The word “penultimate” belongs in the same category as the Oxford comma. What that category is, however, is out of my mental reach. Help from the whip-smart Pandagonians?

“Members and pundits . . . fail to understand the deep seated antipathy toward the president, the war, gas prices, the economy, foreclosures.”
–Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia in a 20-page memo to House GOP leaders.

That Captain Obvious winner shows up in Peggy Noonan’s WSJ column “Pity Party.” This where the real spin begins, as she distances herself from the rest of the apologists and GOP cheerleaders for Dear Leader for the last seven years. She’s the one with 20/20 vision about the disastrous political bind the Republicans are in. The Democrats aren’t the ones falling apart, the Republicans are. The Democrats can see daylight ahead.

For all their fractious fighting, they’re finally resolving their central drama. Hillary Clinton will leave, and Barack Obama will deliver a stirring acceptance speech. Then hand-to-hand in the general, where they see their guy triumphing. You see it when you talk to them: They’re busy being born.

The Republicans? Busy dying. The brightest of them see no immediate light. They’re frozen, not like a deer in the headlights but a deer in the darkness, his ears stiff at the sound. Crunch. Twig. Hunting party.

…Many are ambivalent, deep inside, about the decisions made the past seven years in the White House. But they’ve publicly supported it so long they think they . . . support it. They get confused. Late at night they toss and turn in the antique mahogany sleigh bed in the carpeted house in McLean and try to remember what it is they really do think, and what those thoughts imply.

And those are the bright ones. The rest are in Perpetual 1980: We have the country, the troops will rally in the fall.

“This was a real wakeup call for us,” someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. “We can’t let the Democrats take our issues.” And those issues would be? “We can’t let them pretend to be conservatives,” he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day.

While she’s angry at how the GOP has failed her, she underestimates the capacity of denial and blame-shifting of these clowns in an attempt to save their personal political fortunes.

I say watch the former Bush faithful. If there’s one thing the GOP is good at, it’s the taking the long view of how to make a comeback. Look at what else Davis says to Noonan — after the jump.
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I know I’m supposed to find the character of Pepper Potts in Iron Man offensive and sexist. As the main female character in the movie, she’s, well, a servant. From one perspective, she’s like a fantasy wife-for-hire—hot, devoted, thoughtful, and submissive. She never brings the coffee cold and relieves Tony Stark from his duties for running the dull, domestic parts of his life, freeing him up to conquer the world. But I liked Pepper a lot. She was smart, wry, and professional, and her attraction to Tony seems to be a result of her being a workaholic, and she snaps out of it at the end of the movie. She’s brave and clever under fire. But I was ashamed to put it that way, because none of that really addressed the fact that she’s still a personal assistant.

And then I read this thread, where a discussion about whether or not Pepper is negatively portrayed as materialist hinged on her purchase of an evening gown with Tony’s money for her birthday. I actually thought the dress incident had nothing to do with materialism, and Pepper’s choices were cast in a flattering light. I’d say the dress incident in the movie has two plot functions: to show that Pepper has really good taste like she always said (we usually see her wearing all black) and to show that she has this whole inner life that Tony wasn’t aware of. There was no intention to shame the character for materialism.

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I don’t care how hilarious rapist / murderer-releasing, Christian Reconstructionist- supported, Man-On-Dog wannabe, former Arkansas governor, and Baptist minister-without-a-theology-degree Mike Huckabee thinks he is, this isn’t funny. We’ve already seen the yahoo vote unapologetic about the fact that they’d never vote for a black man — and plenty of them have an NRA card.

During a speech before the National Rifle Association convention Friday afternoon in Louisville, Kentucky, former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee — who has endorsed presumptive GOP nominee John McCain — joked that an unexpected offstage noise was Democrat Barack Obama looking to avoid a gunman.

“That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he’s getting ready to speak,” said the former Arkansas governor, to audience laughter. “Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.”

