Please note: Despite evidence to the contrary, author does not actually suffer from Tourette's.
Updated on no discernible schedule (we try for at least once a week, but don't hold me to that)
So, according to Politico, Michele "Crazy-Eyes" Bachmann has applied for and been granted citizenship in Switzerland.
Marcus Bachmann, the congresswoman’s husband since 1978, reportedly was eligible for Swiss citizenship due to his parents’ nationality — but only registered it with the Swiss government Feb. 15. Once the process was finalized on March 19, Michele automatically became a citizen as well, according to Honegger.
Bachmann’s three youngest children are also now Swiss citizens, and her two older children are eligible to apply for a fast-track citizenship process, according to an email from the consulate provided and translated by Honegger.
Now, Mika (as I'm going to call her from now on) will undoubtedly be releasing a statement shortly about how she can't stand to see America destroyed by Barack Obama. But let's consider a few facts.
1. Michele Bachmann claims to hate "big government." The Swiss government, which combines a Parliament with some of the only "direct democracy" in the world, can be considered to encompass every citizen of the entire country. You don't get bigger than that.
2. Incidentally, remember Mika's complaint about Obama establishing "re-education camps"?
I believe that there is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service. And the real concerns is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums.
Every citizen of Switzerland must serve in the military, or a similar "mandatory service." Their fitness for service is reviewed, and of the one-third judged unfit to be sent to a military reeducation camp, a majority must do some other form of politically-correct service (which takes 50% more time to complete the mandatory duty) in fields such as healthcare, relief work, public welfare, agriculture: generally, you are helping your fellow Swiss, in a fully socialist way.
3. Although she will support the Swiss attitude toward illegal immigrants, her stand on making English the official language in America isn't going to pass muster: Switzerland has four official languages (German, French, Italian and Romansch), and about 10% of the population speaks another tongue (with Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, Portuguese and Spanish each having at least 8,000 more people speaking them than English does).
4. She doesn't support clean energy - aside from her stand on drilling for oil in every available inch of ground, she voted against enforcing limits for carbon dioxide emissions, and against tax credits for renewable energy sources. Switzerland, meanwhile, gets a majority of its energy from renewable sources, with less than 40% of their energy coming from nuclear power plants (which they're moving toward phasing out over the next few decades): the Swiss have been declared the greenest country in the world.
5. Although Mika has notably worked against and attempted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Switzerland has universal healthcare. Period.
6. Most importantly, Mika once called for an investigation into the patriotism of every other congress member. None of whom, except for her, claim allegiance to another country.
That is irony.
_____________________
Update (5/12/12): And then, on Thursday, she rushed out a statement saying "Oops! It was all a misunderstanding!" You know, unlike her previous statements that showed she knew exactly what she was doing.
"Congresswoman Bachmann's husband is of Swiss descent, so she has been eligible for dual-citizenship since they got married in 1978. However, recently some of their children wanted to exercise their eligibility for dual-citizenship so they went through the process as a family," said Bachmann spokesperson Becky Rogness.
The Minnesota congresswoman was interviewed by Swiss national public television in D.C. on Tuesday while with a group of Swiss parliamentarians.
"My husband is a 100 percent Swiss, and his parents were raised in Switzerland, they were married there, they came to the United States, they bought a farm in Wisconsin and raised their three sons there," said Bachmann.
Asked if she would run for office in Switzerland — as she is now eligible to do — Bachmann joked that the competition "would be very stiff because they are very good," referring to the parliamentarians behind her.
I imagine the Swiss government was relieved. On the other hand, hey! Who knew she read my stuff? Hi, Mika!
Does anybody remember why Hitler's march into Russia failed? It was for exactly the same reason that Napoleon's similar march failed, right?
I'm not comparing Romney to Hitler, except in that they both seem unable to learn from history. This is Romney's latest campaign ad.
I'm not even going to attack the obvious lies, distortions and half-truths that it's riddled with. Instead, here's a failed campaign strategy from just 4 short years ago.
Is it just me?
Sometimes, the rules that people want to force everybody else to live by are just complete bullshit.
Anybody who's been reading my stuff for a while would assume that I'd be about to embark on a rant about the current mangy pack of theocrats, or the anti-abortion crew, or some other group of modern-day fascists. And you'd be wrong.
Somewhere between taxes and the random family crisis, I haven't had a whole lot of blogging in my life for the past few weeks. As a hint about one of them, I'm going to have to give you some background.
I have been known to occasionally babble on (endlessly) about my wife, because she's one of the only truly admirable people I have ever met (and I've met a lot of people - not all by choice, but that's neither here nor there). But the fact that this is true is practically a miracle.
My father-in-law was also a good person, and probably the source of the Trophy Wife's awesomeness. The record isn't clear about when he realized that he'd found himself trapped in a loveless marriage with a crazy woman, but he stayed in it for the sake of the children, until my wife was in her late teens (16 to 18, if it matters - I don't remember, and I'm not going to ask her).
My mother-in-law, Ann, on the other hand, has never been a good person, and when her husband divorced her, she went completely off the deep end (assuming she wasn't there already).
The Trophy Wife doesn't remember when her mother began threatening suicide, but as they moved from one cheap rental place to another (usually just ahead of the eviction notice), it was often a daily occurrence. And it wasn't subtle, or any kind of hidden threat, either: "If you ever leave me, I'll kill myself."
I won't dwell on the drug-dealer who lived with them for a while, or any of the other multi-layered slices of idiocy that this woman laid on her daughter. I will point out that when I married her, living on a military base was a bonus, because Ann couldn't stand to be inside a fence that was guarded by guys with guns.
Going to Germany for seven years was a great idea for any number of reasons - one of which was the number of phone calls went down after the first few phone bills full of transatlantic calls. (Yes, this is a woman who would call four and five times a day. Not because she had a reason, or anything to say - she just couldn't let go.)
My mother-in-law was (and sometimes is) a self-absorbed, manipulative bitch; her propensity for rewriting her past has blossomed into full-on delusion these days. As her mental capacity has diminished, she has started to believe the lies she has told and the random fantasies she has occasionally imagined for herself.
Ann has hinted in the past that she wants to move to Albuquerque. And aside from the fact that we don't have room for her, there's actually one simple truth that prevents her from coming here - the town is full of Catholics and Mexicans. She can't stand either one (or blacks, or Muslims, or pretty much anybody on the planet).
My wife can hardly stand to talk to her mother - she tenses up so badly that her back starts to spasm, and her hands are often shaking when she hangs up the phone. But she still manages to talk cheerfully to what little remains of this evil woman. She recounts her week, giving all the little details and mildly funny stories. And then hanging up and cursing, or staring off into space. Or pouring herself a brandy.
