Daytona Rained Out

This is more fun than watching all those stinky race cars anyway. Straight from Dom Rep TV.

Yasmina La Reina De La Bachata ~ De Amor No Muere Nadie

Thanks to CongueritoRD.

Daytona Update

Rain delay. With the last minute addition of some frothy mixture it's gonna be a slippery track.

Here's the 26 Ford Fusion driven by Tony Raines:



Article here.

Mr. Raines got the sponsorship at the last minute and qualified 41st in a field of 42. Santorum has about the same chance of being President as Mr. Raines does of winning the Daytona 500. I hope the 42nd car is sponsored by Ron Paul or Neutie. Heh.

A win for the Santorum car – or even a good run – would out-do his Republican rival Mitt Romney, who is expected to attend the race but likely won't be part of the pre-race ceremonies.

Rumor (ahem) has it that Willard pulled out of a Daytona 500 sponsorship at the last minute when he accidentally discovered the car was a Toyota.

Update Update:

I couldn't resist posting this most excellent photo. I think Willard's brain-dead in terms of situational awareness. The photog or interviewer who walked him into that shot is an evil genius. I hope he's on our side. Heh.

Santorum Makes Campaign Swing Through Seventeenth Century

Andy Borowitz used to be a humorist. It appears he's a straight journalist these days.

At the first stop of his ambitious journey, Mr. Santorum restated his reason for seeking the White House: "I am running for President today because the position of Spanish Inquisitor is no longer available."

The former Pennsylvania Senator served up red meat to his seventeenth-century supporters, telling them, "Since we all agree that contraception is a bad idea, it's time to take a harder look at electricity and soap."

Mr. Santorum, who said that in his first day in office he would repeal the Age of Enlightenment, stressed that he had home-schooled all seven of his children: "That means there are at least eight people in this country who don't understand evolution."

In a lighter moment, Sen. Santorum told his audience what he said was his favorite joke: "A Kenyan, a Muslim and a socialist walk into a bar. And then he makes everyone get an abortion."

Quote of the Day

Fez:

Are we really now living in a world where sending your kids to college is a bad idea because President Obama thinks it's a good idea?

Short answer: Yes.

A Woman's Womb: America's New Sports Arena

My first thought when I saw that was "boy, this is gonna be a helluvan arena-naming contest!"

Connie Schultz reads the riot act to Santorum and the gang of Old White Men who think they know best how to run our nation's lady parts.

In advance, I apologize to my grown kids for what might be, for them, an embarrassing discussion about their mother's sex life and contraception.

Embarrassing discussion about their mother's sex life and contraception follows. Very personal and very interesting.

Then she shifts gears and ends with this:

I wonder whether there's an easier way to snip in the bud this manly urge to control women's bodies. What if -- and I'm just brainstorming here -- we required every man seeking that little pill for erectile dysfunction to watch a Viagra video.

Have you seen that list of that drug's potential side effects? Yowsa. Headache, face flushes, upset stomach. Maybe blurred vision, too. That's not even the whammo list of rare side effects: heart attack, stroke, irregular heartbeats and death.

I can't help but think we could deter a lot of this unnecessary sex with a mandatory Viagra video. Red-faced guys grabbing their chests in a swirl of Vera Wang sheets. Guys dangling their heads over the side of the bed to hurl. At the end, the camera slowly zooms in on the way-too-young girlfriend, her long tresses blowing in the wind as she sobs at graveside.

Surely, this additional information would inspire men across America to swear off sex and take up mah-jongg.

Just as surely, I would become Queen Constancia, empress ruler of Freedonia.

They're tired of playing mah-jongg. That's why they take the Viagra. So they can play with themselves. What's a little heart attack, stroke, irregular heartbeats and death compared to that?

Daytona Report

Kos:

She gotta fast car: Sports Illustrated reports NASCAR's Danica Patrick wins pole for nationwide contest in Daytona. From what I can ascertain this is apparently one pole in Daytona, FL you can be proud of your daughters for pursuing.

True enough. You don't hear many parents bragging with "Daughter got the pole at the gentlemen's club!".

FYI. The race ended a little while ago. Ms. Patrick got crashed out by her teammate and they played a tape-delay (they've learned not to do that live) of her radio communication with her people. I thinks perhaps her remarks were not particularly complimentary to her teammate but I couldn't really tell. It was all bleeps.

Satan Speaks to Santorum

Channelled by our ol' pal RJ Eskow.

But listen -- and I really shouldn't do this -- I'm not sure you realize where you're headed. Put it this way: When the lead singer from Megadeth says he'll vote for you, take it as a sign. I mean, c'mon man! They sang "Prince of Darkness"!

I especially appreciate it when folks like you and the Half-Governor talk about me, because let's face it: We're working the same demographic. I'm after their souls and you're after their campaign cash, but it's the same crowd I've been running with since the dawn of time:

They're the moneylenders who were chased out of the Temple.

They're the Usurers that were condemned three thousand years ago in Babylon.

They're the hypocrites who shout their faith all over the airwaves after the Bible told them to "pray in secret."

They're the liars, the backbiters, the slanderers, the rich men who are no more likely to get to heaven than a camel is to pass through the eye of a needle.

All of them flocked to me after the Competition kicked them out.

The Pope's condemnation of the war in Iraq? You didn't care. Your Church's rejection of the death penalty? Yawn. Its "preferential option for the poor" that demands social and economic justice? You must have been listening to Megadeth with the headphones cranked up when they announced that.

"As you do to the least of these," said the Competition, "so do you do to me." You and your friends don't seem to want to hear that. In fact, you spend most of your time undermining the very teachings you claim to believe in. To which I can only add: Keep up the good work.

If you're as successful as I hope you'll be there's gonna be a whole lot of pestilence, famine, disease, and death around this place. Why, it'll be like the good old days!

Oh fucking swell...

In the same vein:

Screwtape writes again!*

*See The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.

Your strategy is so brilliant! I likely would not have done better myself! Your counterparts assigned to Gingrich and Romney have even been picking up your lead, causing more division in the ranks of the Republicans as each candidate has to keep pace with the other. Don’t worry about the moderate Republicans who see through your strategy; the confusion and chaos your plan is causing is doing its job just fine.

And, of course, NEVER discourage division within the ranks of the Enemy! If Mr. Santorum want to divide ranks by declaring half or more of the Enemy’s forces are not TRUE followers, then all the better! That means less communication between various parts of the Enemy’s forces and thus less coordination of the Enemy’s forces.

My conclusion is that it's better for the country when Frothy Mixture and the other Repug candidates invoke their imaginary friends as talking points against reality and for what he really thinks.

It's too bad ol' FM ain't gonna be the nominee. We could stomp the fundies back into the muck they rose from once and for all.

Heh ...

Pic thanks to the Being Liberal FB page.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

This is as loose and cheery a one-time-only musical aggregation as you are likely to see!