After all, look at what a Freeper posted yesterday in response to the marriage equality ruling in California. These folks are sick.

38 posted on Thursday, May 15, 2008 1:37:53 PM by Lancey Howard

Related:
* Noose found at Secret Service training center
* Dallas: weapons screening halted at Obama rally
* Other posts on the security breach

I’m really starting to wonder whether this level of stupidity and batsh*ttery by the Right — as they watch their political fortunes swirl the bowl because of Bush’s legacy — has completely untethered them from reality. Take a look at this unbelievable nonsense by Bill O’Reilly, who went on a tirade about the fact that Markos Moulitsas (Kos of Daily Kos) has a Newsweek column, and that O’Reilly was embarrassed that Markos ran a clip of the Faux News blowhard going ape on camera during his old Inside Edition days.

What’s even more entertaining is the bile O’Reilly’s fans unleashed into Markos’ mailbox — out comes the violent schooyard faggotry taunts from the intellectual giants. A sampling is below the fold.
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It is, after all, Chris Matthews. But to steal Atrios’ phrase, more of this, please*:

* And less of all the other shit, Chris.

Autumn and I have been passing on right-wing reaction yesterday’s historic Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality in California, but I wanted to reserve a post for this unique reaction from fundie Mike Heath of the Christian Civic League of Maine.

He’s basically cried uncle in terms of protecting the word “marriage,” and wants to get back to basics, which sounds a lot like extermination, if you ask me. Homos have been compared to all sorts of things, but I don’t think I’ve been referred to as a weed polluting a lawn. Via email from Blender Herb, who’s on the CCLM mailing list:

Some people are suggesting that California’s ridiculous Supreme Court decision on “marriage” yesterday is reason to renew Maine’s push for a constitutional amendment. Those people are dead wrong.

While I support any real efforts to amend the Federal Constitution to protect marriage, I don’t support a Maine constitutional amendment at this time. Anyone who has been paying attention to this issue in Maine for the past two decades knows that the entire Maine political establishment is in “love” with “gay” special interests.

The fight is over if we are going to protect the word marriage only. Most recommendations I hear for constitutional amendments will protect only the word marriage, and allow for civil unions and domestic partnerships. A cursory reading of the Massachusetts and California court decisions will reveal the folly of this approach.

We must attack this problem at its root. If you want to get rid of a weed you don’t pull off the leaves. You destroy the root. The root idea of so-called same sex marriage is special rights for citizens on the basis of sexual wrongdoing. That is where the fight must be engaged.

Our only hope in the short term is the people. If everyone will get behind the League’s referendum we can begin the process of righting the ship of state more quickly.

I call on all people of good will to support our referendum today. It is the loving thing to do. Let’s support marriage and equality. We can’t afford to wait.

And Mike’s apparently found yet another version of The Homosexual Agenda. See his discovery below the fold.
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Ten songs at random from your MP3 collection. Leave ‘em in comments.

1. “Your Eyes Are Liars”—Sound Team
2. “Run For Cover”—The Dells
3. “Let’s Get Small”—Trouble Funk
4. “Tennessee emmpp”—Silver Jews
5. “No Comply”—The Studio
6. “We Were Born The Mutants Again With Leafling”—Of Montreal
7. “There’s A Ghost In My House”—R. Dean Taylor
8. “She’s Gone”—NOFX
9. “Murder Me Rachel”—The National (I haven’t decided if I hate this band or not. Probably.)
10. “We’re All Stress”—The Illuminoids (a super huge mash-up based around Bowie’s vocals on “Starman”, which could make a music box sound awesome)

I’m trying to get all my videos from Vimeo now, because it’s just a lot better layout and quality than YouTube. Let’s see if lazy conformity takes over. It labels it for you and everything, so you don’t have to offend people who are at work or have dial-up and can’t watch videos but are dying to know what they’re missing out on. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as comprehensive, so it’s hard to find stuff.

of Montreal - “Rapture Rapes The Muses” - Debaser - Malmö, Sweden - May 5, 2007 from ofmontreal on Vimeo.