I don't know how the years spent with that poisonous, hateful woman didn't break my wife, but she managed to become the most important person in my life. She is invariably kind, gentle and loving, even when she can barely move for the pain. When I have been at my best, I still barely rise to the level of her worst.
Of all the idiocy found in the Ten Commandments, I have come to have no use for one of them. "Honor thy Father and Mother," my ass. Respect is earned.
I'm just not in the mood for politics. Watching the GOP Clown Show on April Fool's Day just seems redundant. Instead, let's talk fast food.
Every brand of fat-enriched, unhealthy food-like products sold over a counter and through a window wants to stand out from the crowd, so they keep trying "innovations" that aren't particularly innovative.
And I'll try anything once.
Burger King rolled out its "new" model french fries just in time for St Patrick's Day this year. Personally, I wasn't impressed: they were bland, not particularly crisp, and actually a step down from what they used to sell.
Taco Bell, on the other hand, decided to go with an interesting idea: they paired with Doritos to make taco shells, and cross-pollinated the products to create the Taco Bell Doritos® Locos Taco. And you know what they ended up with? Is the answer "Awesomeness!"?
Not really, no.
The taco already contains most of the flavors in the Nacho Cheese Dorito - the spice is in the meat, not the cheese, but the components are all there. So really, all you're adding is the orange fingerprint dust coating the outside of the shell.
Oh, and a hefty dose of sodium. Don't forget that.
Break a piece of the shell off, it tastes like a Dorito. But that flavor gets overpowered by the taco. So essentially, instead of just getting random chunks of taco filling dropping on the paper (or your shirt, or your pants), you get all that, plus a light coating of artificial cheese and salt on your hands.
You know what this product is meant for? Brand loyalists. Which means I'm not the target audience.
For one thing, I don't go to Taco Bell often - I live in New Mexico. I have actual Mexican food choices, for similar prices; I also have much better choices, for only slightly more.
(We also have an interesting hybrid locally, called New Mexican food - it's like Tex-Mex, without the emphasis on artificial cheese, cheap cuts of meat, and over-processed greyish-brown bean-like paste. And the chilies: New Mexico's biggest agricultural product is featured, but the purpose is to enhance flavor, not just burn off the top layer of skin on your tongue; our big question is "red or green?" As in the color of the chili sauce, not which football team you prefer.)
And for similar reasons, I'm not a huge Doritos proponent. I kind of like the artificial-cheese end of the snack food spectrum, but have no specific brand or variety that I'll choose first. What's available, what's cheap, and what tastes best all factor in, to varying degrees depending on the day.
In general, I have no brand loyalty. Which must make me a perplexing demographic, from a marketing standpoint.
And really, the only real component the Dorito shell adds to a taco is mental: if "Doritos are awesome!" is tattooed somewhere in your forebrain, then the idea of eating this taco has a certain mental thrill for you that I don't experience.
But that's why the ads have the taco coming out of a Doritos bag. That's why the (perfectly reasonable, by the way) cardboard sleeve the taco comes in has the Doritos® logo emblazoned on it. You're the target audience. I'm not.
I make no claims to psychic powers (or, to be honest, to the existence of psychic powers), but I'm willing to make some predictions. The GOP candidates are going to keep kicking each other in the crotch up until the convention. Ron Paul might or might not stay in, but the three front runners? They're all in it for the long haul.
Mitt Romney will be the eventual candidate, but first he has to overcome two handicaps: the fact that the Religious Right Wing distrusts Mormons, and more importantly, that he comes across as a privileged huckster, a rich kid trying to sell used cars. He's used to being surrounded by two types of people: shameless sycophants willing to laugh at anything he says, and other billionaires. He has no idea how to connect with ordinary people, because he only sees them at a distance: he's Dan Ackroyd in the beginning of Trading Places.
Santorum swept the South, but doesn't realize that he has less than no chance of attracting a majority of Americans. He's turned off about 80-90% of women by indicating that he doesn't care if they're going to die in childbirth, they're taking that kid to term. And then, just because he opens his mouth and random stuff falls out, he decided to lose another 16 percent of the electorate by telling Puerto Ricans that they needed to speak English.
OK, Frothy, is it a good idea to make fun of somebody's cultural heritage? Here's a hint - I live in New Mexico - want to guess what state you just lost entirely? Here's another - do you speak Latin? Think about it.
And Gingrich? He's got no more chance of getting elected than a radioactive skunk, but he's staying in, because he feels like he deserves to be elected king president.
I've got to admit it: I may have gotten frustrated in 2008 watching Hillary Clinton snipe at Obama. But I've got to say, it's much more entertaining watching the GOP do it to each other from the other side of the fence.
That's why the GOP is panicking and trying to prevent people from voting. Tea parties across the country are pushing for measures like "voter ID laws" despite the fact that there is exactly zero voter fraud. Is it a good idea to require Americans to show ID in order to vote?
More than 74,000 people who skipped voting in past elections might have been excluded from data used to estimate how many voters lack state-issued identification... Earlier this week, the Election Commission said nearly 217,000 registered voters in the state lack a state driver’s license or photo ID. That already was nearly 40,000 more than the election agency had previously estimated.
Studies show that these measures mostly affect young, minority and low-income voters, as well as voters with handicaps: in other words, strongly Democratic groups and people who think Obamacare is a good idea. Funny how that works, isn’t it?
The Justice Department already had to stop Texas from taking the vote away from more than 300,000 Texans, because they'd be likely to be voting for Obama.
And there is one very specific reason they want to do this. One conservative lawmaker even admitted it - they couldn't let out-of-state college kids vote where they were going to school, because they'd be "voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do — they don’t have life experience, and they just vote their feelings."
Legal American citizens have already been prevented from voting, and it’s only going to get worse. Because the GOP knows that the only way that there isn't going to be a black man in the White House in 2013 is if they steal the election.
There is a distinct possibility that I am spending entirely too much of any given day thinking about Rush Limbaugh. (As in "I need to scrub my brain with steel wool, because the words 'Limbaugh' and 'sex' have appeared in the same sentence.") But sadly for someone with an active imagination, he is in the news of late. And sex is involved.
So, question time. Rush has been married for roughly twenty of the sixty-one years he has infested this earth. He is known to have acquired Viagra (and a few other substances) through a number of sources. A few of them were even legal.
So, it's probably safe to assume that he had sex with one or more of his wives. (I started to have this mental image of him being lowered onto her with a crane, but then my gag reflex kicked in and I spent the rest of the night gripping the porcelain throne and dry-heaving...)
He doesn't have any kids. So I'm guessing that either birth control was involved, or those D-cup man-boobs have very little to do with him being morbidly obese.
Now, you take a man who hasn't seen his winkie without a full-length mirror in decades, a man with a documented willingness to lie about any subject in the world, a known drug addict with a fondness for cigars that smell like petrified turds: you take that man, and then you note that he is currently married to a reasonably hot woman half his age, and you know one thing as a universal truth. That man is rich.