Encore at Warren Hellman Tribute

Cover of The Band's "The Weight"

Warren Hellman Public Celebration Sunday 2/19/12

Performances by Emmylou Harris, Robert Earl Keen, Old Crow Medicine Show, Boz Scaggs, Gillian Welch, Steve Earle, Poor Man's Whiskey, Buddy Miller, Dry Branch Fire Squad

Thanks to venjance123.

The War On Women

This 'toon reminds me of the sniper duels in Saving Private Ryan and Enemy at the Gates: The Wehrmacht ace sniper lines up on the American or Russian, has 'em dead center, and (Surprise! Surprise! - G. Pyle) gets drilled right down the length of his telescopic sight.

Watch out, Repugs. Da wimmens is practicing their sight alignment and trigger squeeze as we speak. Your eyeball is going to be the guest of honor at their coming-out party. Heh.

Thanks to YubaNet.

Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost

Matt Taibbi in the wake of the Arizona Feces Fling-o-rama "debate", or as The Rude Pundit calls it, ""Night of the Fucktards XX". Good read!

No, it was while watching the debates last night that it finally hit me: This is justice. What we have here are chickens coming home to roost. It's as if all of the American public's bad habits and perverse obsessions are all coming back to haunt Republican voters in this race: The lack of attention span, the constant demand for instant gratification, the abject hunger for negativity, the utter lack of backbone or constancy (we change our loyalties at the drop of a hat, all it takes is a clever TV ad): these things are all major factors in the spiraling Republican disaster.

Most importantly, though, the conservative passion for divisive, partisan, bomb-tossing politics is threatening to permanently cripple the Republican party. They long ago became more about pointing fingers than about ideology, and it's finally ruining them.
...

So they form their local Moral Majority outfits, and they put Ronald Reagan in office, and they sit and wait for the world to revert to a world where there was one breadwinner in the family, and no teen pregnancy or crime or poor people, and immigrants worked hard and didn't ask for welfare and had the decency to speak English – a world that never existed in reality, of course, but they're waiting for a return to it nonetheless.

This is where the Republican Party is now. They’ve run out of foreign enemies to point fingers at. They’ve already maxed out the rhetoric against us orgiastic, anarchy-loving pansexual liberal terrorists. The only possible remaining explanation for their troubles is that their own leaders have failed them. There is a stranger in the house!

This current race for the presidential nomination has therefore devolved into a kind of Freudian Agatha Christie story, in which the disturbed and highly paranoid voter base by turns tests the orthodoxy of each candidate, trying to figure out which one is the spy, which one is really Barack Obama bin Laden-Marx under the candidate mask!
...

But it’s gotten so ridiculous that even Santorum, as paranoid and hysterical a finger-pointing politician as this country has ever seen, a man who once insisted with a straight face that there is no such thing as a liberal Christian – he’s now being put through the Electric Conservative Paranoia Acid Test, and failing!
...

[...] These candidates are behaving like Stalinist officials in the late thirties, each one afraid to be the first to stop applauding.

These people have run out of others to blame, run out of bystanders to suspect, run out of decent family people to dismiss as Godless, sex-crazed perverts. They’re turning the gun on themselves now. It might be justice, or it might just be sad. Whatever it is, it’s remarkable to watch.

Fun too! I'll go with Schadenfreude! More butter, please!

What Bible is Santorum Reading?

Crooks and Liars

I will go so far as to say that the modern conservative faith is the direct opposite of what the Judeo-Christian Bible teaches: modern conservatives argue that everyone should take what they want and devil take the hindmost, that we are all on our own, and that if you are rich it means that a Darwinian selection process allowed you to succeed, and that you owe nothing to anyone else. Modern conservatives are far more faithful to Ayn Rand, who openly rejected Christianity because of its values of helping the poor and caring for others. Give her credit for one thing: at least she was honest. Conservatives like Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich celebrate we're all on our own selfishness, and are happy to let the poor starve and the ill die from lack of health care, yet they proclaim their Christian holiness and denounce Obama's theology. As Jesus would have put it: you have to take the log out of your own eye before you can take the speck out of your brother's, you hypocrite. Mr. Santorum, if you don't know the Bible any better than you do, you should be careful calling other people anti-Biblical.

Shorter: The Cat'lick Choich doesn't exactly encourage its aptly named "flock" to read the Bible, patting them on their woolly little heads and telling them to leave the details of salvation to the priests and saints and put some money in the box on your way out, so being the Catholic-of-which-there-is-no-Catholicker, Frothy Mixture probably hasn't read it.

Protestant Bibles, at least the ones in right-wing fundie and evangelitard hands, are very well read and fall open to the dirty parts. Given the way they seem to ignore the true message in favor of hate, the "red letter Jesus-talk" passages about helping people must be pristine in their un-readness.

I look at the Bible in about the same way I looked at Easyriders magazine when I was a Harley-Davidson mechanic - in amongst the occasional nugget of fact there was a lotta bullshit. I had to read it so I'd be up on what the customers were being mis-informed about - and believed as gospel from on high! - every month.

Headline of the Day

Iceland Solves Banking Crisis by Indicting Bankers, Forcing Mortgage Relief

A few heads on pikes can work wonders.

Off The Rails On The Republican Crazy Train

Addicting Info

Somewhere out there you just know Ozzy Osbourne is laughing his ass off. The king of crazy, who once bit the heads off of 2 doves to get attention from a record label, has had to play second fiddle to the GOP these days. In what has to be considered the death wish scenario of a lifetime, Republicans are literally lining up to choose a candidate who has about as much chance of winning a general election as I do winning a Nobel prize.
...

And that prospect has establishment Republicans practically shaking in their boots, not to mention feeling nauseous. The two things they were hoping to avoid – a long, contested, drawn out primary and the emergence of a fringe candidate who doesn’t poll well among moderates and independents – are now staring them right in the face. They’ll never admit it publicly, but privately the RNC is crapping its pants over the ramifications. No matter how many times they parade their candidate down the runway, the faithful have refused to embrace him. And now, after trying on every hat in the store, they’ve finally found one that fits perfectly. Santorum doesn’t just drink the Kool-Aid, he bathes in it. He’s loved by both social and fiscal conservatives alike. And unlike Newt Gingrich, he hasn’t blown up virtually every bridge among his peers.

Life is good...

It's still gonna be Willard no matter what happens in the primaries. Doesn't matter. Losers lose.

"Wasn't us ..."

The Dingo Sisters

"We go after cats."

Auntie Beeb:

The parents of an Australian baby who vanished in 1980 have urged a coroner to rule that a dingo killed her.

...

In 1982, Ms Chamberlain-Creighton was found guilty of her baby's murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, while Mr Chamberlain was found guilty of being an accessory.

