Saw this coming...

Well, our noble GOP congresscritters are certainly showing their idiot colors since they reconvened this month.

See, in their continuing efforts to do anything except get jobs for American workers, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) introduced a bill, which currently has 174 cosponsors, called the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" which Rep Boehner (R-Sunkist) has called "one of our highest legislative priorities."

Because, you know, fuck the two to five million people who haven't had a job in over two years and no longer qualify for government relief (oh, and by the way, these are people who employers won't even look at any more). Those bastards'll be dead soon enough. And even if they survive, they aren't gonna vote, right?

So this New Jersey nimrod threw his antiabortion bill together without paying attention to a couple of little details. Fortunately, Nick Baumann from Mother Jones Magazine took the time to poke it with a stick, and discovered that it's kind of an abortion all on its own.

Republicans propose that the rape exemption be limited to "forcible rape." This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion. (Smith's spokesman did not respond to a call and an email requesting comment.)

Given that the bill also would forbid the use of tax benefits to pay for abortions, that 13-year-old's parents wouldn't be allowed to use money from a tax-exempt health savings account (HSA) to pay for the procedure. They also wouldn't be able to deduct the cost of the abortion or the cost of any insurance that paid for it as a medical expense.

...Since 1976, federal law has prohibited the use of taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions except in the cases of rape, incest, and when the pregnancy endangers the life of the woman. But since last year, the anti-abortion side has become far more aggressive in challenging this compromise. They have been pushing to outlaw tax deductions for insurance plans that cover abortion, even if the abortion coverage is never used.

(...)

Other types of rapes that would no longer be covered by the exemption include rapes in which the woman was drugged or given excessive amounts of alcohol, rapes of women with limited mental capacity, and many date rapes... As for the incest exception, the bill would only allow federally funded abortions if the woman is under 18.

Yeah, well, even a compromise like that might get killed at the local level. The Arkansas Senate passed a bill to prohibit federal funding for abortions offered through an insurance exchange except where the life of the mother is at risk.

The bill's sponsor, Republican Senator Cecile Bledsoe, ignored calls to amend the bill to cover rape and incest.

Sweet Jesus Christ on a telephone poll, it's now officially time for all satirists to hang it up. Reality has just made it redundant to say things like "Well, in Arkansas, if you outlaw incest and rape, the state just disappears."

I don't know where to go after that. Except to ask if anybody's bothered to trace the family trees of Cecile and her "husband" James, just to see if it takes two generations before they intertwine, or three.

But hey, let's ignore every other problem in the country, and get back to making abortion illegal again! (Ignore that woman behind the curtain with the coat hanger!)

I'm just curious, though. Could somebody please check this list of co-sponsors, and see just how many ran on "the gub'mint is stickin' their nose inta' our lives too dang much!" It might be interesting to see them try to reconcile those two positions.

More Right Wing Idiocy

You know, there’s a lot of idiots out there, so I don’t like to concentrate on any one of them, to the exclusion of the other idiots who are still walking around in public, instead of being institutionalized and fed huge handfuls of antipsychotics.

Like Rush Limbaugh, for example. If I mention the Pilonidal Cyst That Walks Like A Man in one post, I like to stay away from him for a while. Which is usually a good policy, but becomes a little difficult to follow through on when he opens his slavering gob and spews out statements like this.

Liberals should have their speech controlled and not be allowed to buy guns. I mean if we want to get serious about this, if we want to face this head on, we're gonna have to openly admit liberals should not be allowed to buy guns, nor should they be allowed to use computer keyboards or typewriters, word processors or e-mails, and they should have their speech controlled.

If we did those three or four things, I can't tell you what a sane, calm, civil, fun-loving society we would have. Take guns out of the possession, out of the hands of liberals. Take their typewriters and their keyboards away from 'em. Don't let 'em anywhere near a gun and control their speech, and you would wipe out 90 percent of the crime, 85 to 95 percent of the hate and 100 percent of the lies from society.

This, coming from Rush Limbaugh, who, speaking about President Obama, said to a caller, "He's taking away freedom, incrementally each and every day, making another big grab at it. That's not hypocrisy. That's tyranny.”

