More dumb shit Jarheads, or, "One Shot, One Foot!"

When I first saw this, my mind instantly went "uh-oh" followed by two scenarios, neither of them good.

Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, etc. have gotten past their NCOs and officers. Not likely in the Corps, but it has happened in the Army.

or

These are young, dumb, cockstrong scout-snipers who haven't a fucking clue.

I'll go with Door No. Two, Bob.

Raw Story

The commander of a group of U.S. Marines who were photographed in Afghanistan with what looks like a Nazi SS flag concluded they were acting out of ignorance rather than bigotry and decided not to punish them, a Marine Corps spokesman said on Thursday.
...

Master Gunnery Sergeant Mark Oliva, a Marine spokesman at Camp Pendleton in California, said the commander of the elite sniper team involved had investigated the matter and decided no disciplinary action was warranted.

“They didn’t realize that they were associating themselves with something that was racist, fascist,” Oliva said. “This was a chance to educate our young Marines about” the history of the Nazis and “the power of symbols.”
...

“They saw ‘SS’ and associated it with ‘scout sniper’ rather than the Nazis,” Oliva said.

I will give them the benefit of the doubt on this one. Of course, I'm a little biased but I'm glad it went this way and I accept it.

It's hard to come up with a logo/flag etc. for anything with the initials "SS". Maybe they should change 'scout sniper' to something like 'Scouts and Marksmen'.

"S & M" oughtn't to be too hard...

Queen of Angels' Condoms

Greg Palast

Last night, I heard Senator Rick Santorum tell us that President Obama has attacked Catholics and freedom of religion by barring church-controlled businesses from excluding contraception care in their employees' health plans.

Joining the shriek-fest against the president's decision, the sanctimonious little ex-senator prattled on about big bad government crushing religious freedom.

That's just arse-backwards.

Obama's decision is a defense of religious freedom.

Religious freedom is a right of people, not their bosses.
...

No damn employer should be allowed to tell an employee what medicine may be prescribed by their doctor based on the business owner's beliefs.

Good point.

Update:

El Rude-o

Now, unlike so many others who are going around screaming, "Freedom of religion" or "First Amendment rights violation" or some such overdramatic shit that they didn't shout when, you know, the Bush administration enforced a similar rule, the Rude Pundit's not gonna pretend to be a constitutional scholar. But he's pretty fucking sure that if you impose your religious beliefs on your employees, and the government allows you to do so, that's more or less establishing religion. You have the right to practice your faith. You don't have the right to infringe on someone's right not to, especially if your ass receives money from the federal government, like, say Catholic University.
...

Of course, none of this current anger really has much to do with upholding the moral code of the Catholic Church. Otherwise, we'd be seeing John Boehner and Mitch McConnell out there demanding the end of capital punishment and the beginning of a fuck of a lot more programs to assist the poor.

No, as usual, this is about how the right-wing outrage machine can be cranked up to 11, especially in the wake of the Planned Parenthood triumph in the Susan G. Komen Foundation funding affair, and how poll numbers and money can be raised on the bodies of women. It's about who controls those bodies: the women, who can choose whether or not they use contraception, or their employers, who can make the expensive drugs impossible for their female employees to afford. Or right-wing religious leaders, who have been trying so hard to wrangle the unruly female body back into the maternity ward and the house. Or the GOP, who must just no longer give a damn about women voting for them.

To quote Coultergeist (heh): "...and then we lose."

Quote of the Day

A Tweet:

Bet if altar boys could get pregnant, the Catholic Church would be all for contraception.

Contraception would be a sacrament!

When Clint Eastwood Mocks You, You're Officially Screwed

William Rivers Pitt

You know the wheels have come off the GOP wagon when the Republicans feel compelled to accuse Clint Eastwood of being a shill for the president, but that is precisely what has transpired. [...]
...

Reaction from the Republican Right was both swift and hilarious. Apparently, and according to the GOP, Dirty Harry is a dirty liberal hippy socialist communist who hates America and is in the pocket of our birthplace-questionable president...but the GOP found itself struggling to be coherent in its critique.

Take, as the prime example, the words of Karl Rove,...
...

You crack me up, Karl. Some of us remember.

