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:

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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.

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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.

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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.
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[...] 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.

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