That said, this person had cool shit up.

joy division - 9-15-79 transmission from cicolini on Vimeo.

They are getting a little punchy in bible-beating newsgathering land.

With films such as “Dark-Haired Sluts” and “Next Door Panties” on its movie menu, Marriott International is coming under heavy fire from family activists urging the hotel giant to banish such sexual fare from its bedrooms.

Focus on the Family met with hotel executives in Washington, D.C., yesterday and provided Marriott with a petition signed by 102,000 concerned citizens who want pornographic films purged from the list of movie offerings.

Daniel Weiss, media and sexuality analyst for the group, said Marriott has billed itself as a family-lodging establishment, and its decision to provide adult films to its customers is contrary to its reputation.

“In a sense, they’ve kind of put themselves out there,” he told WND. “We saw that offering pornographic content was incongruent with the image they were really going after.”

How’d you like that title on your fundie business card - media and sexuality analyst? It’s probably adjacent to the sign of the fish:

OK, well maybe not that one.

Wow, this headline reads like something in the Reader’s Digest circa 1970, wedged between articles on why kids don’t appreciate waltzing anymore and how smoking marijuana cigarettes will cause your daughter to become a streetwalker: “Catcalling: creepy or a compliment?” (Via.) The article isn’t nearly so bad, and gives full voice to women who grasp that a man yelling sexual (and insulting or threatening) things at you on the sidewalk is insulting you for being a woman, not complimenting you.

But just like those articles of old from Schlaflyites (”I love getting hooted at on the street, and husbands have a right to rape wives!”), this one is full of women the reader is supposed to take cues from on how to be less of a grumpus pain in the ass who thinks she has dignity worth defending.

On the other hand, some women appreciate the attention in certain cases, like Jessica, a 31-year-old health-care educator in Los Angeles who declined to use her last name to protect her privacy.

“Yeah, it’s objectifying and all, but you know, if I walked down the street and didn’t have men looking me up and down and catcalling, I’d think, ‘Boy, I must really be getting old and dumpy,’ ” she said.

She’s gotten catcalls just walking her parents’ dog in baggy sweats. “I thought it was hysterical, like, ‘Boy, doesn’t take much to impress you, does it?’ “

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UPDATE 2: Happy Happy Joy Joy! Here is The Peter:

How Will California Homosexual Couples Consummate their Counterfeit ‘Marriages’?

JUDICIAL ACTIVISM AT ITS WORST: This will always be immoral. California’s highest court has created a “fundamental” marriage right out of behavior - homosexuality - that is fundamentally wrong and destructive. At left is a homosexual male kissing scene as it appeared on the CBS soap “As the World Turns.” Everywhere Americans turn - TV, media, schools, in corporations and the courts - this unhealthy and immoral behavior is being promoted

(UPDATE: Bam Bam Barber of Concerned Women weighs in below the fold.)

Ah, before we get to the Freepi, how about this delicious reaction from the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, who believes civil rights should be determined at the ballot box.

It’s outrageous that the court has overturned not only the historic definition of marriage, but the clear will of the people of California, as expressed in Proposition 22. said FRC President Tony Perkins. The California Supreme Court assumed the powers of a legislative body by imposing same-sex marriage. However, in 2000, the people of California spoke loudly and clearly on the value of marriage when 61 percent of voters approved Proposition 22.

The California Supreme Court has taken a jackhammer to the democratic process, and the right of the people to affect change in public policy. Four judges discarded the votes of 4,618,673 Californians who approved the states Defense of Marriage Act. Voters understand that children should not be deprived of a mother or a father, added Perkins.

I can’t wait for the flying spittle from Focus on the Anus, Bam Bam of Concerned Women for America and The Peter. Right now, take a look at the swamps of Freeperland as they wail, and in one case seems to be calling for violence (big surprise).