But I suppose you have to be generous and remember that his audience is made up of socially-inept mouthbreathers who spell the word “hippockrassy,” So let’s look to vent our spleen elsewhere.

Pennsylvania, for example.

Former Senator Rick Santorum has been out of office for about four years now, and the lack of a public spotlight is starting to wear on him. After all, he’s kind of a pretty boy, and really, really wants to be the center of attention. So he’s putting out feelers to see if maybe he can run for President in 2012 (and if not as a Republican, maybe he can run as the candidate for the Invasive Theocracy Party).

Ricky is an awesome figure in American politics. I love this guy. I mean, I'm not sure what combination of medications he used in order to appear sane, at least long enough to get elected; but since then, he's built up a body of work that basically makes him a leper in Pennsylvania politics. At least, to anybody but a devout Catholic.

Santorum is a man who believes that consensual sexual relations between two adult men is exactly the same as a man having sex with a dog.

(And you know, he never even addresses the question of whether the dog is a top or not. But I digress.)

The controversy surrounding his blatant homophobia was so public, so acrimonious and so lung-searingly rancid that it prompted gay advice columnist Dan Savage to run a contest defining the word "santorum" (small ess, of course, and therefore protected by satire laws). And the final determination?

"That frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex."

This definition is now spread so widely across the internet that Santorum can't escape it. Nevertheless, he plans to try.

But in the course of his journey to an ignominious defeat, he's providing still more fascinating soundbites.



Yup, that's right. In the course of trying to make an argument against abortion, he actually says:

The question is -- and this is what Barack Obama didn't want to answer -- is that human life a person under the Constitution? And Barack Obama says no. Well if that person -- human life is not a person, then -- I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, 'we're going to decide who are people and who are not people.'

Yup. Damn those uppity negroes. Why can't they see that it's the white folks who should make those decisions? We have their best interests in mind, after all.

Yes, I understand that what he's trying to say is that blacks, more than whites, should be opposed to abortion. Which is an equally stupid position. And since I get to choose between two equally stupid positions, I'm going with the one that I can have more fun with.

So I'll tell you what, Right Wing. You stop taking quotes from our guys out of context, and I'll do the same for you.

The Dumbing Down of the Right

Rush Limbaugh, never one to shrink from looking like a complete douche and already angry because he had to cancel his annual trip to the Dominican Republic to avoid their cholera epidemic, vomited up another spittle-flecked rant against all that is good and decent. Or, to be more accurate, showed his hatred of anyone with an IQ higher than 40.

Shortly after Obama’s speech at the memorial for the victims of the Tucson shooting, the Fox “News” show Special Report had a panel of bloviators (Brit Hume, Charles Krauthammer and Chris Wallace) who had the unmitigated gall to suggest that Obama had given a good speech. Limbaugh, practically choking on the bile rising up in his corpulent throat, spewed the following fascinating statement.

”They were slobbering over it for the predictable reasons. It was smart, it was articulate, it was oratorical. It was, it was all the things the educated, ruling class wants their members to be and sound like.”

Now, Krauthammer, who looks a bit like a cartoon child molester, didn't really appreciate that statement. But he actually managed to make sense in his response for once.

"As one of the three slobberers...I find it interesting that only the ruling class wants a president who is smart articulate and oratorical in delivering a funeral oration. It's an odd and rather condescending view of what the rest of America is looking for in their president.”

Unfortunately, there’s a portion of the American people who feel exactly that way. It’s a strain of anti-intellectualism that’s all too common in the right wing.

Joe (the "Plumber") Wurzelbacher, known liar and serial wife beater, got his fifteen minutes of fame based on a complete lack of understanding of government, taxes, or pretty much anything else. Sarah Palin, an articulate but sadly undereducated woman, seems to appeal to the great unwashed because she's "one of them" (despite having all her teeth and a seven figure income).



Ignorant of history, opposed to science, they hate anyone who seems to be "better than us." Which, for the most part, is anybody who can read at better than an eighth-grade level.