Both were later exonerated on all charges, after the chance discovery of a fragment of Azaria's clothing in an area dotted with dingo lairs.

...

You can get away with a lot ...

If it's done in god's name:

Probably the most convenient thing about turning one’s political party into a something closer to a religion, as the Republicans have increasingly done, is that your adherents can be relied upon to believe anything you say, no matter how implausible, provably false, or downright cuckoo it happens to be. When you’re talking about a religion, after all, the more improbable the belief is, the more fervently it is held, and for Republicans this tendency is always a bonus, for good reason. If you intend to mobilize people to accept that God wants us to, say, let old people eat cat food, flatten mountains for their coal, or inject poisons into the earth to extract polluting fuels, picking the ones who already believe in the virgin birth seems a good place to start.

...

And you wonder why the GOP is still a viable political party? If you're gullible enough to believe a fairy tale written a couple thousand years ago, and take it literally, you don't have to make much of a reach to swallow the GOP line. The fact that the GOP is turning into a religion should scare thinking people everywhere.

Fools ...

You know, for the 'party of fiscal responsibility', they sure come off like a buncha suckers. I'd hate to think about how they'd do on the street in NYC if they happened to come across a 3-card Monte game:

So I've been wondering here lately about why these campaigns cost so much more than they did just a few years ago. What are these Super PACs spending all their billionaire contributions on anyway?

Well, surprise ...

Shorter: It's all about wingnut welfare.

Quote of the Day

The Rude One:

... Killing people because you think someone pissed off your god is wrong. And it doesn't matter if it's done with bricks and bullets or with long-term, untreated illnesses that could have been cured with access to health care.

They didn't like him then ...

Why would they like him now? Charlie Pierce looks at the Mittster's "severe conservative" record while governor of Massachusetts:

...

On the stump today, this is the material from which he constructs the fictitious character of Willard Romney, Embattled — Yet Severe — Conservative. He brags about all the bold vetoes he cast. What he doesn't mention in the fact that, according to figures compiled by the Globe for its series, the Massachusetts House overrode his vetoes 99.6 percent of the time. It was worse in the Senate. There, Romney was overriden every single time — often, as the Globe points out, unanimously. The numbers of overriding his line-item vetoes are even more preposterous; of his 283 budget vetoes in 2006, the Globe found, Romney couldn't even get a single Republican to vote for him on 81 roll calls in the state senate, and on 60 roll calls in the Massachusetts House. As governor, his approval ratings never went above 50 percent after March of 2005, and he left office with a miserable 34 percent approval rating to take with him out into the wider world. The Commonwealth had grown very sick and tired of being used as a test-track for Willard Romney's ambitions.

...

In orther words, Mitt has been a self-serving bastid since the days when he was grubbing for federal money to "save" the Utah Olympics.

Dead from it

I'm not doing anything important like Fixer finishing up his latest book and it turns out to be a truism that "an idle mind is the devil's playground". Musta been thinking of that with all the renewed interest in the more retarded circles about "...or could it be Satan?". Goddam Frothy Mixture is channelling The Church Lady fer chrissakes. Without making as much sense. Yeesh.

All the Old White Men's nonsense about women's health issues leads me to believe the right will take on woman suffrage next. They obviously think women shouldn't have the vote since they've just alienated more than half the voters in the land. They must think votes from those vessels of unholiness don't count. They'll find out.

The Repug primary race has sunk lower than whale shit, the Repug state governments are doing their best to take their states back to when I was five years old, the constant Repug assault on truth, justice, and the American way continues apace and, maybe and hopefully just for today, I couldn't care less. Maybe my outrage tank needs repressurized or something. I'm sure it will be.

It's all Ann Coulter's fault that I've lost interest. Credit where credit's due, the skank got a half a sentence right in her whole miserable life: "...we get Romney and then we lose".

She summed up from now 'til November perfectly in seven words. A moment of unwitting light in a life of utter darkness, like a pinhole in the mercy bag over her head.

I'm sure something outrageous from the right wing will come along to snap my ennui-laden ass out of it, perhaps one of the Koch brothers getting caught letting slip that the rise in gas prices is his effort to make Obama look bad. That'd be fun.

But for now, and to show you how far afield I'm going looking for shit, this is the most earth-shattering thing I've found today:

Jamie Lee Curtis will be back for more next week on "NCIS." Tune in to see if Gibbs and Ryan get it on

Oh, the visual...

C'mon Gunny! You can do it! That'll keep me going at least 'til next Tuesday!

Sorry ...

Just finishing up my latest book (you know, the one I was supposed to finish four years ago - the one about which I'm getting a weekly call from my publisher for the last 3 months) and I'm on a roll. Back either later or tomorrow ...

Virginia Ultrasound Bill Loses GOP Governor's Support

HuffPo

"A lot of rumors are floating around this building that the Republicans are trying desperately to find some way out of this Pandora's box," (Great choice of words! Heh. - G) said a top legislative staffer who works with Virginia's Democrats. "I think the sponsors didn't realize when this law passed in North Dakota that this was an intrusive ultrasound. But it would look terrible with their base if they backed down now and didn't pass it."

So now it's just a matter of saving face.

This is what happens when legislators make good-sounding panders to fundie morons without knowing what they're talking about. They musta thought it would be like the TSA guy waving a metal-detector wand over them. Maybe they'da got the message if they got it jammed up their ass as the prerequisite to boarding a flight.

Or maybe they knew exactly how invasive this procedure is and they're simply trying to punish and humiliate women for not believing the way these throwbacks want them to.

Da wimmens, and real men, have come out solidly against this bullshit. Whaddya wanta bet the Guv got the message when he couldn't even buy any nookie on his way home last night? From a male prostitute. Heh.

How to be more like Satan

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford going off on Secaucus Fats and getting to use Milton to do so.

Indeed, part of the the answer is already encoded in the question. People like Christie are, of course, so locked like sad demons into their stiff little roles they cannot help but toe the party line, delude themselves into believing what is so clearly a violent mischaracterization of love and marriage, even as they sell their own soul for the sake of the vote and the sneering fundamentalist GOP nod. Hey, this is politics. The murdering of one's own humanity for the sake of power and position has been around since man first oozed out of the slime and demanded a campaign contribution.

I get this great visual of an arm sticking up out of the primordial ooze, palm up. Tales From The Repug Crypt.

Strip out the bitter, dualistic Christian mythology, and the deeper lesson is simple enough: Stray from your true self, your calm inner knowing, deny your own heart's quieter, more authentic voice in favor of power, shrill punditry or the ego's sly trickery, and watch yourself fall, decay, slither into lower and lower realms of hate and sadness. Choose a path of fear instead of love, and watch yourself die.

Seems simple, no? Shall we alert the politicians?

No need, Mark. They know full well to whom they sold their souls. They think they can screw the devil outta his due like they screw everybody else. They're in for a surprise.