It’s below the fold.
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7PM tonight at MonkeyWrench Books , which is in one of my favorite parts of town, the North Loop area, which is like the hipster central shopping district. If you haven’t come out to a reading yet, try to make it to this one, because that might be the last for awhile.

(UPDATE 1:15 PM: Equality wins!)

(NOTE: There will be real-time coverage at my place.)

At 1PM ET, California’s Supreme Court will on whether same-sex couples may marry in the state. The official document announcing the pending ruling is here. The question:

Does California’s statutory ban on marriage between two persons of the same sex violate the California Constitution by denying equal protection of the laws on the basis of sexual orientation or sex, by infringing on the fundamental right to marry, or by denying the right to privacy and freedom of expression?

The Governator opposes the current constitutional amendment ballot initiative that will go to voters in November, and has said that he will abide by the court’s decision. An impact of this ruling, if it is in favor of equality, is how the presidential candidates will respond, since both Clinton and Obama have clung to a life raft of “marriage is between a man and a woman” for religious reasons and/or letting the states decide the civil matter, which naturally brings up the precedent of Loving v. Virginia. One can only hope that we don’t see the kind of punt we witnessed in New York in 2006, though the legislature in California has already shown its ability to pass marriage equality legislation.

Here is interesting info emailed to me by The Williams Institute, a research center at UCLA School of Law. It’s a national think tank dedicated to research on issues of sexual orientation law and public policy.

• As of 2006, there are an estimated 109,000 same-sex couples in California (2006 American Community Survey, US Census Bureau).
• More than 41,000 California couples have registered as domestic partners, approximately 38% of all same-sex couples (Williams Institute).
• California same-sex couples are raising an estimated 70,000 children (Amicus Brief, Badgett and Gates)
• Marriage equality would add approximately $123 million to the California budget in the first three years that marriage is open to same-sex couples (Badgett and Sears, Stanford Law and Policy Review)
• Demographic characteristics of same-sex registered partners in California (Carpenter and Gates, forthcoming in Demography):
• Male same-sex registered partners in California have been partnered for an average of 12 years.
• Female same-sex registered partners in California have been partnered for an average of 9 years.
• The average age of same-sex registered partners is 44.
• A third of female registered same-sex couples are raising children.

Links:

* Amicus Brief (Gates and Badgett)
* Badgett CA State Senate Testimony
* Putting a Price on Equality: The Impact of Same-sex Marriage on California’s Budget (Badgett and Sears, Stanford Law and Policy Review)
* The Effect of Marriage Equality and Domestic Partnership on Business and the Economy (Gates and Badgett)

Meanwhile, the wingnuts in the state of North Carolina have introduced another marriage amendment bill. More below the fold.
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Another edition of “What’s Cary Tennis been smoking?” He’s been a lot better lately, so there’s not been any reason to write posts wondering about the potency levels of his preferred smoking materials, but today’s column is a doozy. The guy who writes in has a Bible-thumping friend, and the letter writer is an atheist, and they have fun with their contentious differences. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, right?* Now his friend, who teaches at a church school, is being pressured to teach young earth creationism to the kids, and the guy is fixing to do it, after going through a hefty process of convincing himself that he’s really considered the evidence, which is impossible, because honest engagement with the evidence in this case leads to one conclusion—evolution is the reality. I don’t say this lightly. We all have biases and prejudices that color our views and in many cases, the evidence is hazy enough that people can have real disagreements with no real conclusion. This isn’t true in the contentious debate between evolutionary theory and Adam and Eve. Objectively, one side has marshaled an irrefutable amount of evidence and the other is blowing smoke out their asses.

So what his friend is doing is that he already decided to bend over for the bullshit and is looking for a rationalization for it, so he doesn’t have to admit that he’s a wanker. Our letter-writer, however, is livid. He thinks teaching creationism is a form of child abuse, and while I think the term is overheated, I agree that using children in service of whack-a-doodle ideologies is cruel to children, especially in cases where your lies to them could have serious, long-term negative consequences on their job prospects. (The whole classroom, for instance, is automatically seeing any chance of going into sciences plummet through the floor because of this stuff.) Tennis, however, has one of his goofier answers, which is for this friend to dispassionately treat the misuse of these children as if he’s reading a book on anthropology.

