United States Government on the open market, RepubliCorp^TM is now perfectly positioned to lead our hostile takeover bid, currently scheduled for completion on November 2^nd 2010.

Be sure to see the brilliant organizational diversity chart and check out the staff profiles at the bottom of the page. The first two columns and the staff boxes have rollover expansions.

My Wack-Job Cousin is At it Again

Regular readers know that I have a wack-job cousin who is continually sending me crap that she apparently has been able to swallow whole, without even a burp afterward.

She's been pretty quiet lately, but yesterday I received the following broadside (probably because she knows that I am a gun owner and might respond positively):

It has started.
Very Important for you to be aware of a new bill HR 45 introduced into the House. This is the Blair Holt Firearm Licensing & Record of Sale Act of 2009.
We just learned yesterday about this on the Peter Boyles radio program.
Even gun shop owners didn't know about this because it is flying under the radar.
To find out about this - go to any government website and type in HR 45 or Goggle [sic] HR 45 Blair Holt Firearm Licensing & Record of Sales Act of 2009. You will get all the information.
Basically this would make it illegal to own a firearm - any rifle with a clip or ANY pistol unless:
It is registered
You are fingerprinted
You supply a current Driver's License
You supply your Social Security #
You will submit to a physical & mental evaluation at any time of their choosing
Each update - change or ownership through private or public sale must be reported and costs $25 - Failure to do so you automatically lose the right to own a firearm and are subject up to a year in jail.
There is a child provision clause on page 16 section 305 stating a child-access provision. Gun must be locked and inaccessible to any child under 18.
They would have the right to come and inspect that you are storing your gun safely away from accessibility to children and fine is punishable for up to 5 yrs. in prison.
If you think this is a joke - go to the website and take your pick of many options to read this. It is long and lengthy. But, more and more people are becoming aware of this. Pass the word along. Any hunters in your family - pass this along.
Peter Boyles is on this and having guests. Listen to him on KHOW 630 a.m. in the morning. He suggests the best way to fight this is to tell all your friends about it and "spring into action". Also he suggests we all join a pro-gun group like the Colorado Rifle Association, hunting associations, gun clubs and especially the NRA.
This is just a "termite" approach to complete confiscation of guns and disarming of our society to the point we have no defense - chip away a little here and there until the goal is accomplished before anyone realizes it.
This is one to act on whether you own a gun or not.
If you take my gun, only the criminal will have one to use against me. HR 45 only makes me/us less safe. After working with convicts for 26 years I know this bill, if passed, would make them happy and in less danger from their victims.

It's obvious that she didn't write it, and equally obvious that she didn't even bother to do a rudimentary "Goggle" search. Otherwise she would have found that the ever-reliable Snopes has already dealt a death blow to this one.

This isn't as bad as some of her "birther" rants and anti-Islamic boilovers and Socialist-Fascist-Communist meltdowns, so maybe I shouldn't be so critical. After all, as the saying goes, you can't blame a girl for trying.

Uh... yeah, you can. Despite the fact that she's in her late 70s and maybe senile dementia is creeping in, you can still blame her.

She's a moron. And she votes Republican. But I repeat myself...

Westboro Church's 'Surreal' Day in Court

Over at The Atlantic, Garrett Epps writes about his take on the SCOTUS appearance the other day of the attorneys arguing the Westboro Baptist "Church" and its pending lawsuit by the father of one of the soldiers whose funeral was disrupted by the "God Hates Fags" rantings of some devout Christian "church" members:

More often than one would expect, oral argument in front of the Supreme Court resembles a Celebrity Deathmatch between Lionel Hutz of The Simpsons and Ned Racine of Body Heat. Lawyers with no Supreme Court experience sometimes insist on going to the Show. The result can be a halting hour of argument that sometimes resembles the 1945 World Series, between two teams so war-depleted that sportswriter Warren Brown said, "I don't think either one of them can win it."
In Wednesday's high-profile argument in Snyder v. Phelps, two inexperienced pilots sailed into a legal Bermuda Triangle, where the compasses no longer pointed to magnetic North. It's possible that, once it recovers its wits, the Court will put this case in order; but in the courtroom at least, what seemed at 10 a.m. like a sure thing had become by 11 a.m. a head-scratcher.
. . .
The most logical course for the Court would have been to leave this stinker alone. There's no groundswell of tort actions like this; instead, the reaction in most states has centered on new statutes barring disruption of a funeral. Most of those laws would allow demonstrators considerably nearer the funeral than the WBC pickets ever got. Time enough to test them when a proper case arose. Just last term, the Court had reaffirmed a broad reading of the First Amendment in a much less sympathetic case, United States v. Stevens, which held that videos of animals being killed were, in some cases, protected speech.
But the Court granted cert., and it heard an hour of argument from Sean Summers, a York, PA., lawyer who has represented Mr. Snyder pro bono, and from the soon-to-be-legendary Margie Phelps, a Kansas lawyer who is the daughter of the Church's pastor, Fred Phelps. By the end, the Justices' comments gave the eerie impression that Margie Phelps might have singlehandedly managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of a seemingly all-but-sure victory.
. . .
Then it was Margie Phelps's turn. She looks a lot like someone who would come to your door selling tracts during the baseball playoffs, and her grim, whispery monotone is what I imagine Norman Bates's mother sounded like.
None of that should have mattered; a competent second-year law student could have handled it. One would simply concede that Mr. Snyder is a private person. The issue is the kind of speech. The WBC's speech, disagreeable though it might be to the majority, was aimed at issues of American social and military policy. This kind of speech is fully protected by the First Amendment. Nothing in WBC's signs was directed at Matthew or Albert Snyder personally. Church members never approached the funeral or tried to disrupt it with noise; they did not interact with Mr. Snyder, who never even saw the signs until he read news reports; the "epic" was not sent to Mr. Snyder, simply published on the Internet. Under these circumstances, letting a jury assess a multimillion-dollar verdict is plainly permitting punishment for a distasteful message on a question of public importance. The Snyders' pain is the kind of pain free speech requires us to bear.
Thank you. Sit down.
But Margie Phelps spent most of her time arguing that Mr. Snyder is a public figure because he and his family had spoken to the news media about their grief for their dead son and their horror at the war in which he died. All he had to do was keep absolutely quiet. By making any public comment after Matthew's death, they became fair game for WBC. Over and over the Justices suggested, asked, begged her to assume that Mr. Snyder was not a public figure. Please, they seemed to be saying, we're not buying it, give us some other reason to vote for you. Over and over she refused."They step[ped] into a public discussion," she said.
They had it coming.

As far as this case goes, I think Epps is right in his/her judgment that this was a bad case from the get-go and the Supremes should never have taken it on. As the old saying goes, "bad cases make for bad laws" when it comes to SCOTUS.

That said, I am pretty much an absolutist when it comes to free speech (remember the Skokie case, where the American Nazi Party sued to be allowed to march in Skokie IL, and the ACLU took on the case as a free speech issue? It cost the ACLU a lot of members who resigned in outrage, but I was not one of them.

The actions of the "Christianists" in the military funerals they picket is reprehensible, but it is still protected speech.

But rights are always in conflict -- at least that's the way it should be in a democratic society -- and it's a balancing act to uphold free speech rights for someone while at the same time upholding privacy rights for someone else.

I think that, despite the obvious grandstanding by the Phelps girl, the decision will come down on the rights of free speech. Which is kind of too bad, since the "church" thrives on publicity, and little Margie will be catapulted into her 15 minutes of fame.

All in all, it is a stinker, as the author says, and we would have been better served if they refused cert and let it alone. Attacking state laws on disrupting funerals would have made better case law.

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[HT to my buddy Jae over at Jae's Sea for emailing me this story.]

Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck in 'Right Wing Radio Duck'

Here's an absolutely brilliant remix of some old Donald Duck cartoons -- about a dozen of them if I have it figured right -- in which a jobless and home-foreclosed Donald Duck starts listening to Glenn Beck:

Be sure to watch it and kudos to the creators for all of the obvious hard work and skill that it took to compile it.

And don't miss the Glenn Beck response to this "attack".

Damn that Woodrow Wilson Anyway

"Don't know much about history" -- the words of a popular Sam Cooke song from 1998. It ought to be the anthem of Glenn Beck University.

The Beckster has gone off on any number of rants about the Progressive Movement of the turn of the 20th Century, but his main whipping boy seems to be Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, comparing him to -- and crediting him with -- the rise Adolf Hitler, eugenics, the communist threat, and just about every other evil horror of the 20th Century that you can think of.

I will admit that there's a hell of a lot about Wilson that I do not admire: His lying about getting the US into WWI, his continuing segregation of the Federal bureaucracy, his overt racism (he once described the KKK-celebratory film Birth of a Nation as "history written with lightning") but he also was part of a political movement that culminated in the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Farm Loan Act and America's first-ever federal progressive income tax in the Revenue Act of 1913.