Update:

Raw Story

Republican New Jersey Gov. Christie says that Rick Santorum’s warning that Satan is targeting the U.S. should be a relevant topic in the U.S. presidential race.

Good fucking grief.

On the other hand, if you view the right-wing as Satan personified like I do, he's right for once.

Heh ...

Thanks to the Being Liberal FB page for the pic.

They scare you too?

I was wondering how far the crazy would get before even the Republicans got scared:

Republicans are staring down the increasingly real possibility that Rick Santorum could snatch the presidential nomination away from Mitt Romney and with it any idea that they could mount serious opposition to President Obama in the fall.

As a result, many have started to hit the panic button, and they’re doing so in a way you probably wouldn’t have expected from the GOP, which still counts evangelicals among its strongest and most reliable base vote. Nevertheless, the freakout is evident from the Romney-allied Drudge Report homepage right through to radio host Laura Ingraham’s national airwaves.

...

I think some of the more sane (less insane?) ones are starting to realize that Santorum has no chance of beating Obama but also runs the real risk of damaging their brand beyond repair. I'd say that happened already but you can never discount the vast amount of stupid in this country.

Another Clown Car ...

Charlie Pierce looks at yet another Rethug debate and decides it should be a reunion show:

...

It should be A Very Special Episode, this Wednesday night's season finale of the 1,329,465,771.5 Republican debates. They should invite the whole cast back, all the people who left the show for their own spinoffs, the way they brought Rhoda and Phyllis back when Mary Richards got fired at WJM. Look, here's Herman Cain, and there's Michele Bachmann, and there's Rick Perry, stumbling and falling into the potato salad. And there's the formerly invisible Jon Huntsman. Who knew he was so tall?

...

Shit, if they did that I might actually watch. I miss the Black Walnut ...

...uhhhhh, yup...

Thanks to YubaNet.

"...the party’s biggest problem is the ideological bloodlust of its base."

Micheal Tomasky on the well-deserved fate of the Repugs:

So there is no savior. And let us please be clear on why there is no savior. Because there is no one who can satisfy the base of the GOP — a cohort so drunk on ideology and resentment that they cheer electrocutions and boo a soldier—and be elected president of the United States. Period. The standard journalistic trope the past few months has been to say that the Republican establishment would step in at some point and not let things get too out of hand. But that’s mostly nonsense. This GOP establishment is barely less loopy than the base. If the base is driving the party into a ditch, the establishment is riding shotgun holding a shovel.
...

Remember that satirical Brecht line about it being perhaps easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect a new one? It’s not a new candidate the right needs. It’s a new electorate.

To paraphrase a famous war criminal, "You go to the polls with the voters you have, not the voters you want."

Luckily there aren't enough Dead End Quarter assholes to elect anybody unless everyone else abrogates their civic duty like in 2010 and stays home.

How about ...

I shove one of them up your ass?

The desire of many Virginia Republicans to treat some women like the popsicles of the damned has run into a major problem...the public.

...

Ya think?

I am so sick of these fucking people, you wouldn't believe. A woman who is considering an abortion, one way or the other, is at a point where she might be making the biggest decision of her life. I am certain her emotions are in serious disarray as she wrestles with her choices. I am also certain that the great majority of women do not take the choice lightly or without emotion. And, as a man, those are the only things I am certain about on this subject.

To have a bunch of men, mostly, decide that a woman at this time should also have to undergo the humiliation of being 'institutionally raped' sickens me. I can't believe, in this day and age, people would be so backward to even conceive of this, let alone attempt to put it into practice. All these men should be ass raped with the same device they want to use in the procedure.

Oh, the irony...

I usually do this first thing every Monday but Ironic Times had the day off.

Study Finds 1.8 Million Dead People Still Listed as Active Voters
Also finds 23 dead people still serving in Congress.

It'll only be 22 next year. Lieberman's going to retire.

States Where Federal Government Spends More Than it Collects Support Republicans, Most Strongly Where Biggest Disparity
Be careful what you wish for.

The rest of us pay for it but don't worry about us. Keep on enjoying those bennies you love to hate that you'd whine like spoiled brats if you ever got the "less government" you claim to want and they stopped.

Milestone: Astronaut, Humanoid Work Together in Space
Until humanoid locks hatch while astronaut on space walk.

Harrumph! Ya call that progress? I saw that in a movie forty years ago and it's eleven years later than the movie said it'd be!

The iPod of Vibrators?

"Honey, where's that music coming from...?"

It's a slow day, folks.

File under ...

"No Shit":

Thanks to the Republican Bigotry FB page.

Westboro Baptists caught lying

And yer point is...? Raw Story.

The Westboro Baptist Church did not picket singer Whitney Houston’s funeral on Saturday, but they did upload a fake photo to Twitter in hopes of convincing others that they did.
...

Recently, the church has failed to show up to funeral services numerous times after announcing they planned to do so.

The Westboro Baptist Church, which only has a few dozen members, is typically drowned out by counter protesters.

I think they'da been more than "drowned out" at that particular funeral. Too bad they didn't show up. We might be rid of them today.

Note to the Holy Haters: I think you've hit on the way to avoid being shouted down - don't show up. Look, we totally get it - you inbred retards anointed yourselves a church to avoid paying taxes and keep your tax exemption by preaching hate in God's name. Despicable, but probably legal, so have at it. Shit, you're already the most hated family in America. What more could you want?

You better STFU and crawl back under your rock, not that you will, while we figure how to get you and all the other phony religionists to cough up big time at tax time. Happen it must so happen it will, but you keep runnin' your mouths, the sooner it's gonna happen and the sooner the better.

How Rick Santorum Ripped Off American Veterans

MoJo

The Armed Forces Retirement Home, which is run by the Department of Defense, bills itself as the "premier home for military retirees and veterans." The facility sprawls across 272 acres high on a hill in northern Washington, DC, near the Petworth neighborhood. The nearly 600 veterans who now live there enjoy panoramic views of the city—the Washington monument and US Capitol to the south, the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception to the east. At its peak, more than 2,000 veterans of World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War lived at the Home.
...

[...] Still, the money problems began to show, with its older historic facilities slipping into disrepair and decay. To grapple with its worsening shortfall, officials running the Home eyed a valuable, 49-acre piece of land worth $49 million as a potential financial lifeline.

Enter Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.). At the behest of the Roman Catholic Church, and unbeknownst to the Home, Santorum slipped an amendment into the 1999 National Defense Authorization Act handcuffing how the home could cash in on those 49 acres. The amendment forced the Home to sell—and not lease—the land to its next-door neighbor, the Catholic University of America. Ultimately, the Catholic Church bought 46 acres of the tract for $22 million. The Home lost the land for good, and by its own estimates, pocketed $27 million less than the land's value and $83 million less than what it could've made under the lease plan. Santorum's amendment sparked an outcry from veterans' groups and fellow US senators, who barraged his office with complaints.