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And I thought Bush’s lie that he gave up golf in solidarity out of respect for U.S. soldiers killed in the war was the winner of the dumbassery remark of the year. Boy was I wrong.

PZ Myers at Pharyngula points to an incredible statement by the movie critic, right-wing Clown Hall writer and radio show host. First, I love PZ’s opening.

Did someone declare this National Flaming Racist Idiot week, and I just didn’t notice until now? You have got to read Michael Medved’s latest foray into pseudoscience: he has declared American superiority to be genetic, encoded in our good old American DNA. Because our ancestors were immigrants, who were risk-takers, who were selected for their energy and aggressiveness. Oh, except for those who are descended from slaves.

Oh yes, Medved did, friends. I guess the best thing we can say about the following statement is that he probably wasn’t emitting the spittle Pat “A Brief for Whitey” Buchanan did yesterday when he was on Hardball. Medved even makes the gutsy move of explaining that the DNA shaped by our borders and risk-taking requires governing by Republican policies:

The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide - between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here, and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self-selection based on personality traits.

…Senators Obama, Clinton and other leaders who seek to enlarge the scope of government face more formidable obstacles than they realize. Their desire to impose a European-style welfare state and a command-and-control economy not only contradicts our proudest political and economic traditions, but the new revelations about American DNA suggest that such ill-starred schemes may go against our very nature.

Wow. Talk about junk science — so now Americans are a “race”? Holy smoke, this is incredible. Actually, Medved’s working from the same playbook as Buchanan — slavery was a good thing for the darkies, after all, those bringing the slaves over as cargo didn’t have genocide on their minds, they needed that cargo alive because good hard money was paid for them.

Estimates remain inevitably imprecise, but range as high as one third of the slave “cargo” who perished from disease or overcrowding during transport from Africa. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean. By definition, the crime of genocide requires the deliberate slaughter of a specific group of people; slavers invariably preferred oppressing and exploiting live Africans rather than murdering them en masse.

H/t, Oliver Willis.

Oh my. Just watch. This administration cannot end soon enough. Oh my. Just watch. This administration cannot end soon enough. Olbermann shows a pic of Dear Leader playing golf two months after he claimed he stopped playing “in solidarity” with grieving families who lost loved ones in his Iraq nightmare. That was bad enough, but his sacrifice wasn’t even his own idea, so his handlers even saw this as some sort of noble gesture to spin — it’s an administration of completely morally and ethically bankrupt people, and KO had enough.

Part 1:

A snippet:

Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on two topics a lot of us had foolishly thought, had naively hoped, we would not again have to address… and a third topic nobody thought a president would ever seriously mention in public unless perhaps he’d just been hit in the head with something and was not in full possession of his faculties - how he expressed his “empathy” to the families of the dead in Iraq - by giving up golf.

The President has resorted anew to the sleaziest fear-mongering and mass manipulation of an administration - of a public life - dedicated to realizing the lowest of our expectations.

Part 2:

Full transcript is below the fold.
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You know, I wasn’t sure if my former senator was actually going to throw his hat into the endorsement ring.

(WaPo):

In the immediate aftermath of Edwards’ decision to drop from the race, both Clinton and Obama made a pilgrimage to North Carolina to huddle with the former candidate and make their pitch for his support.

By all accounts, those meetings left Edwards genuinely undecided. Obama’s message of change and his call to end the influence peddling in Washington were clearly an obvious fit for Edwards’ sympathies, but he retained some lingering concerns about Obama’s depth of experience. Clinton, on the other hand, had considerable experience but struggled to represent the sort of change that Edwards believed was necessary to win the nomination.