P.S., the Detroit bailout worked, which is what pisses you off...that, and the fact that you and your ilk can't admit it when you're wrong. Detroit lives, you hate it, and all your tantrum will accomplish is to paint Michigan a bright, vivid Blue in November of 2012. Congratulations, genius.

In other words, fuck you, Turdblossom, you whiny bitch. Better, to quote Gunny Highway, who makes Dirty Harry look like a pussy: "Be advised. I'm mean, nasty and tired. I eat concertina wire and piss napalm and I can put a round in a flea's ass at 200 meters. So why don't you go hump somebody else's leg, mutt face, before I push yours in."

A neat segue into a few hundred words on the contraception non-issue follow.

In other words: Shut the F-k up.

This is, to be sure, a thick and knotted forest of gibberish and nonsense we must hack through in order to find our way to daylight. The daylight is there, however, without a shred of doubt. The Right would love, love, love to careen our national discussion away from a conversation on the economy they have plundered and the jobs they have destroyed, and steer it instead toward a discussion of snowflake babies, unrequited semen, and the importance of being earnest. The events of the last week have given them a wide window to do so, save for the fact that the American people have no interest in their opinions regarding the matters at hand.

Jobs? Fail. Choice? Fail. Contraception? Fail.

For the first time in living memory, the Culture War battlefield is tilting hard against the Right. This we call "evolution."

I suppose it was inevitable. In "Unforgiven," it was Clint Eastwood who said, "We all got it coming, kid."

Gunny Highway: "Why don't I bend you over the table there... send you home with the "I just pumped the neighbor's cat" look on your face."

Works for me.

Update:

Crooks and Liars

Stuart Varney Thinks Pro-Obama Ad Directors Tricked Clint Eastwood Into Chrysler Ad

Desperate people say desperate things. Heh.

Fox News just cannot leave this alone. First of all, they loathe American car companies, especially American car companies who were part of the auto industry rescue. Those companies would be General Motors and Chrysler. Never mind that the first piece of the bailout was in December 2008 before Barack Obama took office. It was nevertheless a grievous socialist sin visited upon us by That Guy in the White House.
...

Enter Chrysler, with a commercial made by a staunch Republican with a simple message: It's halftime in America, and we've clawed our way back from the brink of collapse. It is not a partisan message. It is a celebration of success and overcoming, something that everyone should celebrate. Unless, of course, your political fortunes might turn on America's decline. There is that.

See, Clint Eastwood isn't a fool. He knows that recovery in this country is good for all of us. The only people who stand to lose are those who stand to sabotage that recovery for political gain. Not surprisingly, those same people tend to inhabit, comment on, and view Fox News.

They can't stop spinning or they'll fall over. I'm waiting for 'em to spin so fast they explode from centrifugal force. Heh.

Heh ...

Pic stolen from our pal Montag.

The Whole Truth - and Nothing but

Scariest thing in the world to Repugs. Dr. Paul on Politifact.

The criterion, according to Politifact, seems to be that a fact isn’t a fact if it helps a Democratic narrative. In his State of the Union address on Jan. 24, President Obama said: “In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005.”

Which is just true. Period. But Politifact initially rated it as only “half true” because he was “essentially taking credit for job growth.” He didn’t actually take credit — and even if he had, a fact is still a fact. I do not think that word means what Politifact thinks it means.
...

Unfortunately, Politifact has lost sight of what it is supposed to be doing. Instead of simply saying whether a claim is true, it’s trying to act as some kind of referee of what it imagines to be fair play: even if a politician says something completely true, it gets ruled only partly true if Politifact feels that the fact is being used to gain an unfair political advantage.

That would make Repugs "Pants On Fire" 100% of the time, maybe more.

Aside from undermining the mission, this makes the whole thing subjective — notice that Politifact wasn’t even analyzing what Mr. Obama said; they were analyzing their impression about what he might have been trying to imply. Leave that for the talking heads!

They're wrong almost all the time anyway. Heh.

Yet Politifact wants to be seen as nonpartisan. If it just stuck to the facts, it could say look, we’re just reporting the facts. But having defined its role as something that goes beyond checking facts to saying whether the facts are being used in some “proper” way, it then finds itself under pressure to be “evenhanded,” which ends up meaning making excuses for Republican falsehoods and finding ways to criticize Democrats’ true statements.