[...] A former Santorum aide told New York Times Magazine in 2005 that the senator was "a Catholic missionary who happens to be in the Senate." [...]

Damn good thing this mackerel-snappin' asshole isn't going to be President.

We don't need the White House to be Vatican West. People worried needlessly about that before John Kennedy was President. JFK wasn't an Opus Dei Catholic League warmonger radical fringe right christowhackjob. Frothy Mixture is.

But of course ...

Another Rethug hypocrite outed:

While saying for the first time publicly that he is gay, rising Republican star Sheriff Paul Babeu used a dramatic news conference on Saturday in Arizona to angrily deny allegations that had been leveled against him by an ex-boyfriend in a newspaper report a day earlier.

...

Just one more on a long list entitled "Do as I say ..."

Talibaggers

Here he is again. Posted 2/18:

Sauce for the goose...

This has been going around Facebook for a day or so. Got it from Maddowblog which was easy to snag and came with an explanation.

Ed King of Portland, Maine's West End News found this old Women's Christian Temperance Union photo and thought he could do something with it. (History buffs: Temperance started in Portland, and the group lives on.)

THAT group?!! Holy shit...

The 2012 Political Animal Awards

Will Durst

BEST COSTUME: Rick Santorum for that winning period look- subtly harkening back to a young Mr. Rogers with rabies.
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BEST CHOREOGRAPHY: Grover Norquist.

THE “OH MY GOD, NOT YOU AGAIN” AWARD: Whoever decided contraception made for a good election year wedge issue.

BEST BOY: Marcus Bachmann.
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BEST ENSEMBLE IN A MUSICAL OR COMEDY: The entire Republican Party Presidential Nomination cast.

BEST ACTOR: Body of work award goes to Speaker of the House John Boehner for various portrayals as outraged defender of fiscal responsibility, obstinate party stalwart and sophisticated gentleman to whom gracious cooperation is of the highest priority and doing it all while orange.

BEST DIRECTION: The Koch Brothers.

More.

Shit ...

Literally.

As regulars around here know, I am the proud parent of these two little monsters:

Princess Ziva

Da Chooch

They are great dogs and I love them as much as a parent would love their human children; the Mrs. does too. That said, they are two little shit factories. My god, I think more comes out of them than goes in.

For the last 18 months, I've been either bagging it and tossing it in the trash (needless to say, the garbage is eye-watering by garbage day) or tossing it on the compost (which presents its own 'scent problems' come June, July, and August). It was making me nuts so I sat down and did some research.

Aside from paying some guy to come and pick up after them (that ain't happening), my only option was to compost it. Since I compost my grass and leaves anyway, I wanted to dispose of it where it did some good as opposed to just stinking. I looked around on the intarwebs and found a lot of products ranging from cheap (in quality and price) to gold-plated expensive (we are talking about dog shit after all).

So I did some more poking around on the Google and found this video a guy made of how he dealt with the problem with his two dogs. I went to Home Depot this morning and got busy.

I got a 30 gal. heavy duty plastic trashcan, 50 lbs. of sand, and a box of Rid-X (I use it in the septic system in the house too). I also poked around the yard and collected a 5 gal. bucket full of moderately sized rocks (this is Long Island and one thing we got a lot of - thanks to our geologic history - is rocks).

I drilled a million holes (1/2" dia.) in the side of the trashcan and cut out the bottom. After digging a deep enough hole at the edge of the compost, I filled the bottom with sand (at that depth, it's all clay here so the sand will help the water perk off). I stuck the trash can on top and tossed the rocks in before back-filling. I collected the day's haul, tossed in a half box of Rid-X, and poured 5 gal. of water on top of it all. The cover keeps the rain and bugs out. All good. Took me about 2 hours

I'll let you know how it works out ... or not.

Tax the shit out of them ...

That's what the Italians are doing:

After several years of scandal in which the Catholic Church has faced allegations of financial impropriety, paedophile priests and rumours of plots to kill the Pope, the Vatican is now facing a new €600m-a-year tax bill as Rome seeks to head off European Commission censure over controversial property tax breaks enjoyed by the Church.

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And that's what we should be doing here. The megachurches, all of the Catholic Church's property, the synagogues, and every other house of worship. If the preachers play in politics, they should be taxed at double the rate.

Great thanks to Chris in Paris for the link.

Admin ...

I turned off word verification for comments thanks to the nagging kvetching suggestions of a couple old guys who I should send a gift certificate to Vision Center. Heh ... If I get too much spam I'm putting them back on.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

This song fits right in with all the phony religiosity we're hearing lately.

From 1993 Emmylou's album Cowgirl's Prayer

Emmylou Harris ~ Jerusalem Tomorrow

Thanks to Indigoinsf2.

Free Mexican Airforce

Continuing with today's theme, this is Peter Rowan (website), who wrote the song in the video just below this one. Complete with introductory funny story!

Thanks to MyTallTripod.

Since we have a theme today ...

A little musical accompaniment:

The New Riders of the Purple Sage - Panama Red

Church Of The Blessed Mary Jane

Fixer could be the Pope of this one. I believe he has satisfied the canonical requirements for sainthood as well.

But first, Old Fart rakes Orange Boner and his set over the coals. The smoking lamp is lit...



Everybody should subscribe to or bookmark oldfartrants on YouTube and refer to it often. The guy comes up with new good shit all the time.

"No Shit" Headline and Quote of the Day

Paul Krugman In Playboy Interview: 'People Should Be In Jail' Because Of Financial Crisis

One reason to keep up with politics

Fighter Jets Intercept Drug Plane in Obama's No-Fly Zone

Heh. Really bad timing for your weekly weed run ta Fixer's house, dude!

America's Real Debate

LATimes

Click on it. Holy shit the thing gets big!

Some among the sleek set in the fashion industry think the 19-year-old, self-promoting model is too chubby to be chic -- their definition of hefty encompassing 99% of the nation’s females. The fashion mavens denigrate Upton’s whole look – her too-blond hair, her generic, pouty cheerleader face and her long legs that one critic described as looking as if they belong to a player for the WNBA. The casting director for Victoria’s Secret fashion shows said she’d never allow such a skank to darken her runway. (We all know how Victoria’s Secret is the epitome of haute couture.)
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Upton's defenders say she has a right to party. To suggest she is fat, they say, is tantamount to promoting anorexia. Her fans insist that Kate’s look is a healthier example for American girls, even if her beach attire indicates she can’t distinguish between panties and a Post-it stuck to a strand of dental floss.