You know, I wasn’t particularly impressed by ABC’s recent revamping of “V”, but I used to watch the original show avidly when I was a teen. Still, there was one plot device that I never liked (I thought it was a little weak): one of the tactics employed by the aliens in their quest to enslave humanity was to demonize scientists and educated people as "enemies of the people."

But looking at America today, I’m suddenly seeing it in a whole new light.

I'm THIS many years old...

The other day, I went looking for something I'd written sometime back, and in thumbing through the archives, realized that today was the fifth anniversary of this blog.

I was, at the time, a frequent commenter on a blog called Hoffmania (Hoffman, a few years back, became disgusted with the country during the Bush years, and converted his blog to an internet radio station and a news aggregator, or in this case, Bloggregator).

There, I was "Mr. Bill" (originally "Sgt Bill," but then I retired); prior to that, under my current moniker, I was a contributor on a community-driven website called Plastic.com, which has recently declared its intention to close its doors too.

In fact, I first started using Nameless Cynic on a couple of old, long-gone BBS' (because I'm occasionally reminded how old I am). So, as it turns out, I am become Nameless Shiva, destroyer of websites. I stride through the internets, leaving only destruction in my wake.

Anyway, in my first post here, I bitched about the right wing making false equivalences, which was a thing I used to do years ago, when I was still young and angry.

And while one of the two specific examples I chose, Michelle Malkin, is, if anything, an even bigger bile-spewing harpy, it turns out that the other object of my derision is still limping along on his private Road to Perdition.

His latest posts include a story of a woman masturbating on a train, which he pulled from the German web-equivalent of the New York Post. He declares that this behavior is "THE DIRECT RESULT OF THE GODLESSNESS POSTMODERNISM (sic)" (yes, he now types everything in all caps), and it's apparently the end of civilization as we know it.

Of course, while she is a Harbinger of Doom, the Tucson gunman Loughner, two posts later, is just a random loon. No irony there.

Recycled talking points, all caps, jacked-up code in the header; it's just not pretty. I'd pick on him, but, you know, fish. Barrels. Bad.

So anyway, happy anniversary, y'all.

Just keep saying it. "Words have consequences"

Good freaking god, right wing! What the hell is the matter with you? Can't a guy take a break? I mean, don't you know that Fallout: New Vegas is out there? And it's not going to play itself! Can't you just chill the hell out for a while?'

But no. It's Glenn Beck, it's Sarah Palin, it's all the rest of you ignorant fucks. You go spewing your violent rhetoric when you don't think it means anything, and then try your damnedest to back away from it when your chickens come home to roost, don't you? Seems to me like the only person who would, you know, "retreat," instead of "reload"... well, hell, if you can't live up to the stupid philosophy you've been spouting for the last three or four years, then I guess you're kind of a pussy, aren't you?

I mean, come on!!

It's sad when you've got to let your congressbitches Durbin and Alexander make excuses for you because you're too scared to face the demon you raised.

And you know, it's even sadder when people have been pointing out that the crazies are coming out of the woodwork on this very issue, over this specific graphic, for almost a year, and you still can't figure out that maybe you're part of the problem.

OK, let's be real. Every time you meet up with some rightard screaming about how "liberals just want to blame this on Palin," there's a couple of things to remember.

If they say "well, lefties talk mean about Republicans, too," remind them that there's a big difference between "talk" and "shoot." (The saddest part, of course, is the right wing trying to justify Sarah Palin's rhetoric by digging deep into the farthest depths of the internet to find leftists making threats, too.)

On July 27, 2008, Jim Adkisson walked into a Unitarian church, killed two people and wounded two others, because he "wanted to kill... every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book,” but knew he couldn't get to them.

On April 4, 2009, Richard Poplawski shot and killed three police officers, because he was scared of "the Obama gun ban that's on the way." He was an avid watcher of Glenn Beck.

There are literally dozens of examples of increasing, escalating rightwing violence over that last three years. It's time for these frothing media types to get a clue, that maybe their spittle-flecked rants are only making things worse.

As usual, Keith Olbermann said it best. And if you haven't seen this yet, you need to.


And, you know what? If you just have to get your violence on, you could try Fallout, where you get to kill people virtually for a while, instead of out here in meatspace. Give it a shot (so to speak). Nobody gets hurt, except for a couple of pixels. Try it.