It’s all very sad.

I think we should follow the money to Politifact. Might be something interesting there.

Google's hangin' with the wrong crowd

Right Wing Watch. Lotsa links.

Does Google Know It’s Sponsoring a Right-Wing, Anti-Gay Conference?

Bloomberg reported on Monday that Google, joining with the likes of the NRA and Heritage Foundation, will be a primary sponsor of CPAC, the right-wing conference kicking off tomorrow in DC. Google portrayed its sponsorship as just another way for the company to reach campaign professionals, candidates, and tech-savvy young adults:
...

That would make sense if CPAC was just another GOP event. It’s not.

CPAC 2012 is as notable for who is coming as who isn’t. Peter Brimelow is a prominent white nationalist and founder of the racist and anti-Semitic website VDARE. He’ll be at CPAC 2012.

“Birther” leader Joseph Farah will be there. He has boycotted CPAC since 2009 when he was blocked from hosting a panel questioning the President’s citizenship. This year he’s being welcomed back with open arms.

Youth for Western Civilization’s founder was arrested in 2007 for karate chopping an African-American woman on the street while calling her “n****r.” They, like Google, are sponsoring this year’s CPAC.

Romney, Gingrich and Santorum will be there too, along with major Religious Right groups like the Family Research Council.

FRC boycotted last year’s CPAC to protest the participation of a conservative gay rights organization, GOProud. CPAC 2012 will be different. The gay group got the boot, and CPAC and the Family Research Council kissed and made up.

Google told Bloomberg that the company is “planning hangouts with top Republicans and well respected conservative journalists at CPAC.” That’s not all they’ll find at CPAC if they go through with their sponsorship.

Note to Google: Find the fucking idiot who came up with the idea that CPAC has to do with anything other than the worst of the worst in our society and can his ass. Then move up the the chain to those who OKed it and do the same, I don't care if it's Herr Google hisself.

Sal si puedes. Withdraw your sponsorship and publicly admit it was a mistake, an affront to everyone except the Dead End Quarter.

At this point, the "oo" in Google look remarkably like self-inflicted bullet holes. We like you, Google, we really do, but less today.

Obama, Explained

A truly excellent read in The Atlantic. Quite long, and worth the time it takes to read.

As Barack Obama contends for a second term in office, two conflicting narratives of his presidency have emerged. Is he a skillful political player and policy visionary—a chess master who always sees several moves ahead of his opponents (and of the punditocracy)? Or is he politically clumsy and out of his depth—a pawn overwhelmed by events, at the mercy of a second-rate staff and of the Republicans? Here, a longtime analyst of the presidency takes the measure of our 44th president, with a view to history.

[...] The earnestly devotional HOPE poster by Shepard Fairey was the official icon of the Obama campaign. But its edgier, unofficial counterpart, a Photoshopped Internet image that appeared as an antidote to the panic over polls and Palin, perfectly captured the candidate’s air of icy assurance. It showed a no-nonsense Obama looking straight at the camera, with the caption EVERYONE CHILL THE FUCK OUT, I GOT THIS!

[...] The reality, though, is that our judgment about “really good” and “mediocre” presidents is colored by how long they serve. A failure to win reelection places a “one-term loser” asterisk on even genuine accomplishments. Ask George H. W. Bush, victor in the Gulf War; ask Jimmy Carter, architect of the Camp David agreement.

Geez, dude, ya left out "near fatal totally fucking disastrous", AKA "The Bush Years".

In the realm of foreign policy, Barack Obama has learned what every modern president eventually does: despite the dangers, the emergencies, the intractable disagreements, and the life-and-death risks, international affairs naturally claim an ever-growing share of a president’s attention and enthusiasm. On the world stage, he represents an entire mighty country, not one perhaps-embattled party. International figures may be frustrating to deal with—Karzai, Ahmadinejad, Netanyahu in their different ways — but usually they can’t totally thwart or undermine him the way a Mitch McConnell or a Roger Ailes can. He can think big thoughts and announce big plans without seeing them immediately picked apart or ridiculed. And he can dare to devise a long-term strategy, like Obama’s with China, knowing that the tools for carrying it out—in the military, the diplomatic corps, the intelligence agencies, and the rest of the national-security apparatus—are within his line of command.