The point here is not to take sides in this debate or even imply it has any importance. The Kate Upton kerfuffle simply lends a little perspective to the current political campaign. Journalists have been covering every twitch and twist of the Republican nomination fight for months now, millions of dollars have been spent on attack ads and robo calls and the candidates have roamed the countryside shaking hands and calling each other names, yet the number of people who have taken part in primaries and caucuses compared with the number of Americans who have stayed away is about the same as the ratio of fabric to bare skin in Kate’s beach shot.

Notable quote:

We may be in the midst of a titanic struggle for the soul of the country, but, in the land of the free, none of us are required to pay attention.

To which line I would add:

Until it's too late.

Yeah ...

Big money guy, he is. From the Democratic Party:

Romney portrays himself as the savior of the 2002 Olympics, but here's the truth: He spent $1.3 billion in federal dollars on the Salt Lake City games—more than all previous U.S. Olympic games combined. Romney didn't save the Olympics. The American taxpayer did.

Gordon knows his antics ...

Better than I do, but this guy Issa is a complete asshole. He's one who stacked the committee meeting on contraception with men and this is how he justifies it:

In case House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa's (R-Calif.) anti-contraception hearing wasn't quite offensive enough yesterday, the Republican congressman added insult to injury last night by equating his opposition to birth control to Dr. Martin Luther King's fight for civil rights.

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Boy wouldn't know a civil right if it bit him in the ass.

Aspirin ...

I loved Andrea Mitchell's reaction (I thought she was gonna faint) to Foster Friess' announcement that women should hold an aspirin between her knees as a form of cheap birth control. I personally haven't heard that line in 40 years and it goes to show you how these guys think.



Well, Drifty caught this too and has a few thoughts on the subject:

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Now you know why RNC chair Reince Priebus always has the squirmy, uncomfortable look of a man who brutally crapped his pants an hour ago and still hasn't yet found a way to get behind a closed door and clean himself up. Now you know why, before Priebus, the GOP hired an incompetent House Negro and a self-loathing gay man to front for them. Because you have to have a superhuman capacity for ass-kissing and gag-reflex-suppression to beg for money from a CHUD like Foster Freiss.

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When the people who have the money look at women's issues the way this asshole does, it should be no surprise that you have a panel of witnesses at a congressional committee hearing on the subject comprised of nothing but men.

So, let's review. The crazy racist bastids have basically chased away the Hispanic vote (except for some hardcore Cubanos in Miami) and now they're trying to chase away the women too. Do these assholes actually want to win in November or has it just turned into a contest to see who can out-crazy everybody else?

The celibate* old sexperts speak

The Gospel According to Bishops

*Altar boys don't count.

You ain't gonna believe this one either...

EssEffChron

Watch the video below and you might assume it’s a Saturday Night Live skit—well, it’s not. The uptight man in the purple shirt is dead serious about what he’s saying.

This anti-Planned Parenthood propaganda was created by the American Life League, the largest pro-life organization in the United States that opposes abortion under any circumstance, contraception, and embryonic stem cell research.

The video was created to show that Planned Parenthood is a “perverted” organization, turning America’s children into sex addicts through community events featuring penis-shaped balloons, vagina macaroons, vulva puppet shows, and giant vagina costumes. And then there’s all the masturbation literature, graphic images of naked boys and girls, and online descriptions of sexual organs. Planned Parenthood would tell you they offer these materials to educate youth and encourage safe sex but Michael Hichborn, media director of the American Life League, says, “They’re selling pornography to kids as science.” No matter, this video is quite an impressive collection of lewdness.

Go see for yourself. I'm not giving that trash the bandwidth.

Ya can't make this shit up...

Raw Story

Man has heart attack while eating ‘Triple Bypass Burger’

A restaurant called “The Heart Attack Grilled” finally earned its name on Saturday when a customer eating one of their Triple Bypass Burgers had a cardiac arrest.

“At the time of the incident I was performing bypass procedures on other patients,” restaurant owner Jon Basso told Raw Story. “My ‘head’ nurse informed me that one of our patients was having an actual heart attack.”

Basso comes to work dressed as a “doctor” and his waitresses wear sexy nurse costumes, but on this night they had to call in trained medical professionals.

Heh. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Face down in a burger.

Noooooo!

There ain't enough bleach in the fuckin' world...

And yes ...

I would giggle my ass off.



Watch the background (around 00:11) as a woman comes down the steps, texting at the same time. Sometimes I wonder where people's priorities are. Was the text really that important to risk serious injury? Had a girl fall into an open manhole last year because she had her head up her ass. I guess we should be happy they weren't driving at the time.

Thanks to Watertiger for the vid.

Keep yer gummint hands ...

Blah, blah, blah. Oliver Willis finds (in the NYT) another conservative idiot who just doesn't get it:

Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.

He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice. [my em]

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Fucking amazing. Don't these people ever look in a mirror?

Obviousness ...

A Bible story from Drifty:

There should be a bible story about two brothers: Willard and Detroit.

One brother stayed on the farm his father had built, working hard and dutifully tending the fields even as the soil grew thin, many crops were lost and hard times came and kicked his ass over and over again.

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Quote of the Day

JP:

... As Santorum creeps from the rear and washes across America Romney's getting more and more desperate to prove that, Yes, by God, I can paint the walls with my fecal matter as good as my rivals ...

Want "happy ending" GI?

She shoulda realized what she was doing before she did the Hoekstra ad, especially reinforcing the stereotype of her own people, but I'm glad she either woke up or someone explained it to her.

Lisa Chan, the actress who starred in former Rep. Pete Hoekstra's (R) Senate ad in Michigan that created a racial firestorm, apologized on Facebook Wednesday for the character she portrayed.

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Good for her.

And just an anecdote from the other day, when I had to explain to a fellow vet why that ad was racist. I told him:

"Look at it this way," I said. "It would be equivalent of saying that Hoekstra is cheap ("Save-it-now" as opposed to "Spend-it-now" in the ad) and using an obviously Jewish person, like a Rabbi or Hasidim, going around picking up pennies on the sidewalk in order to save money."

I actually saw the cartoon light bulb go on above his head. It was a good day.

The essence ...

Of the Frothy Mixture's campaign, boiled down into four small sentences by Charlie Pierce:

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(Vote for me. While others quailed, I dared to be proudly ignorant and paranoid. Come on in! The stupid's fine!)

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Heh...

Thanks to Slate.

That Old Black Magic

MFBTIR* goes off on Bill Donohue. Heh.

As though Bill Donohue didn’t have enough to be cranky about.
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What’s wrong with the rhythm method anyway? That’s how I got here.

Millions of people are nodding...

Donohue took time out from hyperventilating against the president to hyperventilate against the rapper Nicki Minaj. He was in a snit about Minaj arriving at the Grammys in a red Versace cloak resembling a cardinal’s, arm in arm with an actor dressed like the pope, and her over-the-top exorcist-themed number.

“Perhaps the most vulgar part was the sexual statement that showed a scantily clad female dancer stretching backwards while an altar boy knelt between her legs in prayer,” Donohue bristled.

