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.