You know for a fact that she didn't marry him for his looks, or for his charming personality. He wouldn't have a chance in hell of landing this woman if he didn't have in excess of seven figures in the bank.
So, we have a woman who is willing to occasionally allow this bloated half-human slime to bounce his sweaty nethers against hers for a few seconds, before a thin dribble of lifeless sperm oozes out and he rolls over, exhausted, and falls into a bourbon-induced coma.
(And the next day, while he's railing against whatever liberal plot he claims is destroying America this time, she dashes off for a morning of passion with Reynaldo, the Dominican pool boy.)
So, in essence, the former Kathryn Rogers is having sex for money. Which would apparently mean that, by Limbaugh's definition, she's a prostitute.
I'm just saying...
But that is neither here nor there. More importantly, before anybody loses control of their gag reflex, let's turn away from this sordid scene of the human Hindenburg and his harlot, and consider one fact.
What does it say about America that Rush Limbaugh has been sending up racist dogwhistles for over twenty years, but it's his sexism that finally causes him to start hemorrhaging advertisers at an alarming rate? Why is it sex and not race that brings him down?
This fat bastard has been sexist for years: I mean, admittedly, there are more white women than black people in America, but bigotry is bigotry, isn't it? From the beginning of his program, before he was even syndicated, he was using the term "feminazi" to refer to... well, to any woman who said anything that wasn't strict Judeo-Christian submission to a man. And it isn't like he's ever pulled back from that position.
I have long told you, for example, Undeniable Truth of Life No. 24, written back in 1987: Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.
See, I recently made fun of an idiot who titled a blog post "In Defense of Pat Buchanan and the First Amendment," where I finally had to explain to him, in tiny little words, why Pat Buchanan qualified as racist. And Limbaugh uses exactly the same tactics as Buchanan: he dog-whistles his way through life.
It all boils down to the "Southern Strategy" of the GOP, as explained by Lee Atwater, advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and later Chairman of the Republican National Committee.
You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'
And there you have one of the core strategies of Rush Hudson Limbaugh III.
There are dozens of articles out there listing the various racist things he's said, going back to his earliest days in the radio. His empty-eyed zombie supporters will then find one that isn't properly sourced, and claim that the whole list is therefore invalidated. So the best way to play this little game is to find the ones that still exist in recorded form.
Unfortunately for Rush, this is not a difficult thing to do. Watchdog groups like Media Matters have literally hours of the stuff.
His favorite tactic (and that of much of the White Right Wing) is to paint Obama as a usurper, an outsider. He's different from "you and me," and so he's scary! He's the "Halfrican-American," the "angry black guy" from Kenya who's taking over the country: Limbaugh draws on the stereotype that all black men are gang members and thugs, and therefore, that Obama is dangerous.
Rush then reinforces this with continual references to Kenya, to Obama being "more African in his roots than he is American" and "behaving like an African colonial despot." Why specifically an African colonial despot? Well, see, Africa is full of black people! And it's in chaos! Which is what Obama is going to do to us!
And Limbaugh is fairly open about it. Not like Newt Gingrich, who calls Obama "the food stamp president" (see, all black people are on food stamps), but then gets to talk about "more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history" (a lie, by the way - that record is still held by George W. Bush). Rush doesn't hide behind code words like "food stamps" and "entitlement society" - he comes right out and tells you that Obama is going to confiscate your house.
This guy's -- this guy obviously has got a new role model, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. The next thing to look out for is for Obama to take the farms. Well, that's what Zimbabwe, that's what Mugabe did, he took the white people's farms.
That little clip actually covers many of Limbaugh's little tricks, all in two minutes and forty-four seconds of your life that you'll never get back. It's got Obama looking up to African dictators, it's got America spiraling into chaos, Obama taking your house - hell, early on, he even get's the subconscious "violence" reference in, saying "Bernanke and Obama are out of bullets, that they've got nothing left in the quiver." See? The angry black guy is dangerous! He has guns! (And bows and arrows, because Africans use arrows, right?)
Well, with his sponsors running away from Rush Limbaugh so fast that he has to play dead air and PSA's, maybe we're finally hearing the death rattle of the Rush Limbaugh show. But let's not remember him just as some bile-spewing, misgynist asshole: there were so many other reasons to hate him.
Winston Churchill is occasionally said to have made the statement "Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains." This is, of course, a lie. As Paul Addison of Edinburgh University put it:
Surely Churchill can't have used the words attributed to him. He'd been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35! And would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie (Clementine, the Baroness Spencer-Churchill, his wife), who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?
And I like to think that I'm proof of the exact inverse of that theory, regardless of which idiot said it.
As a young man, I entered the military as a relatively moderate conservative. I listened to Rush Limbaugh, I had few interests in helping anyone but myself, I was known to make sexist and (yes, I'm afraid) racist jokes once in a while.
But then I met people. I learned things. I discovered that a "society" made up of devoted followers of Ayn Rand would simply fall into chaos: with every member dedicated to their own selfish pursuits, the fabric of that society would eventually fall to shreds. Why would a Randian want to join the police, or the enlisted ranks of the military, where nobody gets rich? A philosophy of selfish materialism can only work if it is allowed to grow, like a wart or a tumor, out of an otherwise healthy society.
Look up the history of the "robber barons" in industrial America to see how well that worked out.
So, I slowly overcame my shameful past - and I have to admit, much of the cause of this has to do with trying to live up to the example of the Trophy Wife, one of the few truly good people I have ever met.
In a way, I suppose that means that I'm worse than the "ordinary" liberal (if such a thing exists) - I'm a Born-Again Liberal. I came from the darkness of selfish ego, into the white light of humanity.
But, yes, I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh. I thought he was funny. I haven't thought so in years.
And now, he's going on his national soapbox, and calling a private citizen a slut. Because he's an bloated, lying bag of ass. He is the herpes sore on the face of society.
What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her?
It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We're the pimps... the johns, that's right. We would be the johns... no! We're not the johns. Well... yeah, that's right. Pimp's not the right word.
OK, so, she's not a slut. She's round-heeled. I take it back.
Her name, you oozing pile of rotting feces, is "Sandra." And those ellipses are there, not because I cut anything out, but because the drugs are finally taking their toll and his ability to spew bile and lies occasionally goes off-track. Hopefully, the memory lapses will get worse, and he'll shut up altogether.
(Actually, if there was any justice in the universe, he would get Parkinson's and be completely unable to communicate. That isn't happening, and therefore, there is no god. Q.E.motherfuckingD.)
See, that's what Rush said. It is, of course, unrelated to reality, but it's what right-wingers want to hear. Because the last thing they want is for people to know what Ms Fluke actually said.