So why does The Beckster vilify Wilson with such statements as "This is an evil SOB, man...One evil SOB -- bad dude!...I mean, he's a dirtbag racist, is he not?...I hate this guy. I don't even want to show his picture. No, don't do it. Don't show it. I hate this guy...He was a horror show, wasn't he? A horror show, possibly the spookiest president we've ever had."?

Well, my guess is that it wasn't because of his snobbish elite-Southern-gentleman racism but rather, since Wilson was in part responsible for all of those commie lefty pinko fellow-traveler socialists laws listed above, all of which were passed by Congress and signed by Wilson in his first term, he makes a handy target on which the know-nothing meathead Teabagger Beck can pin all of the blame for the things that have gone 'wrong" with this country since 1912.

Never mind that the Progressive Movement's biggest champion and most outspoken proponent was a guy named Theodore Roosevelt, who is apparently being let off the hook by The Beckster only because he was a Republican. Never mind the fact that TR, were he alive today, would be shunned by Glenn Beck and his own fellow-travelers in the Teabagger movement and the rest of that wholly-owned-subsidiary-of-the-wealthy-corporations, the Republican Party.

Be sure to read the Washington Post's Dana Milbank story, Glenn Beck is obsessed with Hitler and Woodrow Wilson. (I'm just saying.) for further clarification of Beck's uniquely warped perspective on American -- and world -- history.

More Scary Stuff from the Qu'ran

With the new -- and probably bogus -- "terrorist alert" that started just as we were scuttling out of Paris, I thought it appropriate to advertise some more of those scary and violence-ridden passages out of the Holy Book of the Muslims, the Qu'ran:

Every Christian should be aware of these. The following endorses genocide, violence, rape, forced marriages, infanticide, and even cannibalism.

1. "..devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. "
2. "Happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us, he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks."
3. “But of the cities of these peoples which [Allah] gives you as an inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive, but you shall utterly destroy them."
4. "And when [Allah] shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them."
5. "And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword."
6. "Their children shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes! There houses spoiled, and their wives raped...Dash the young men to pieces...have no pity on the fruit of the womb, the children shall not be spared..."
7. "So [he] smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as [Allah] commanded."
8. "We took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain."
9. "And [he] smote the land, and left neither man nor woman alive, and took away the sheep, and the oxen, and the asses, and the camels, and the apparel. And [he] saved neither man nor woman alive."
10. "Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the female children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."
11. "But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me."
12. "And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon."
13. “If a man finds a young woman who is a virgin, who is not betrothed, and he seizes her and lies with her, and they are found out, then the man who lay with her shall give to the young woman’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife because he has humbled her.."
14. "If his master has given him a wife, and she has borne him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself."
15. "And if you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and desire her and would take her for your wife, then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and trim her nails. She shall put off the clothes of her captivity, remain in your house, and mourn her father and her mother a full month; after that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. And it shall be, if you have no delight in her, then you shall set her free."
16. "Make ready to slaughter his sons for the guilt of their fathers; Lest they rise and posses the earth, and fill the breadth of the world with tyrants."
17. "If there be found among you... man or woman....who hath gone and served other gods and worshiped them, either the sun or moon or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded...then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman who has committed that wicked thing unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones till they die."
18. "Take heed to yourself, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land where you are going, lest it be a snare in your midst. But you shall destroy their altars.."
19. "You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you."
20. "Take all the heads of the people and hang them up before [Allah against the sun.”
21. "They shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up!"
22. “And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.”

The only problem with these horrifying examples? You probably already guessed it: They are not from the Qu'ran after all, they are from the Xian Bible. It is easy to cherrypick the horrifying stuff out pretty much any religious book and trot it out as though it is unerring Holy Writ which every practioner of that particular cult must follow and adhere to.

Here are the sources for the quotations, so you can look them up yourselves if you don't believe me: 1 Samuel 15:3, Psalm 137, Deut 20:16, Deut 7:1-2, Joshua 6:12, Isaiah: 13: 16-18, Joshua 10:40, Deut.2:26-35, 1 Samuel 27:8-9, Numbers 31: 17-18, Luke 19:27 2 Samuel 12:31 Deuteronomy: 22: 28-29, Exodus 21:4, Deuteronomy 21:11-14, Isaiah 14:21, Deuteronomy 17:2-5, Exodus 34: 11-12, Leviticus 26:7-8, Numbers 25:4 Hosea 13:16.

You may recall I've expounded on this theme before, but it never hurts to reinforce the idea.