Shorter: it's easier to deal with the rest of the world than it is to deal with Repugs.

If Barack Obama loses this fall, he will forever seem a disappointment: a symbolically important but accidental figure who raised hopes he could not fulfill and met difficulties he did not know how to surmount. He meant to show the unity of America but only underscored its division. As a candidate, he symbolized transformation; in office, he applied incrementalism and demonstrated the limits of change. His most important achievement, helping forestall a second Great Depression, will be taken for granted or discounted in the dismay about the economic problems he did not solve. His main legislative accomplishment, the health-care bill, may well be overturned; his effect on America’s international standing will pass; his talk about bridging the partisan divide will seem one more sign of his fatal naïveté. If he is reelected, he will have a chance to solidify what he has accomplished and, more important, build on what he has learned. All of this is additional motivation, as if he needed any, for him to drive for reelection; none of it makes him any more palatable to those who oppose him and his goals.

And for those who supported him the first time, as I did? To me, the evidence suggests that given a second term, he would have a better chance of becoming the figure so many people imagined.

He'll get his second term, perhaps not on the basis of what he has actually done or his learning curve and what he may yet do, but through sheer blind fuckin' luck on the basis of the Repugs' internal disintegration and takeover by the regressives, not to mention the clown car of Repug candidates. Even Repugs don't like 'em.

Again, please read this. Agree, disagree, whatever.

Headline of the Day

New Hampshire Republicans Propose Bill To Eliminate Workers’ Lunch Breaks

Rumor has it, and I know because I started it, that the Repugs are going after bathroom breaks next. After that? Depends.

Heh ...

The Hoekstra "me so horny, love you long time" ad redone.

Dancing with ourselves ...

Seems reality is starting to sink in on Wall St.:

...

Sounds like the party's over. And it rings true to me that the great howls of outrage at the alleged injustice of the nation treating these banksters with disdain were the screams of a dying breed. It never made sense to me. These were smart guys. Hugely successful, vastly wealthy. If they thought their scam had any life left in it they would have done a few mea culpas and laid low.

...

Doesn't matter how smart you are, if you're blinded by greed, you refuse to see the reality of things until it imposes itself on you. Works the same with drugs and alcohol, all depends on what your own personal monkey is.

Quote of the Day

Ellen DeGeneres:

...

"I usually don't talk about stuff like this on my show," she confessed. "But I really want to thank everyone who is supporting me, and if you don't know me very well, if you're just watching for the first time or maybe you are just getting to know me, I want to be clear. Here are the values that I stand for: I stand for honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you want to be treated and helping those in need. To me, those are traditional values. That's what I stand for."

...

For all those fundie wingnuts, Ellen's values are closer to Jesus' than yours are.

The Odd Couple + a Couple

This is just a passage I like from page four of a Rolling Stone piece by Matt Taibbi, the subhead of which makes me reach for the laughin' bleach:

How the GOP race became a showdown between a walking OCD diagnosis and a flatulent serial adulterer

But I digress...

[...] The grown-ups in the party establishment and their lackeys in the press simply refuse to take Paul seriously, which is part of the reason Paul is so extraordinarily attractive to young people (in both Iowa and New Hampshire, he scored almost half of the under-30 vote).

But the Republican Party is not dominated by 22-year-old college students reading The Fountainhead for the first time and finally understanding what it is they've always hated about their ex-hippie parents. No, the party is dominated by middle-aged white suburbanites who hate Mexico, John King and the Golden Rule and are willing to flock to anyone who'll serve up the Fox News culture war in big portions and without shame or hesitation. Romney might have memorized a few I-hate-Obama sound bites, but voters simply don't believe him. Gingrich alone offers GOP voters the emotional payoff they want out of an election – an impassioned fight against the conspiracy, played out in thrillingly contrary three-hour debates on health care with the liberal Satan. Gingrich lives for confrontation: He was born for this sort of insurgent primary politics.