A friend of mine, for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome, and she has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by Georgetown's insurance because it's not intended to prevent pregnancy.
Unfortunately, under many religious institutions and insurance plans, it wouldn't be. There would be no exception for other medical needs. And under Sen. Blunt's amendment, Sen. Rubio's bill or Rep. Fortenberry's bill there's no requirement that such an exception be made for these medical needs...
In 65% of the cases at our school, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed prescription and whether they were lying about their symptoms.
For my friend and 20% of the women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription. Despite verifications of her illness from her doctor, her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted birth control to prevent pregnancy. She's gay. So clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy for her.
After months paying over $100 out-of-pocket, she just couldn’t afford her medication anymore, and she had to stop taking it.
I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that in the middle of the night in her final exam period she'd been in the emergency room. She'd been there all night in just terrible, excruciating pain. She wrote to me, "It was so painful I'd woke up thinking I’ve been shot."
Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary as a result.
On the morning I was originally scheduled to give this testimony, she was sitting in a doctor's office, trying to cope with the consequences of this medical catastrophe.
(Those ellipses are because I did cut some stuff out. Go read the whole thing. And yes, Mr Santorum. This woman had to be medically sterilized because you are opposing birth control. It would be ironic if it weren't so goddamned sad.)
That's Rush Limbaugh for you. More than happy to lie on any subject, at any time.
Now, Rep. Jackie Speier is calling for a boycott of his sponsors. And I think that's a pretty damned good idea: the right wing will whine that he's having his free speech suppressed, but he's welcome to say whatever he wants to; he just also gets to take responsibility for his lies.
Now, because Rush is a turd, Quicken Loans, Sleep Train, LegalZoom.com and Sleep Number have all pulled ads over this. (If you want to say thanks, they all have contact us or feedback somewhere on those links I gave - but you should know you'll probably end up on a mailing list.) However, there are others.
Well, it's been a week or two, and the American public, with their beagle-puppy attention span, can no longer remember the little tiff between Planned Parenthood and the Susan G. Komen Foundation.
(For those of you slipping into a CNN-induced haze, Karen Handel resigned as Senior Vice President for Public Policy of the Susan G Komen Foundation; she was widely accepted as being responsible for Komen deciding to defund Planned Parenthood.)
Being a Republican, Handel is, of course, wandering around trying to play the victim card, because martyrdom is the default strategy of the Right. Fortunately, the previously-mentioned attention span problem has pushed her deep into the sidelines where she belongs.
We can all agree that this is a challenging and deeply unsettling situation for all involved in the fight against breast cancer. However, Komen’s decision to change its granting strategy and exit the controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood and its grants was fully vetted by every appropriate level within the organization. At the November Board meeting, the Board received a detailed review of the new model and related criteria. As you will recall, the Board specifically discussed various issues, including the need to protect our mission by ensuring we were not distracted or negatively affected by any other organization’s real or perceived challenges. No objections were made to moving forward.
I am deeply disappointed by the gross mischaracterizations of the strategy, its rationale, and my involvement in it. I openly acknowledge my role in the matter and continue to believe our decision was the best one for Komen’s future and the women we serve. However, the decision to update our granting model was made before I joined Komen, and the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization. Neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology.
Just so you know, there are a bunch of huge lies in those two little paragraphs. Let's consider two of them.
"the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization"
Really? Has it, now?
Komen founder Nancy Brinker published Promise Me in 2010, a memoir about starting the Susan G. Komen Foundation because of a deathbed promise to her eponymous sister.
In the book, she discusses how the Curves workout chain withdrew their support to Komen in 2004 due to Komen's grants to Planned Parenthood centers. Brinker is clear about why they refused to buckle to Curves' pressure:
"The grants in question supplied breast health counseling, screening, and treatment to rural women, poor women, Native American women, many women of color who were underserved--if served at all--in areas where Planned Parenthood facilities were often the only infrastructure available. Though it meant losing corporate money from Curves, we were not about to turn our backs on these women."
And despite Handel trying to claim that it was Foundation policy and she was just trying to enforce it, the people she worked with don't agree: it was entirely her doing, she came up with the excuse needed to defund, and she was the primary motivator pushing it through.
Now, despite her attempts to claim that she resigned in the face of a hostile "liberal media" (and, holy crap, do I wish that there was such a thing as a "liberal media"), considering the big picture, I'm personally willing to say that she didn't really resign, so much as she was forced out; at the very least, she put in her resignation before she would have been fired.
Why do I suggest this? (And let's be honest - I'm not "suggesting" it, I'm coming right out and saying it.) Because she wasn't very good at her job. She, in fact, failed badly, just a few months after being hired.
Remember, the job she was hired for was Senior Vice President for Public Policy.
Put aside your politics. Your personal feelings on "freedom of choice" vs. "abortion" don't make a bit of difference to the following argument. If anything, they get in the way. Suppress them for just a minute.
The evidence shows that she was the person pushing the policy to immediately stop funding Planned Parenthood. And that, by itself, is a blatantly stupid policy: when dealing with a group who hires as many lawyers as Planned Parenthood does, one truth should hold sway over every other consideration: if you publicly promise to give them money, you damned well follow through on that promise!
Lawyers love stuff like that. They can't even stand straight from the law-boner it gives them.
So, bad policy. From the Senior Vice President for Public Policy.
Second, and more important, "Senior Vice President for Public Policy" is an extremely fancy, extremely well-paid PR position. She's managing the public face of this charitable empire: the policies she sets up and advocates define how people see the Susan G. Komen Foundation. And when they end up looking like political hacks instead of public health advocates, somebody isn't doing their job.
Like, maybe, somebody in charge of Public Policy.
So, in the end, Ms Handel will probably get a book deal out of it, and a paying gig at Fox "News" whenever the subject of abortion comes up.
More importantly, what we have to do is keep an eye on the Susan G. Komen Foundation during the next round of grants. Because if they try to quietly stop giving grants to Planned Parenthood in the shadow of all this, that will tell us something about them, won't it?
You might think that a person's sex life should be their own business. On the other hand, if you're like me, you might also think that, since Rick Santorum believes that he has the right to shove the government straight up every woman's vagina, then his own "love" life would be open season. So, just for fun, let's look at some of those pesky things they call "facts."
Fact 1: Rick Santorum married the former Karen Garver in 1990, and they have seven children (eight, if you count pickled Baby Gabriel).
Fact 2: Ricky has publically stated that he is completely opposed to all forms of contraception, and that sex should only be for procreation.
(Sadly, the original publishers, CaffeinatedThoughts.com, an evangelical Christian website, got a little cranky that people were taking chunks of their interview and showing what Santorum actually said, usually in context. So they make the usual "copyright infringement" argument every time somebody extracts a bit of it. Ironically, since they hosted it on Youtube, they can't hide it away without losing access themselves. Drag forward to 17:55 for this bit.)