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[HT to Tia Lynn at Abandon Image for this list.]

The Teabaggers and the Founding Fathers

Glenn Beck and the other loudmouths of the Reich Right are so fond of invoking those sacrosanct "Founding Fathers" and what they really meant at the time of the founding of this country. It's too bad that they don't really know shit about our history and the drafting of the constitution.

According to Beck -- and especially his "historian"-in-residence, historical revisionist/Christian Nationalist and pseudoscholar David Barton -- the Founders were all Fundo Christians who believed in the current Beck-Barton-Franklin Graham, etc., Fundo version of "god", the idea of the Separation of Church and State was that government was not allowed to mess in the "free exercise of religion" but not the other way around (churches could dictate to the government all they wanted), and that this country was founded on "Judeo-Christian principles" in ethics and morality.

There's actually a trenchant analysis of what the Founding Fathers would have really thought about today's Teabaggers over at the Buzzflash blog, entitled The Tea/GOP Would HATE Our Actual Founders by a real historian, Harvey Wasserman:

This is a Greco-Roman nation, gathered in a Hodenosaunee longhouse.
As they wrap themselves in the Constitution they mean to shred, that is the self-evident Truth the Tea/GOP Party ultimately cannot face.
Our legal godfathers---the ones Glenn Beck loves to conjure---were Deistic liberal humanists whose core beliefs he hates.
They dumped that tea because they despised the corporation that owned it and the idea of empire it (and today's corporate-military right) stood for.
. . .
The federal structure adopted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, was---with Franklin's mentoring---based on the Iroquois Confederacy. That union was born at latest 1540 AD. It sustained a functioning democracy for at least 250 years, still longer than the US has been in existence.
The matriarchal Hodenosaunee were defined by a love of nature and communal land stewardship. Open dialog was as easily accepted as abortion and homosexuality. Along with so many other lethal diseases, Original Sin was an unwanted import.
It is the humanistic liberalism of America's Founders that STILL enrages today's neo-Puritan Tea/GOP. The Jefferson they love to claim fathered at least five children with his slave Sally Hemings, thirty years his junior. Some were conceived while he lived "alone" in the White House.
He and Franklin and Madison and Paine had no time for the Christian faith. It's by their intelligent design that Jesus appears nowhere in the Constitution. Their liberal Deism said a Creator got the universe going, installed the laws of nature, endowed humans with free will (and inalienable rights), then left.
Franklin's disdain for church services spices his autobiography. Jefferson clipped all references to a divinity for Jesus out of his personal Bible. Paine's Age of Reason still enrages the official church. Madison's First Amendment enshrines disdain for an official religion. Unitarianism in all its liberal diversity was shared by presidents two through six, including two Adamses, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.

Go read the rest of it, and give yourself some ammunition for the next time that IBIL* of yours starts spouting his crap about this being a "Christian Nation". Just be prepared to be expelled from attendance at next year's family holiday gathering. Big loss. Just stay home and read a good book instead. It will be better for you in the long run.

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[* IBIL = Idiot Brother-in-Law]

New Book of the Month: Freakonomics

In honor of the release of the movie Freakonomics, based loosely on the best-selling book from 2005, our book of the month for October is Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.


This fascinating book, mostly through the relatively new practice of "data mining", takes a fresh look at the macro-and-micro-economics of everyday life and finds some amazing correlations between, for example, cheating sumo wrestlers (yes, they do exist) and cheating teachers in the Chicago school system, between crack dealers at the street level and burger flippers at McDonald's, and how 1973's SCOTUS Roe v. Wade abortion decision led to the precipitous and otherwise statistically unexplainable drop in crime rates in the 1990s.

It's a far-reaching and far-ranging look at a whole bunch of stuff that we take for granted, such as conventional wisdom and false-paradigm logic and the media manipulation of information which serves to put up false incentives to manipulate people to behave in a certain way.

I literally could not put it down. I read it in one day (admittedly at only 352 pages it's not that long) but I was so engrossed in it yesterday that I ended up paying a neighbor kid to mow my lawn. (Not that I needed any incentive in that direction -- that grass was really long...)

Withe election season upon us, this book ought to be required reading for anyone who wants to be a more informed voter who will take the talking points of the self-appointed "experts" with a grain of salt.

Back from France

After a whole month in France, which happens to be one of the most civilized nations on the planet in spite of the right wing racism of its president and its current governing class, I'm back in the nation of my birth and my citizenship.