Dear Right-Wingers: You Are All Muslims Now

You know, once again, the Rude Pundit hits it on the head. And then steals its wallet while it's unconscious.

Oh, dear, sweet conservative Americans, how you must have shit yourself on Saturday when you heard that someone had shot up an event with a Democratic member of Congress in, of all goddamned places, Arizona. And, worse, a Representative who had voted in favor of health care reform, which you have demonized as nothing short of a resurrection of the Nazi Party. It must have been awful for so many conservatives, thinking, praying, "Please, please, please, don’t let it be some Tea Party dick who says he did it because Glenn Beck told him to. Don’t let it be someone who wants to fuck Sarah Palin and thinks that if he starts taking out her congressional crosshaired targets, he’ll get into her pants."

How you must have heaved in relief when you saw that it would be quite easy to portray Jared Lee Loughner as a raving psychopath, an effort that’s helped a great deal by the apparent truth, which is that Jared Lee Loughner is a raving psychopath. Yeah, he's a psychopath whose mad rantings are heavily peppered with an insouciant flavor of Beck or Ron Paul or loony conspiracy theory nutsiness, but a psychopath just the same.

Now, ah, yes, now, lovely right-wingers, you could defend yourself. You could work yourselves into a huff about how unjustly you were accused of driving this obviously disturbed individual into an act of calculated, cold-blooded violence. But that's because you're sitting there in your shit-filled underpants, thinking, "I don't believe in violence. I don't approve this. I hope the government doesn't try to crack down on us."

So, welcome, assholes, because you are Muslim now.

How does it feel to stand in Muslim shoes today? Because, right now, yes, you are being treated like suspects. You are being treated like you are guilty of the crimes that are committed by the deranged in your number. Sure, you may think, you can spout all the blood-filled, gun-toting, war-flogging rhetoric you want against citizens of your own country. But those are just words, you know? You can’t, you know, be held accountable for the actions of a few. And, gosh, it’s just wrong to lump you all together, to stereotype you all as criminals in waiting. Like, you know, you have done with Muslims since September 11, 2001.

Here's the deal, though. The vast, vast, vast majority of Muslims decry not only acts of violence, but the rhetoric of it, too. The vast, vast, vast majority of right-wingers not only stay silent as conservatives shoot at targets with their opponents' names or initials on them, talk about revolution and violence, and accuse Democrats of getting ready to put Americans in forced health care camps. No, you embrace your extremist assholes and anoint them your idiot queen.

How will you live with yourselves in the future? Look, heated, vicious rhetoric is part of the political game. But, frankly, there’s a bit of difference between saying that you’re going to "target" an opponent and saying that there might have to be "Second Amendment solutions" to the nation’s problems. Let's not do the bullshit dance of false equivalence. While there was a period of time when the left was violent (which was met by officially-sanctioned violence by the government), in the last couple of decades, it hasn't been the left shooting shit up. It wasn't the left who let the assault weapons ban lapse. It wasn't the left that made access to guns as easy as a McDonald's drive-thru. It wasn't the left that cried "Fascism" to background checks for someone who wants to own a fucking machine gun. It wasn't the left that supported preemptive war and violence against individuals as solutions to our nation's problems. Time to welcome your chickens home, conservatives. Open your filthy arms.

So, yeah, yeah, cowering motherfuckers, Jared Lee Loughner was monkeyfuck insane. He wandered in the fringes of conspiracy theories and wallowed in the stinking pit of his own mad brain fluids. You can comfort yourselves and have a shaky drink to that.

But you know what, you ridiculous worms? At the end of the day, the Rude Pundit supports your right to say your stupid shit. And it's ironic that Giffords read the First Amendment during the House's big show last week of reading the Constitution. Free speech ain't a free pass. It never, ever comes without responsibility. You wanna spout crazy, violent shit? You wanna talk about end times and revolution, Glenn Beck? Then man up and know that some people will take you seriously, even if you are just a joke.