Millions of altar boys are praying for female priests instead of the ones they have to do that to.

[...] The only good thing about it, as Marc Hogan wrote in Spin, was the chance that her devilish song might make “Bill Donohue’s head spin while spewing green vomit.”

Ah, to dream!

The satanic rap was merely the latest illustration of the renewed fascination with the ancient rite of exorcism. After languishing in the Catholic Church, exorcisms are back in fashion. In 2004, worried about the rise of the occult, Pope John Paul II asked Cardinal Ratzinger, the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI, to direct bishops around the world to appoint and train exorcists in their dioceses.

The infusion of Hispanic and African Catholics to the U.S., with their more intense belief in the supernatural, has brought a fresh demand.

The joke's on you, Holy Mofo Church. You didn't actually think The Other'd convert all the way, did you? Bwahahahaha! Only enough to keep you from killing them.

I think the Roman, Greek, Eastern, and probably Coptic Churches would shit if they knew what old gods got trotted out when it doesn't rain and the crops might fail. That's what they want to exorcise. Fat chance, robe boy.

*My Favorite Big-Titted Irish Redhead

A Texas Judge Reams Newt Gingrich's Vicious Ass

The only thing better than one Rude Pundit is two Rude Pundits in one day!

For big time fun, though, check out Appendix II, which, swear to God, will make you come with joy, as Biery fucks conservatives with a rhetorical strap-on by recounting the history of religion in a succinct, sarcastic, and utterly exhilarating way. After saying that Homo sapiens are the only creatures that know they're going to die, Biery writes, "Not wanting their existence to end, Homo sapiens developed a multitude of theories and hopes, encompassed in thousands of religions, of how they can avoid simply returning to the Earth from when they and other species came." Oh, yes, it does go on like that, talking about torture and war and the Constitution. It's the best judicial porn of the year.

On page 4, Biery has an intentional misspelling that should be the death knell of the career of one politician: "While religious institutions bestow many blessings and try to alleviate suffering, those acts of Grace are newtralized (my em) by religious Homo sapiens who exhibit an historical and continuing pernicious and pervasive tendency to kill other humans and confiscate the property of those, sometimes even within the same religion, who do not believe as they do."

Fuck, the Rude Pundit needs a cigarette.

Me too! Smoke 'em if ya got 'em.

The Right’s Inside-Out Constitution

Good essay by Robert Parry on states' rights and what the Constitution is all about.

According to the Right’s revisionist narrative, the framers of the Constitution met in Philadelphia for the purpose of tightly restricting the powers of the national government and broadly empowering the states – when the actual intent of the Constitutional Convention was nearly the opposite.

The Right has now popularized this bogus version of history so much that it has become a rallying cry for the Tea Party and other poorly informed Americans, including that self-proclaimed historian Newt Gingrich, who declared recently, “I believe in the Constitution; I believe in the Federalist Papers. Obama believes in Saul Alinsky and secular European socialist bureaucracy.”

Instead, the Right has sought to impose a reinterpretation of the Constitution by using its increasingly powerful media tools to revise the history of the United States and pretend that Madison and other Founders designed the Constitution as a document to establish the authority of the states to defy the federal government.

This revisionist view is now at the heart of the Tea Party movement and is reflected in comments by Republican presidential hopefuls, such as the insistence of Rep. Ron Paul of Texas that much of what the federal government has done domestically in recent decades has been unconstitutional. It also apparently was what Gingrich was driving at with his recent comment about his belief in the Constitution and the Federalist Papers.

But the Right leaves out of this narrative the key fact of why the Constitution was drafted in the first place: to get rid of the Articles of Confederation with that language about sovereign and independent states in a non-binding “firm league of friendship.”

It simply doesn’t fit the Right’s narrative that the Constitution represented the nation’s single greatest consolidation of federal power – nor that the key Founders, including James Madison, saw this new constitutional authority as a practical way to build a stronger nation, then and for the future.

The wingnuts use the Constitution the same way they use the Bible, as a tool to mislead the ignorant and uninformed whom they know have never read either of them.

Delusions of Grandeur ...

The Frothy Mixture haz dem:

Forget the next Ronald Reagan, Rick Santorum is telling Michigan voters they may just have the reincarnation of America's first president on their hands.

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You know, I can't envision Santorum crossing the Delaware.

The Conservative Obama ...

WARNING: Brain bleach will be required.

The Rude One does an excellent job of summing up the creation of an Obama that the conservatives need to believe in for all their bullshit to work:

...

See, conservative politicians and their media mouthpieces have gathered around a cauldron in the middle of an oil patch and they've filled it with Kenyan dirt and pelican blood and Muslim eyeballs and a whisker from Karl Marx's beard. They've danced nude around the giant pot, with flames licking its sides from the fire beneath it, Grover Norquist and Andrew Breitbart and one Koch or another and Karl Rove and others, adding their own spit and semen to the potion. They madly chanted to gods and ghosts of their crazed conservative forefathers, Reagan and McCarthy and Goldwater and Thurmond, willing into existence a horror, a phantom Obama that fulfills all their rhetorical needs. Oh, no, it doesn't look like the real Barack Obama in any way, but that's not the point. Surely, the creature that emerged from the viscous liquid of the cauldron, contorted and grotesque, bears enough of a resemblance that those who merely glance at it will be convinced that it is the same as the real President.

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Ick.

Your bishop is stuck in my Santorum

Wednesday. Morford. Heh.

Completely insufficient level of sarcasm, really, given how it apparently really is 2012, well past the sexual revolution, the Pill, shattered glass ceilings, designer vibrators and dragging females around the cave by their lustrous hair without enthusiastic fetish/safe word consent, and here we are, stuck like an errant NuvaRing under the sweaty, sexually disgraceful thumbs of a shrinking but still shrieking subset of hyper-religious males who think women are vile and lesser and should not, cannot make choices for themselves regarding sex and war and love, et al.

Rick Santorum! Are you really back in the national spotlight for a blip of a cringe of a groan? Don't worry, it won't be for long. It won't take much time for your 15 minutes of swelling GOP fame to expire like Bachmann, Cain, Christine O'Donnell and other fringe nutballs before you, and you regress back to your rightful status as Dan Savage's plaything, as the world's favorite filthyfun Google search.

Do you know what conservatives fear and lament the most? They fear the end of a rose-colored, belligerently patriotic, stiffly Christian nation that never really existed. They lament that the very foundations of America and the angry, oppressive God that created it are crumbling beneath them, that the fabric of this fine nation is coming undone and they're powerless to stop it

I think it is probably unnecessary at this point for me to suggest you go read this.

Proud to be a New Yorker ...

Lotta firsts lately here. This is cool:

NEW YORK -- Two women who met as college students in Alaska and two men who met at a nightclub in Manhattan became the first same-sex couples Tuesday to be married at the Empire State Building.