One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea ... Many in the Christian faith have said, "Well, that's okay ... contraception's okay."
It's not okay because it's a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They're supposed to be within marriage, for purposes that are, yes, conjugal ... but also procreative. That's the perfect way that a sexual union should happen. We take any part of that out, we diminish the act. And if you can take one part out that's not for purposes of procreation, that's not one of the reasons, then you diminish this very special bond between men and women, so why can't you take other parts of that out?
And all of a sudden, it becomes deconstructed to the point where it's simply pleasure. And that's certainly a part of it—and it's an important part of it, don't get me wrong—but there's a lot of things we do for pleasure, and this is special, and it needs to be seen as special.
As Ms Santorum is barely out of her 40s, there is no reason to assume that she's gone through menopause, although it's always possible. Adding these facts together, we have to assume that the Santorums did not mate like mad minxes during the nearly six years of her life that Karen has spent pregnant, or for the brief period of any hypothetical menopause which she might or might not have experienced.
Therefore, I think that it's safe to assume that, either Rick Santorum is completely hypocritical on the subject of birth control (always possible), or he and his wife have had sex between eight and twelve times total. Approximately once every two years.
You could fantasize that they make it special: a glass of wine, maybe some candles, with her in her most fetching flannel nightgown and him in nothing but a sweater vest.
But I suspect that that the dark deed is most likely performed with a minimum of foreplay, with the lights out, missionary style. I picture Ricky pumping away grimly, trying to finish as quickly as possible, before either of them starts to enjoy it. And when the vile depravity comes to an end, they both roll over and quietly sob themselves to sleep.
There is, if you look at the middle of these United States, right at the bottom, a godforsaken oozing sore of a state known as Texas. It is not a good place to live - it's a black hole of humanity and common sense, and it's where televangelists and crooked politicians go to die.
I was born there. And I would rather be castrated with a hammer than ever go back.
But I'm not going to run down the entire state; I don't have that kind of time right now. I'm just going to focus on one unique example of the kind of venal bundles of manure in a suit infesting the Texas legislative offices. He's a member of the US House of Representatives from East Texas, and his name is Louie Gohmert.
It is quite possible that he is the second stupidest Aggie in the history of Texas (tied with Rick Perry), but he is so much more than that. This man is a particularly special kind of crazy - put him in a room with Michele Bachmann and a bonobo on meth, and it's a tough call to say who will come out looking like the sane one.
He is (it almost goes without saying) a full-on birther: he, in fact, co-sponsored what came to be known as the "birther bill" (HR 1503), to "require the principal campaign committee of a candidate for election to the office of President to include with the committee's statement of organization a copy of the candidate's birth certificate..."
At one point, he became enthralled with "terror babies." You've heard of "anchor babies," where a pregnant illegal immigrant waits until her water breaks, then dashes across the border just in time to spew out her spawn, who then, under the 14th Amendment, is a American citizen. (It is, of course, a myth.)
Well, that paranoid fantasy wasn't bad-ass enough for our boy Louie! No, sirree Bob! He began openly coughing up the idea that terrorists were impregnating women, sending them to the US to have their "anchor babies," flying them back to wherever they came from, and then waiting twenty to thirty years to send them back as glassy-eyed kamikaze assassins who could gain easy entry into ANYWHERE and destroy ANYTHING!!! We're DOOOOOOMMMED!!!!
He successfully proved that he has less evidence for this than a UFO buff has of real illegal aliens by going on Anderson Cooper 360 and ranting incoherently.
But don't go thinking that's the worst conspiracy Louie can come up with. See, apparently, Obamacare, combined with our minor assistance in the Libya conflict, will inevitably lead to Obama ending up with a private army that only HE controls!! (cue sinister music)
"But then when you find out we're being sent to Libya to use our treasure and American lives there, maybe there's intention to so deplete the military that we're going to need that presidential reserve officer commissioned corps and non-commissioned corps that the president can call up on a moment's notice involuntarily, according to the Obamacare bill!"
And, of course, being a good Texas lawmaker, Louie isn't afraid to ignore that whole "separation of church and state" thing. The realization that California's Proposition 8 was unconstitutional made him a little cranky.
Said Gohmert: "The court, as I understand it today, struck down a law that said marriage is between a man and a woman. It's interesting that there are some courts in America where the judges have become so wise in their own eyes that they know better than nature or nature's God."
Gohmert then brought up the Supreme Courtjustices in Iowa who were ousted last year after a vicious campaign by anti-gay activists over their support for marriage equality:
"Nature seemed to like the idea of an egg and a sperm coming together because of pro-creation. Apparently [the judges] thought the sperm had far better use some other way biologically, combining it with something else. But the voters of Iowa came back and said you know what, if you're not smart enough to figure out actual plumbing...then perhaps we need new judges, and that's what they did."
(Youtube pulled the video from the original link, so I substituted one from ThinkProgress, where they also point out that Proposition 8 had nothing to do with procreation, because it didn’t even mention whether same-sex couples could raise children.)
So, that's our boy Gohmert. Not the brightest of all possible lawmakers, but certainly one of the more entertaining. But I think that Louie outdid himself this week.
See, Gohmert sits on the House Natural Resources Committee (because presumably all the members with functioning brain cells want to avoid that one), and his biggest interest this week? Making sure that Alaskan caribou get laid. Of course, to do that (and this, ladies and gentlemen, is the genius of Louie Gohmert), he needs to make sure that we spend more money on the Alaskan Pipeline.
It seems that Gohmert is also something of an expert on animal husbandry. Here's his theory: The caribou very much enjoy the warmth the pipeline radiates. "So when they want to go on a date, they invite each other to head over to the pipeline," he informed his colleagues. It's apparently the equivalent of being wined and dined. And that has resulted in a tenfold caribou population boom, he concluded.
"So my real concern now ...if oil stops running through the pipeline...do we need a study to see how adversely the caribou would be affected if that warm oil ever quit flowing?" he asked.
Because god only knows how they mated before there was a pipeline in Alaska.
People of America, I give you... Louis Buller Gohmert, Jr. Humanitarian, father, and caribou fucker.
What follows is the video, and the transcript for a Superbowl ad starring Clint Eastwood.
It’s halftime. Both teams are in their locker room discussing what they can do to win this game in the second half.
It’s halftime in America, too. People are out of work and they’re hurting. And they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback. And we’re all scared, because this isn’t a game.
The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together, now Motor City is fighting again.
I’ve seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life. And, times when we didn’t understand each other. It seems like we’ve lost our heart at times. When the fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead.
But after those trials, we all rallied around what was right, and acted as one. Because that’s what we do. We find a way through tough times, and if we can’t find a way, then we’ll make one.