A lot can be said for the USA, but you France-haters out there who think that you are sooo fucking superior to the French can baisez mon cul. You really don't know merde about France

Only a couple times, during a whole month of driving from Paris to Verdun to Aix-en-Provence to Nice to Millau and back to Paris did we encounter "assholes", and they were the same kind of assholes you can -- and will -- encounter anywhere.

Right now I am jet-lagged beyond endurance. Give me a few days to get it together again...

Screw It ... I'm Already on Vacation

Even though we are not leaving for France until next week, it's hot, I'm tired, we have a ton of packing -- and repacking -- to do to get ready...

As much as I'd like to rant and rave about some of the meatier items in the news (Grampaw "I'm not a maverick" McCain running off the rails; the mosque-that-isn't-a-mosque-at-ground-zero-that-isn't-ground-zero , etc. etc. etc.) I'm laying myself off until October.

Since I've already been unemployed for 99 weeks, there won't be any unemployment insurance (aka "rocking chair" aka "welfare queen" aka "lazy-ass-motherfuckers-who-don't-want-to-work ") money coming in...

Instead, since I am going to Paris for ten days (followed by 19 days of fairly aimless driving around France in a tiny rental car) with She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, there will undoubtedly be a net outgo of beaucoup bucks from the coffers of The House of Farnsworth...

"Chanel!" she says. "Haut couture!" she purrs. "Haut cuisine," she murmurs, licking her lips lasciviously...

Okay, I think I know that last one: "Hot food". Okay I can handle that. A quick infusion of a burger and fries from the American Grill in Paris. Yeah.

Followed, of course, by a visit to the beach. I already have my chiropractor on retainer to fly to the Riviera and adjust my neck, should I throw it out from excess swiveling...

And, since even the bottom of the caves at Lascaux has Internet access, I won't be that far away in case something tweaks me to the degree that I have to issue a diatribe...

But don't count on it. See you in October.

It Is the Will of Allah

You know, I'm getting pretty tired of all these liberals sucking up to the Muslims in this country, saying that their religion is one of peace and brotherhood and all that crap, when everyone knows that Islam is a religion of death and destruction and infanticide and abortion.

Just consider these concepts from their "holy book":

1. "Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every women that hath known man by lying with him.” In other words: women that might be pregnant, which clearly is abortion for the fetus.
2. Allah promises to dash to pieces the infants of S___ and the “their women with child shall be ripped up”. Once again Allah kills the unborn, including their pregnant mothers.
3. Allah allows the pregnant women of T____ to be “ripped open”.
4. Allah commands the death of helpless "suckling" infants. This literally means that the children Allah killed were still nursing.
5. Allah commands that infants should be “dashed upon the rocks”.
6. “For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him.”
7. Allah gets angry and mercilessly torments and kills everyone, young and old. He even causes women to eat their children.

Pretty shocking, isn't it? Who wouldn't hate a religion whose god commanded all that icky stuff?

Well, I've got a little surprise for you. Go back in that paragraph and substitute "God" for "Allah", and then see this page on the Internets that will give you chapter and verse from the Christian Bible, the so-called Word of God, for each and every one of these quotes.

Yeah, the Muslim world has absolutely nothing to fear from the peace and love and freedom-beating bearing Christian world....

OOO-WEE-OOO! Tinfoil Hat Time

Okay, students. Time to make your own tinfoil hat and settle back to wait for Armageddon:

If I recall correctly, Numerology is one of the "lost science" ideas of the Dark Ages (so called for a reason...), especially so since the advent of easily-available computer time (fellow geeks, do you remember the 70s?).

With a modern computer (I'm talking basic desktop now, not a Cray supercomputer), any hacker geek worth the title can come up with a combination of numbers based on the numerological "sciences" that will ultimately, with enough pushing, come down to...

666!

OMFG, it's the Number of the Beast!!!!!! Henry Kissinger? The Beast. Pepsi Cola? The Beast.

My favorite was, of course, Ronald Wilson Reagan. Ronald = six letters; Wilson = six letters; Reagan = six letters! Put 'em together and whattaya got?

666!!!

The fucking Number of the BEAST, right there in the fucking White House!!!!!!!!!

Eeeeeeeee-owwwwwwwwww! No no no no no no no no!!!!!!!!!!

Obama "Born a Muslim"?

I don't quite get how that happens, but no less an authority than Franklin Graham (no doubt still smarting from his exclusion from the Pentagon party) claims that Barack Obama was "born a Muslim" and that Muslimness (Muslimosity?) somehow is in the DNA of the father and if that "tainted seed" gets implanted in fertile Christian soil (i.e., his mother's virgin womb) and any issue from that implantation will be Muslim...