The Right's Doublethink

One unexpected side effect of the Internet was, not the unprecedented access to information available to the public, but the widespread propagation of openly ignorant, easily debunked bullshit. The easy availability of knowledge has been balanced by easy availability of conspiracy theories, lies, and unintentional errors. Add to that the unprecedented ability to cherry-pick preferred oversimplified answers to complex situations, and one thing becomes obvious.

Despite the potential inherent in what evolved from the ARPANET, it has become apparent to those of us who think about stuff that we've actually entered the Misinformation Age.

For example, today’s front page story on that flaming stack of ignorance and mendacity calling itself Conservapedia is a fascinating story called “Atheism and obesity,” where they determine that, apparently, if you don’t believe in God, He makes you fat (as you could probably tell from the title, but I thought I’d spell it out for you).

The crux of this theory (so to speak) is a Gallup poll, which reached the conclusion (repeated in the first line of the Conservapedia story):

Very religious Americans are more likely to practice healthy behaviors than those who are moderately religious or nonreligious.

Now, I could get all statistical and point out that a poll measures how people answer questions, not how they behave. And religious people are more prone to guilt, so wouldn’t they be more likely to lie when answering questions like “Do you do things you aren’t supposed to?”

But that would be the easy answer. (Plus, some actual atheists, as opposed to one nameless doubting agnostic, are cheerfully ripping this one apart.)

Instead, let me point out that, two weeks after the Gallup poll was released, we hear from New York that 1300 people are now in danger of contracting Hepatitis A, because they all took drinks from the same communion chalice. And remember, very religious Americans practice healthy behaviors. Like sucking down the backwash of other diseased Catholics.

Should I point out that they’re all at risk because they came in contact with the blood of Christ? Has He been shooting up with dirty needles again? Or should I just move on, since it's probably endangering your immortal soul to be taking religious advice from people with the balls to rewrite the "inalterable Word of God"?

Maybe the easiest answer is to show the following two maps? First, this.



See that? That shows how religious Christians claim to be, in various parts of the country. The greener, the Godlier, right? OK, then. Now check this out.



Now, that one shows the distribution of weight, per capita, in these United States. The more red, the more rotund.

See how the dark green and the dark red tend to match up? It’s kind of like Christmas, isn’t it? I guess you can’t spell faith without F - A - T.

Not a new thought to me, by the way. We already knew this; it's one of those pesky "fact" things that the GOP is so desperate to rewrite.

Wikileaks - Nothing new here

Even before I took my little Christmas vacation from blogging about politics, I avoided saying anything about Wikileaks. I thought it might be prudent to wait and see if any of the revelations might actually be as damaging as some people (even, for example, Bill Clinton) were claiming.

But since even the US government has admitted that nobody is going to die because of any of the information Wikileaks has released, I think it's reasonably safe to point out one fact that the international media has, for the most part, been glossing over.

There was a time when this was exactly what reporters did. From the Pentagon Papers to Watergate, reporters used to live for this kind of thing. (On the other hand, perhaps our boys and girls in the media are just jealous that they've been taking dictation from whichever politician wanted to spread their message, and not bothering even with basic fact checking on any of these overblown claims, for fear of losing their all-important "access" to the Halls of Power.

Most of what Wikileaks has thrown out into the public view has been the type of "secrets" that everybody already knew. Diplomats make fun of each other and insult heads of state? No shit. And to be honest, the fact that the Secretary of State ordered diplomats to gather information on other countries? What's new there? That's pretty much how it's been done since Ramses II made peace with the Hittites.

And most of us already knew the fact that the Obama administration has been preventing attempts to investigate the Bush administration for war crimes and the torture of prisoners.

So what else did Julian Assange tell us? The Pope didn't let the Vatican cooperate in investigations into rapist priests? Wow, there's a revelation - how many different ways can you say "no shit"?

Afghanistan is already a quagmire? That wasn't anything we haven't known for centuries - wasn't it Alexander the Great that first broke that piece of news?

China hacked Google? Yeah, knew that.

So, why is it that right-wing idiots keep claiming that Assange should be killed?



Because the US government has been embarrassed?

After documentary evidence of what people already knew has come to light, maybe some people deserve to be embarrassed.