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I generally don't agree with Noot on anythng ...

But, like Charlie Pierce, I think Humanity's future is among the stars. I think a Moon base would be a goal to shoot for, and then moving farther afield from there.

I have to confess: The fact that N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer Of Civliization's Rules and Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civlizing Forces, proposed building a base on the moon by 2020, only to have the idea turned into a punchline and general ridicule, actually bothered the hell out of me. When did we become so quick to mock this kind of thing? When did our national imagination wither this way? When did exploration become just another "big government" program for pipsqueaks like Willard Romney to ridicule?

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Some of us still have an imagination, Charlie, but we write fiction.

What if ...

A group of Muslim Imams took exception to some policy of the Preident's, as opposed to the Catholic bishops? Somehow, I don't think the results would be the same:

When did the 1st Amendment change from basically saying that you can practice whatever religion you want and you won’t be burned at the stake as a heretic and we’re not going to form or recognize a national religion like the Church of England? When did it change to “everyone everywhere has to do what a bunch of old catholics in funny hats wants, because otherwise it hurts their feelings?” And why does it only apply to certain religions?

I seriously wish other religions would get in on the act. I wish Keith Ellison would start sponsoring bills that allow insurers to cut people’s benefits if they don’t pray to Mecca a certain number of times a day. Or someone Jewish proposing a bill requiring circumcisions or you can’t get health insurance. Just flood the zone with bullshit so people can see how out of control our concept of religious liberty has become.

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How many teabaggers would be screaming "Sharia Law"?

Great thanks to Jill for the link.

The Reactionary Mind

Attempts to answer the question "What makes a Conservative tick?"

Hopefully, some kind of timer, as in tick, tick, KA-FUCKIN'-BLOOEY!

These take some time to watch. Worth it.

Thanks to TheBigPictureRT.

Shorter: They want THEIR hierarchy, not OURS, and thus have domination over all things, public and PRIVATE. That's what we're fighting against, folks.

“We don’t need someone to think”

All morning I've been reading about the CPAC. Sickening. Salon comes the closest to a one-read solution. Here's a snippet from Gruber:

“We’re not auditioning for someone to tell us what to do,” he declared. “We know what to do. We just need a president who can sign the legislation that the Republican House and Senate pass. … We don’t need someone to think. … We need someone who knows how to hold a pen.”

I think he stopped short nominating George W. Bush who apparently was the Repug ideal.

Sickening.

Severe Conservative Syndrome

Dr. Paul on The Conservative Disease.

Mitt Romney has a gift for words — self-destructive words. On Friday he did it again, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was a “severely conservative governor.”

As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described conservatism as if it were a disease.” Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.

How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!

My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.

Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.

The point is that today’s dismal G.O.P. field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic conservatives played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many years to cure.

We need to quarantine them like lepers on Molokai before their disease rots all our peckers off. Send them all to the South. Then wall it off.

Can't fix it ...

If you still don't believe the Republicans (and I'm talking rank and file here, not their "leaders") are a collection of racist bastids, you haven't been paying attention. It's rampant enough to give Charles Johnson of Little Green Snotballs pause.

There’s a real sickness running rampant in the right wing; the Fox News comment thread on Whitney Houston’s death is yet another disgusting deluge of outright racism: Singer Whitney Houston Dies at 48 | Fox News.

...

The link is to Digby where you can go see for yourself. I don't link to right wing blogs.

Just sayin' ...

Stolen from the Being Liberal FB page.

Winning strategies ...

Yer doing it wrong:

Not satisfied with President Obama’s new religious accommodation, Republicans will move forward with legislation by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) that permits any employer to deny birth control coverage in their health insurance plans, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Sunday.

...

So, Mitch the Chin is gonna beat this mule for as far as it will take him. Good luck with that.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

High School Science Project Laser Cannon Accidently Destroys Nancy Reagan Chandelier
Obama: “It was awesome!”

20% of Republicans May Vote for Obama
They're the same 20% of Republicans who believe he was born here.

1 in 5. More than I thought.

Teen Pregnancy, Abortion Rates Lowest Since 1972
Clearly due to teens heeding abstinence programs, avoiding suggestive entertainment and showing great restraint when around the opposite sex, and not due to widespread use of contraceptives.

Pennsylvania: Vending Machine at College Dispenses Morning-After Pill
It's next to a condom machine and a sperm bank ATM.

Ewwwwww...

Another Falklands Conflict Brewing
Meryl Streep cancels promotional tour of Argentina.

Heh.

Latte-come-lately

Go read about Starbucks invading India (hint: they're late to the party) here. I love the fake logo and wanted to share.



We have two Starbucks in my town of fifteen thousand, and they're about 50 feet apart. One's a regular store and one is in the Safeway next door. Hell, we've got a coffee bar, complete with barista, inside the entranceway to the hardware store across the street from 'em as well. Other places in town too. You're never far from a shot of overpriced coffee around here.

Halftime and Hyperbole

Joke Line gets it right.

They almost lost everything," Clint Eastwood growled in the best ad of the Super Bowl, a celebration of Chrysler's resurrection. "But we all pulled together. Now Motor City is fighting again." Any normal person watching this ad had to be thrilled--Eastwood's voice, the rousing script, the fighting spirit: "This country can't be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again, and when we do, the world's going to hear the roar of our engines." But somehow, Karl Rove was "offended." The master Republican strategist saw the ad as a Chicago-style payback from Chrysler to Barack Obama for bailing out the company. Now, Rove is not a stupid man. He is a relentless partisan, but usually a clever one. And yet he managed to denigrate an American icon (Eastwood) known for his flinty integrity, expressing opinions most people would consider patriotic. How could he get it so wrong? The answer relates directly to the Republicans' muddled and inept campaign this year.

Rove lives in the hermetically sealed world of GOP fantasy. He's integral to the relentless pounding of wing-nut talk-show spin. In that world, Obama is the Antichrist--a combination of cynical Chicago pol, socialist, naf and teleprompter-reading tool of unseen forces (and maybe even, who knows, a secret Muslim immigrant). In that world, the notion that the auto bailout, or any Obama policy, actually worked is insidious. In that world, the notion that the government might organize us to "pull together" for the common good is a threat to individual liberty.
...

[...] But there is a paranoid edge to the Republican fantasy. [...]

Ya think? Much more.

Irony is KIA

There are three of these at Raw Story.

A test ...

Pic stolen from the Great Orange Satan.

In this country ...

We got hog calling. In Germany they call the deer:

The hunt is on for Germany’s champion deer caller.

Enthusiasts grunted, bawled and bellowed their way through imitations of red deer in the breeding season in the 14th edition of the competition at the Hunter & Dog Trade Fair in the city of Dortmund.

...

Of course, being Germans, the have apparatus. Video at the link.