All that matters now is what’s ahead. How do we come from behind? How do we come together? And, how do we win?
Detroit’s showing us it can be done. And, what’s true about them is true about all of us.
This country can’t be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines.
Yeah, it’s halftime America. And, our second half is about to begin.
That was it. A simple celebration of a recovered auto industry. Nothing political, and carefully sanitized pictures of a union rally, with all the union signs photoshopped out.
But they made the mistake of using "halftime" as a metaphor for "the time to rally your team, build up confidence, and get back in the game." Which, of course, caused the Far Right to just completely lose their minds.
They decided it was a call for a second term for Obama. That, plus the fact that the auto industry was saved because the president loaned them money, and the shrews and screamers of the right wing noise machine went ballistic.
"WTH? Did I just see Clint Eastwood fronting an auto bailout ad???" said Michelle Malkin, the conservative blogger. "I think Clint Eastwood’s credentials as a conservative have been overrated for some time," added David Limbaugh, the brother of Rush and himself a conservative author.
Karl Rove was "offended by it." (Which is OK with me - I'm offended that Karl Rove is still allowed out in public.)
"I'm a huge fan of Clint Eastwood, I thought it was an extremely well-done ad, but it is 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."
But reread that transcript. Watch the video again. Or perhaps, notice that both Eastwood and Sergio Marchionne, the CEO of Chrysler, have said that there was no political spin to the ad.
Doesn't matter. It didn't say that the Kenyan Devil-baby infesting the White House is destroying our Way of Life, so the attack hamsters continue to shriek and spew spittle. Because that's how they roll.
This is a battlefield that we must stand upon. And we need to let President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and my dear friend, chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table...
Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, and take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America.
Of course, when confronted by a reporter asking you to clarify your statement, instead of standing behind your openly moronic quote, you chose to deny having said it. Which kind of makes you a pussy, doesn’t it?
The other thing is that I did not refer to any person leaving. If you go back and read the transcript of the message that I gave, it was about equality of achievement, it was about economic dependence, it was about enslaving the American entrepreneur’s will and spirit. That message needs to leave this country.
That's crap, Allen. You don’t get to say idiotic things to pander to the paste-eating lunatics and inbred mouthbreathers hiding in the swamps of Florida, and then back away from it. You said it, and only a coward lies about his own past.
Of course, you have a lot to be ashamed of in your past, don't you? Strangely, you and I have a lot in common. Both of us entered and left the military in the same years: of course, having said that, only one of us wasn't forced to retire instead of going to jail for torturing Iraqi policemen.
I'm not going to say that makes me a better person than you: it would be the sum total of your life that proves that. And I'm not going to tell you to get out of my country, because unlike you, I have some concept of the ideals that this country was founded on, and I support them.
I will say that you are a shallow, deluded, lying gasbag who is not fit for public service; please resign in disgrace from a second government job. Get the hell out of my Congress.
With all due respect,*
Bill Minnich Albuquerque, NM
* None _______________
Snail-mailed this afternoon (without links or video) to:
Representative Allen West 3111 South Dixie Highway, Suite 308 West Palm Beach, Florida 33405
In Missouri and Indiana this month, bills have been put forward in the legislature to return "intelligent design" to the classrooms. Because their children are apparently not stupid enough yet.
I occasionally hang out on a blog called Stone the Preacher (it's run out of Hope Chapel in Hermosa Beach, CA); I ended up there rebutting one of the standard canards of the fundamentalists (I think it was "atheists have no morals," but at this late date, I'm really not sure), and I kept going back, probably because I thrive on conflict. And run-on sentences. And recently, Pastor Steve, a young-earth creationist, made the mistake of mentioning "intelligent design."
I've always loved that phrase because of its inherent idiocy. "Intelligent design" is creationism wearing glasses and a clown nose, and the adjective is so clearly in conflict with the noun that people should be unable to avoid stuttering when they say it. Every attempt to sneak it into schools gets thoroughly destroyed in the courts, but that doesn't stop them from trying over and over again (for example, in Missouri and Indiana - and probably in some other state any day now).
Let's be honest: evolution explains why some of the ridiculous design flaws exist in the world. There is no "intelligence" in the "design" of the world, and examples are everywhere. Comedians have been pointing them out for years.
"God is a mechanical engineer! Look at this marvelous collection of joints and levers!"
"No, God is an electrical engineer! Look at the intricacy of these neurons and synapses!"
"No," said the city planner, "God is obviously a civil engineer. Sometimes, when nobody's looking, it's just easier to run a sewer pipe through a recreational area."
But fundies, being fundies, keep soldiering on, like particularly pious zombies on a quest for children's brains.
Let's consider the evidence. And remember, the people who believe this silliness also believe that God doesn't make mistakes.
1. As we develop in the womb, we form three sets of kidneys. The pronephroi ("forekidneys") appear in the fourth week; they degenerate pretty quickly, but the ducts are recycled to build the mesonephroi ("midkidneys"). And then those degenerate and the tubules are recycled in the metanephroi ("hindkidneys"), which are our permanent kidneys.
This almost seems like an elegant bit of engineering, but really, it's more like building an Eiffel Tower as scaffolding for another Eiffel Tower, which is used as scaffolding for a final, bigger Eiffel Tower, and you rip down each one as you go (I don't remember where I saw that metaphor, but it's perfect). It's an unnecessarily complex process, and it's just evidence that evolution had a number of false starts along the way, and had to go back and refigure what it was building.
(On the subject of kidneys, why is the gene for polycystic kidney disease dominant? Why make it 50% likely that you'll inherit a painful, life-threatening condition?)
2. The female quoll (an Australian marsupial) has only six teats, but gives birth to a litter of 18, meaning that the 12 slowest or weakest die of starvation. A 66% death rate makes sense to you? Was God weeding out the weak ones? Why didn't He just build them right to begin with?
3. While you’re in Australia, look up the mystery of a kangaroo’s teeth, for that matter. The grasses they eat are tough, and wear down the front teeth of the 'roo. So, to make up for this, they evolved were designed with an unusual ability: as the front teeth wear down, they fall out and the back teeth move forward to replace them.
Which sounds great, except that they don't have the ability to grow new teeth. So by the time they're 15 or 20, they run out, and starve to death. Apparently, God hates kangaroos, and wants to see them suffer.
4. Birds of the family Sulidae (boobies and gannets)...
...heh, heh... I said "boobies"...
4. Birds of the family Sulidae are diving birds, plunging into the water from the sky. One of their adaptations to this is that they don’t have external nostrils – the water would get shoved up their noses on impact. But even without external nostrils, they have everything else that makes up a nasal airway inside their beaks. It’s just that the nostrils are sealed off at the outside. Having nasal airways that can’t work is pretty pointless design. Although evolution tells us why they’re there, it makes you wonder why God would choose to install a completely pointless structure inside the bird's beak. Did He build it from spare parts from another bird?