I am not making this up. See it here.

[Note to Franklin G: I think you would profit greatly from auditing a basic class in biology at your local community college.]

Fuck sake, no wonder so many of the Moron-American voting bloc think Obama's Muslim...

Not that any of that should fucking matter to begin with. It's really nobody's business what religion a leader professes to follow -- just as long, of course, as that religion doesn't have a god who is nudging him to push The Button (are you listening, Pat Robertson?).

Just Answer the Question, Boner!

Here's senate minority "leader" John Boehner, wiggling like a frog caught on a spike, in front of David Gregory last weekend on Meet the Press:

Can't the Rethugs find a single spokesperson that can have that "conversation" that Boner is talking about? Especially when he can't (won't) give a straight answer to a pretty simple question.

Just answer the fucking question, Boner!

Sweet Victory

The primary election in Washington State was held on Tuesday of this week, but I had to wait until late yesterday to get the results of the most local of races, that for Precinct Committee Officer.

You may recall that I decided to run for the office this year, only to find that I had competition for a race that is usually a slam-dunk since most candidates run unopposed.

But with some adroit footwork and some campaign schmoozing, I was able to win the race by a 60-40 percent landslide.

Now the real work begins, getting out the Democratic vote for the general election in November. This will be somewhat complicated for me since I will be out of the country the whole month of September.

But thanks to a little idea that I like to call "The Internets", nowhere is truly out of reach these days. Not even France...

Hangin' With the Stars

I did manage to take some time out of my busy politickin' to attend a "listener forum" thrown by KPTK 1090 AM, the Seattle liberal talk radio station.

Here I am with some of the most talented -- and funniest -- liberal talk radio hosts: L to R, Norman Goldman, Thom Hartmann, Randi Rhodes, Mike Malloy, Stephanie Miller, me, and Ron Reagan.

[Note that VIP badge I'm wearing around my neck - Woot!!]

I had already met Randi and Thom on the Air America cruise in 2008, but it was great to see them again, and really terrific to meet the others. And this was pretty much an informal chat session, where they all got to kind of let their hair down, and man-oh-man was that gang funny! They had us rolling in the aisles. Well, actually, rolling on the ice, since it was held in the hockey and ice-show center. Fortunately they had covered up the ice so geezers like me wouldn't slip on it.

Note that Thom Hartmann and Stephanie Miller seem kind of hors de combat, what with the leg cast and the arm sling. I asked them if they got mugged when they got off the plane, but they assured me that it was due to totally separate issues.

Coincidentally, this was the day after Stephanie "came out" on her radio show, and I told her that she had managed in about five seconds to break the hearts of literally millions of men in this country.

She's a good sport, of course, and laughed at the comment. At least I think she was laughing at the comment, and not at me...

Randi made what I thought was one of the pithest and most memorable comments of the evening: "When someone tells you that not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims, shoot back that not all White Christians are KKK, but all KKK are White Christians."

Busy this Week

This is the last week before Washington's primary election, so I am going to busy politicking all week long. Posts, if any, will be few and far between.

Being active politically takes up a LOT of time...

Welcome to Trailer Park: The Series

Jeez, I swear I never saw this coming.

Turns out that the whole thing would make for a great redneck country song -- or a "reality" tv show.

First the teenagers Levi and Bristol were "in love" and, inexplicably, without even the most readily available form of contraception on the planet (I mean really, you can't go into the bathroom in any bar without seeing The Machine) when their horny teenage reproductive genes kicked into high gear and they started grappling like wolverines in heat.

So she gets pregnant, and Boy Teenager suddenly finds himself trapped in the national spotlight when Granny Mooselini got herself, again inexplicably, on the ticket for VP. So it was almost a shotgun wedding, and then he made a zillion bucks on the quasi-celebrity circuit trash-talkin' Granny, and then it turned out the shotgun wasn't loaded and he dodged the whole trailer-trash-redneck-marriage thing.
But wait! There's more: Our boy Levi it turns out was off on a "hunting trip" (jeez, couldn't he come up with something original? That's such a fucking cliché!) when he was really hunting pussy and porking some California jailbait, who is now the mommy of Baby #2.

I swear to god you can't make this shit up. Now CBS is in negotiations with the Palin family to bring their weekly "reality show" to television this fall.

Need I remind everyone that these are national-spotlight representatives of the Party of Family Values? No, I didn't think so...