The only problem is, he's a bloviating, egomaniacal hog clinging to a third marriage who suffers from incurable diarrhea of the mouth and, according to polls, is one of the most intensely disliked politicians in America, making him an utterly absurd choice for the general election. If Gingrich ends up winning the nomination, Obama will essentially be running against the political version of Gilbert Gottfried or raw garlic – strong tastes that some like quite a lot, but many more can't stand to even be near. If that happens, every Democratic flack from Leon Panetta to Obama himself will have to wear restraints to keep from publicly crying out in joy.

I've given up. I'm at the stage where I point and laugh hysterically at wingnut bumperstickers even if the people are right there putting their groceries in the trunk. Lotsa booze these days. Ah, blessed oblivion is better than their presidential field. Or their chances. Heh.

'The Market' Has Chosen the Winner of the Culture Wars

It's all about the bucks as usual. Tina Dupuy.

The argument could be made (mainly by those who want to take us back to a mythical innocent time of the supposedly recent past) that it's advertisers who've corrupted our culture and changed what's socially acceptable through their manipulations. Or, if you have sold your proverbial soul to the gods of unfettered commerce — like the rightwing self-described Culture Warriors, or the (formerly) Moral (former) Majority — advertisements are the market speaking for the greater culture at large. And the greater culture, funny enough, largely disagrees with the rightwing.

You can think of the market as a leading indicator of our social mores and the Republican primary as a lagging one.
...

The GOP-worshipped market has chosen the winner of the culture wars, and it hasn't looked favorably on its most devout.

Of course, the market for Republicans is just like the Bible or the Constitution. They worship it piously as long as they believe it agrees with them.

If their deified market is all-knowing and all-powerful — it clearly favors a progressive social agenda...and not the GOP's.

Go read. The gory details are in between my quotes.

Gay Marriage, Susan Komen Debacle, and Dirty Harry

The Rude Pundit on those topics.

Man, it's just Tuesday, and it's already been a shit week for conservatives:

And our best wishes for many more!

1. Proposition 8, the Mormon-licious California law that banned gay marriage, was declared unconstitutional by a 3-judge panel (or a "justice-a'-trois") from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Right now, that sound you're hearing is several million evangelical heads exploding and the clicks of computer keyboards as assloads of money pour into homophobic candidates and organizations and the dropping of pants, licking of lips, and moans, moans, moans of joy all over California.

2. Karen Handel [...] Seriously, it would have been easier just to say, "Yeah, fine, we did it because we're big damn conservatives and we hate Planned Parenthood because conservatives are fucking crazy now."

3. Speaking of conservatives being fucking crazy, the outrage on the right over the Clint Eastwood-narrated Chrysler ad is beyond bizarre. [...]

At some point, someone needs to say to Republicans that it's okay to have been wrong about the auto bailout. Now let's move on.

But they can't. They just can't. Karl Rove pranced onto Fox "news" to announce his displeasure, saying that the ad was "a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising." The man who helped demonize a legless Vietnam vet said he was "offended."

What this reaction says is something deeper. See, Clint Eastwood, who voted for John McCain and opposed the bank and car bailouts, thinks the whole controversy is bullshit. He rewrote the script, and he's donating his pay to charity. What Rove and the rest of the right's negative reaction really means is that they are divorced from the nation as a whole. In the ad, Eastwood says that, during tough times, "we all rallied around what was right, and acted as one." We acted, in essence, like Americans.

Conservatives are saying that it's offensive to expect them to do so. And if Dirty Harry wants to wallow around with the dirty hippies, then fuck him, too.

Try it, Turdblossom. Make my day...

Headline of the Day

Orly Taitz Orders Prosecution of Everyone Who Disagrees With Her

Funny. This woman is so far past being ready for the rubber room...

How to be outraged in America

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford going off on the reaction of some to MIA flipping the bird at a football game and the backlash over the Komen hard right turn.

What was it this time? Right. Rapper M.I.A.'s 1.5 seconds of a middle finger, raised pseudo-defiantly during Madonna's completely ridiculous, lip-synced Super Bowl halftime show. A middle finger! Heads will roll! Punishment must be doled! Who, pray who, will save the children from this frightening woman's vile extremity, given how everyone knows hysterical middle fingers lead straight to unchecked lesbianism, Obamacare and dancing for seven straight days at Burning Man? What's next, Starbucks teaming up with Satan? Oh wait.
...