If these things, and so many others, are designed, that’s some pretty shoddy craftsmanship.
Maybe God occasionally gets drunk on sacramental wine while He's working?
Well, two days ago, a random douchenozzle put a comment on a post I wrote six months ago, about the internet's reaction to Rebecca Watson admitting that she felt uncomfortable in an elevator, and explaining why.
What he wrote, in part, was a fairly standard male-privilege response.
This whole blog is an equivocation fallacy... If we were to take that seriously, then I suppose I should never talk to a woman anywhere, because rape DOES happen anywhere.
What some people seem to want is for a special exception to be made for women, because they view women as inferior. The people who feel this way are radical-feminists, pretending to be feminists.
This guy was undoubtedly just some random troll (his nickname was probably created seconds before he posted), but nonetheless, I responded to him.
Maybe I was a little rude (because I'm normally such a calm, generous, diplomatic person), but to be honest, my only regret is that I left off a question mark and used the phrase "you're an idiot" twice. Because I can do so much better than that.
My only excuse is that cheap boxed Merlot is a harsh mistress.
As far as I'm concerned, any male who uses the phrase "radical feminist" is almost automatically an inbred mouth-breather with limited capacity for reasonable thought. There are only two types of people: feminists, and morons.
(Quick disclaimer: sure, if you look hard enough, you can find a couple of lesbian separatists out there who want to live without ever seeing a man, or occasionally dominate men, reversing the status quo and sticking women on top of the bigotry heap. But they're a really tiny minority - the exception, not the rule - and it's rampant, overblown stupidity to equate the one with the other.)
You could argue that I'm setting up a strawman to make an argument, but this idiot male attitude is all too common. When you start with the two largest religions in the world openly stating that women are inferior to men, and somebody suggests that maybe the two should be equal, it leads you down a path where drug-abusing sociopaths make up words like "feminazi."
And you end up with men who think all women who don't fall into their stereotypes of "Madonna" or "Whore" must be ball-busting lesbian bitches.
And sometimes, you even end up with people trying to claim that the Costa Concordia disaster was made worse because of feminism.
Apparently, in their minds, there is only a limited supply of rights, and in order for somebody else to get any, they have to lose some. Sorry, guys, that's not how it works: we aren't about to reach "Peak Rights."
Anyone who has wives or daughters (I have one of each) and doesn't want to see them succeed is a subhuman asshat who never evolved past masturbating in public and flinging their own feces.
Because it's a basic fact of life - men do get all the breaks: society contains a built-in bias that allows men to succeed more easily than women. Hate to be the one to break it to you, children, but if you're too microcephalic to figure it out, I'm not going to help you at all. Instead, I'm going to give you math. Because I'm cruel.
(Interesting side-note: because the concentration of money is in the hands of white males, white women earn, on average, 45% less than the salary of white men - a greater disparity than among any other race.)
And those numbers only get worse if you keep digging. According to the Department of Justice, one out of every six US women have been victims of a completed or attempted rape. The male stat? One in thirty-three. (And let's not even get into the concept of sexual slavery.)
But you aren't supposed to bring up these pesky little facts, and a young woman shouldn't talk about how she didn't appreciate getting hit on in an enclosed space. Because pinheaded morons start blathering on about "radical feminism."
Really? It's radical to think that women should be treated the same as men? And at the same time, it's radical to pay attention to the fact that some people feel uncomfortable in certain situations, and you should respect that?
Fuck you. Fuck every bloated, self-involved whiny little boy who uses the word "feminist" when deep down, they're screaming "cooties!"
If you're like me (and to be honest, I'm pretty sure that you aren't - but I digress), you have to have a certain fondness for Newton Leroy Mephistopheles Gingrich. I mean, he may be an evil, bloated troll and a complete abject failure as a human being, but he, more than anybody else in America except Mitt Romney himself, is working hard to help ensure the reelection of Barack Obama.
It's true that we liberals, progressives and real Americans can't afford to be complacent as we approach the election, but sweet flaming Baby Jesus on a popsicle stick! How can you not giggle like a schoolgirl watching the GOP flail away at each other like some kind of morally bankrupt Rock'em Sock'em Republicans?
Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican candidate: that's all but a mathematical certainty. But Newton (who is apparently blind to the open oozing wound where his soul might once have been) is charging in like a screaming toddler in the candy aisle, demanding to have his way, by golly! Dragging his animated wax replica of a wife behind him, he's going to keep stabbing away at Mitten's exposed back, trying to bring the Mechanical Mormon down.
Newton's faltering campaign is freshly energized by an influx of gambling money from a stereotypical mob boss straight out of Central Casting: Sheldon Adelson, who occasionally introduces himself as "the richest Jew in the world."
With all these stacks of fresh, clean money piling up in the back room, Newton's SuperPAC (which Newton has no connection to, except that he set it up and put former staffers in charge) put out a short film and website bashing away at Romney's record as a "job creator."
And things are just going to get better.
"This is going to be Armageddon – they are going to come in here with everything they've got, every surrogate, every ad, every negative attack," Gingrich said. "At the same time we'll be drawing a sharp contrast between a Georgia Reagan conservative and a Massachusetts moderate who's pro-gun control, pro-choice, pro-tax increase, pro-liberal judge, and the voters of South Carolina will have to look and decide."
And just because the Three Stooges have to have their Larry, the craziest of the evangelicals got together this weekend to decide on their favorite flavor of not-Romney, and it turned out to be Santorum Crunch. So we can look for waves of fun coming from that quarter, too.
All I have to say is, the Obama campaign should see if they can borrow some of these ads later on.
The right wing is completely losing their shit over Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and three appointments to the National Labor Relations Board.
With Senate Republicans vowing to block any labor board nominees, the five-member board would have been paralyzed this year because it has only two sitting members. The Supreme Court has ruled the board needs at least three members to operate.
So, here's John Stewart to put it into perspective for you.
The problem is that we have a Congress which has done less than any Congress in recent memory, because so many seats have been filled with small-minded small-government idiots, who ran on a platform of "Congress doesn't work. Elect me, and I'll prove it!"
The majority of them don't have any interest in fixing the economy or helping Americans. Instead, they've embraced Mitch McConnell's strategy, which, as he explained it, was very simple: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
So they obstruct, delay and obfuscate; they prevent anything from happening, and then they try to claim that Obama is a "failed president" because he couldn't fight his way past the obstruction.
Well, guess what? He just did, and it's completely thrown them for a loop.
How can you claim that the Senate is "in session" when the entire sesson consists of gaveling in, saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and gaveling out? That's nothing but a sham, and the Senate has been completely open about it.
Steven Bradbury and John Elwood, two former legal advisors for President Bush, pointed out that the nature of a "recess" is still open for interpretation, and Obama is fully within his rights to make these appointments.
In a 1905 report that the Senate still considers authoritative, the Senate Judiciary Committee recognized that a "Recess of the Senate" occurs whenever the Senate is not sitting for the discharge of its functions and when it cannot "participate as a body in making appointments." The committee cautioned that a "recess" means "something actual, not something fictitious." The executive branch has long taken the same common-sense view...
The Senate, of course, does not meet as a body during a pro forma session. By the terms of the recess order, no business can be conducted, and the Senate is not capable of acting on the president's nominations. That means the Senate remains in "recess" for purposes of the recess appointment power, despite the empty formalities of the individual senators who wield the gavel in pro forma sessions.
But you can still hear the sobbing from the poor, thwarted motherfuckers. Ironically, one of the motherfuckers in question, Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) managed to step on her metaphorical dick in her public pearl-clutching.
"These appointments are an affront to the Constitution. No matter how you look at this, it doesn’t pass the smell test. I hope the House considers my resolution as soon as we return to Washington so we can send a message to President Obama."
The problem is, the Constitution doesn't specify a minimum length of time the Senate has to be in recess before the president can enact a recess appointment. And since this Congress has effectively been in recess since 2010, it's time for them to shut up and admit that he played the game better than they did.
You have to feel sorry for John McCain. When you're the privileged son of an admiral, and you're in your 30s when those negroes got all uppity the Civil Rights movement took place, it's understandable that you might have a certain amount of "white man's privilege" that it's hard to let go of.
So it probably stung when he got his ass so throroughly spanked by a black man in 2010.
And since he had to sit out most of Vietnam sitting in a bamboo cage, maybe little Johnny just wants to get his war on. I suppose that could be it.
Arizona Senator John McCain on Sunday warned that the situation in Iraq is "unraveling" due to recent U.S. foreign policy actions there - and that a "very chaotic situation" could give way to a rise in Iranian influence in the region.
McCain, speaking to Bob Schieffer on CBS' "Face the Nation," argued that the recent U.S. military drawdown from Iraq is creating a dire situation in that country.
"It's unraveling because we didn't keep residual force there, because the President of the United States pledged to get out of Iraq," McCain said. "We could have kept a residual force there and kept some stability. And instead it's unraveling, and Iran's influence is increasing and there's every possibility you could see a very chaotic situation there."
See, Johnny, it's probably best that you didn't specifically name which president it was that "pledged to get out of Iraq," since Obama simply lived up to the timetable that was set up by the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement, signed by George W. Bush.
I have to assume that Rick Santorum is still in the race to be the GOP nominee because he hopes that some simultaneous outbreak of monkey pox will wipe out the rest of the field. That, or, as a good Catholic, he enjoys a little flagellation every so often - it's good for the soul.
He is probably the thirteenth or fourteenth least-electable candidate in the history of humanity, but we can't seem to get him to just shut the hell up and go away.
Even before the primary, Santorum was surging in Iowa(eeewww!) at 15%, but he still can't seem to consistently break 5% nationally. Not that he isn't optimistic (or possibly sadistic): he put it a few weeks ago, "I'm counting on the people of Iowa to catch fire for me." (Which seems unnecessarily cruel, but what do I know?)
The problem is that Santorum is just the latest flavor of not-Romney to hit the shelves. It's his turn to be touted nationally for the next few weeks, until somebody remembers that we're electing a president, not a pope.
Santorum has two major disabilities that are going to prevent his election: his sanctimonious, unpleasant nature, and his aggressively ignorant and regressive social policies. His entire platform, as far as I can tell, seems to be abortion and gay marriage - everything else is secondary. If he were, by some miracle, to be elected president, we'd have an uninterrupted 4-year fiesta of fag-punching.
We know that Santorum is so homophobic that he'll only eat a corndog with a knife and fork, but is he also racist? Well, that one's a little trickier. He has, for a long time, been consistently in favor of the full GOP stand on immigration: no amnesty for illegal immigrants, and likewise no benefits for them; deport criminals, strengthen border security, and even the somewhat trickier "English as the official language" stance. And while that has overtones of "scary brown people," it's the Republican party line. So no points there.
On the other hand, it's somewhat telling when you stand in front of a group of white people from Iowa (a redundant statement, but let's move on) and explained that "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."
His first explanation was that he didn't remember making the comment. Faced with the video, he huddled with his campaign, but the best they could come up with was that he "mumbled it... I was starting to say one word and I sort of came up with a different word and then moved on."
What he couldn't seem to explain was what that "one word" was. "Blaa" is a pretty unique sound. Who does he not want to help? Bloggers? Bluefin tuna? Blink 182?
Blacks?
But let's move beyond that. What would a Rick Santorum presidency do for America? Well, let's consider his belief system for just a moment. What does Rick Santorum believe in?
His career should have been over after he tried to make political points leading the charge in the Terry Schiavo case, exploiting the pain of the family of a provably brain-dead woman. But he weathered that (presumably, the $250 thousand he earned in campaign contributions from the Schiavo debacle helped a lot).
Rick Santorum believes that birth control is directly responsible for the moral decline of America, saying "the dangers of contraception in this country, the sexual liberty idea and many in the Christian faith have said, you know contraception is OK. It’s not OK because it’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."
He wrote an article in 2002 blaming pedophilia in Catholic priests on "moral relativism" and "cultural liberalism."
This is a man who said that John McCain, who was tortured while a POW in Vietnam, "doesn't understand how enhanced interrogation works."
He tried to require the "No Child Left Behind" law to ensure that creationism was taught in schools.
Will Bunch, the senior writer and columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News has covered politics in Pennsylvania since shortly after Rick Santorum was elected for the first time. He wrote a fascinating article from a Philadelphian's point of view entitled "The Rick Santorum That America Doesn't Know." Take a few minutes and read it - it's worth your time.
But the worst thing I know about Rick Santorum is what happened when his wife Karen was 20 weeks pregnant. Her non-viable fetus was not expected to survive, and the mother developed an infection. And Rick Santorum, who is opposed to abortion for any reason, allowed the doctors to give his wife pitocin to speed the birth. And while that may have been wildly hypocritical, what followed was completely insane.
After spending the night with the dead fetus on the bed between them, they took the body home with them, and forced their children to cuddle with it and sing songs to it. Ms Santorum even proudly wrote a book about it.
Where the hell was Child Protective Services when this was going on? Where was the Health Department?
The worst thing that could possibly happen to America would be a Rick Santorum presidency: I wonder how long it would take him to appoint a Grand Inquisitor?
And yet, he is suddenly one of the two front-runners in the GOP field. Is the Republican Party so desperate to find an alternative, any alternative, to the robotic hair-helmet that is Mitt Romney that they're willing to embrace anyone at all?