One final question, PTC: Did you happen to notice the hordes of giant, sweaty gladiators furiously bashing each others' skulls in for three straight hours and calling it a sport? Did you notice the adorable homoerotics of it all, or perhaps the millions of very drunk fans, or the mountains of garbage food, or the onslaught of $4 million TV ads hawking beer and trucks and sex and beer, all pummeling the hell out of your kids' small, impressionable minds? Do you have any idea what real, healthy outrage even looks like?

Let's call the kind of outrage Komen's decision ignited the healthy kind of outrage, in diametric opposition of PTC's childish pseudo-indignation, an informed and electrifying kind of reaction that had the wonderful consequence of alerting tens of thousands, even millions of people to the fact that not only is one of the nation's leading charities violently lopsided, fundamentally misguided and not so deserving of your dollars, but that Planned Parenthood is, well, just the opposite.

Are you furious, for example, that Microsoft -- and hell, all of Washington State -- now officially endorse gay marriage? Are you outraged that yet another appeals court deemed hateful ol' Prop 8 unconstitutional? Are you an outraged religious group, furious that Obama might make you step into the 20th century? Or are you upset, like the clearly brilliant GOP Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana, that Planned Parenthood is opening an $8 billion "abortionplex" in Kansas, replete with a climbing wall, noiseless incinerator and gift shop? I'm so sorry for you. The crushing roar of imminent doom (and rampant idiocy) must be deafening.

I used to be outraged all the time at the things Repugs did, but it has subsided somewhat to mere spikes of outrage which subside to mostly mild amusement at their ridiculous antics to turn the clock back to a time that never was where life was beautiful all the time and everybody was a rich white Christian. I love the part where they shoot themselves or each other in the feet, which is happening more and more as people catch on (finally!) to their shit..

11 Dimensional Chess ...

Remember the debt ceiling talks, where the Orange Boner had a gun to the head of the US economy? Remember the failed Super Committee and the Draconian cuts to everything they were supposed to prevent? Well the chickens are coming home to roost and the GOP is squirming like they have ass mites:

...

Last year, the GOP held the routine debt ceiling limit increase hostage for $1.2 trillion in cuts. At the time the GOP was attempting to brand itself as the party of fiscal prudence. Much to the annoyance of many on the left, President Obama responded by embracing the cause of deficit reduction.

At the time, Obama's move looked ridiculous as the country is in a recession caused by a lack of demand. The last thing the country needs to worry about right now is the risk of inflation.

...

Now, I ain't gonna buy that Barry had this planned all along. It's better to be lucky than good:

...

This is how the GOP negotiating strategy collapses when they can't hold the country hostage with a gun to its head. The McCain/Kyl proposals all offer something that the President probably doesn't want in return for something he wants to avoid. Heads I win, tails you lose. [em in orig]

...

The GOP is so short sighted that they'll reflexively oppose everything Obama proposes, even when it's everything they want, without thinking out how it's gonna play out in the long term, like how their obstruction would come around to the bite them in the ass.

There went the drone program...

President Barack Obama may have just had his favorite day as leader of the free world. Video.

Congratulates young science geek for single-handedly coming up with Anti-Drone Cannon (ADC) and putting foreign and domestic surveillance at risk.

I mighta made part of that up...

That look on his face is priceless! That's either "Wow!" if everything went well, or "Oops!" if it didn't. "Watch this!" may have been involved.



Mrs. G says the young engineer/gunner looks like a mini Jay Carney. Heh.

Scrap the wingnuts, Clyde...

Shopping day today. I'll leave yas with this, links and video:

Dirty Harry has turned against the GOP.

That’s basically the message in last night’s episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, during which guest host Chris Hayes examined the popular Chrysler Super Bowl ad featuring Oscar-winning director Clint Eastwood.

His conclusion: Eastwood’s sideways endorsement of the auto bailouts punches conservatives where it hurts — right in the Reagan.
...

But now that Eastwood is singing a different tune, and praising one of President Barack Obama’s policies on an issue where his likely Republican challenger goes in the exact opposite direction, conservatives have been sent reeling.

Yep, ol' Clint committed an unpardonable sin - he told the truth about something Obama did.