Rumors flew for months about Edwards’s leaning although of late it had been expected that if he endorsed a candidate, it would be Obama.

Matt Bennett, a former Clinton Administration official, described Edwards as the “troubadour of the working class” and said the North Carolina senator’s endorsement of Obama makes it “tougher for Clinton to make the case that working class Democrats can’t [or] won’t support Obama.”

During his 2004 bid for president, Edwards focused his campaign message almost exclusively on middle-class and lower middle-class people — insisting that his southern roots, his father’s experience as a mill worker and his own up from the bootstraps success story uniquely positioned him to represent their interests in the White House.

The timing of this is quite interesting, given the proximity of the West Virginia primary, where the Two Americas message that Edwards ran on is highly relevant, as is the racial divide that was in stark relief in that primary. However, a slice of this demographic, as we’ve seen, has no qualms declaring that they will not vote for a black man under any circumstances — even if voting for a Republican is against their basic economic interests. You have to think those folks are unlikely to be moved by an endorsement by Edwards.

So what, if anything, do you think this endorsement means in the greater scheme of things?

So NARAL endorsed Obama, in a move that was sure to create what you laypeople call “controversy”. The bloodletting at their blog comments is disturbing. You’d think they endorsed, oh, McCain or someone anti-choice, when they instead endorsed a pro-choice candidate they’ve had a long and fruitful relationship with.

It’s not a crazy choice, or even necessarily a badly timed one. NARAL has long thought of itself as a strategic organization, and I suspect that they think that Obama’s the better bet for beating McCain in November. And beating McCain is more important from a pro-choice perspective than the choice between Obama and Clinton, who have pretty much identical views on reproductive rights. Or maybe they think that an endorsement released now will help hurry up an end to the primary season, so the party can focus its energies on fighting McCain, who has pretty much promised to spike the Supreme Court with justices hostile to women’s rights.

In fact, they said as much in their press release.

NARAL Pro-Choice America PAC is making our endorsement now because every day that passes, Sen. McCain gets a free ride on the issue of choice. That free ride ends today.

It’s about moving onto the next stage, the most important stage: Getting a pro-choice Democrat into the White House.

There’s a scent of sour grapes in the air around the Clinton campaign, and from a feminist perspective, I’m boggled. Sure, I understand that it’s disappointing if “electing a female President” was a major priority for you and that’s getting thwarted. But if you support women’s rights, you need to put your support behind the Democratic nominee, even if it’s Obama and it’s likely to be. McCain can’t even support equal pay for women! He’s going to continue the assault on reproductive rights that the Bush administration started. If you support women, have some pity on us in our fertile years living in red states who sorely need a political break in our direction right now, namely a pro-choice Democrat in the White House. Which Obama is, in case there’s a whiff of doubt created by this needlessly contentious primary season.

(UPDATE: The GOP is in a panic over the legacy of this administration and its effect on November elections. See below the fold.)

We all know Dear Leader has no shame, but here’s yet another example of his terror alert leash jerking and fearmongering, intimating that electing a Democrat will lead to disaster if the U.S. withdraws from Iraq.

President Bush warned in an interview Tuesday that the Democratic presidential candidates’ plans to withdraw abruptly from Iraq could “eventually lead to another attack on the United States” and would “embolden” terrorists.

In a White House interview with Politico and Yahoo News — a president’s first for an online audience — Bush said his doomsday scenario for a premature withdrawal “of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States.”

I hate to break it to his highness, but he f*cked up the whole region with his Big Military Adventure. It’s hard to imagine anyone screwing over both this country and Iraq any more than he has.

In the interview, he also shows how he prays away any guilt at sending young Americans to perish fighting military battles based on his bad judgment and Darth’s dark hand. God’s comfort is all these families need, not an apology from the man sitting in the Oval Office.

His Christian faith has increased in office, since “part of the faith walk is to understand your weaknesses and is to constantly try to embetter yourself and get closer to the Lord, and that’s a daily occurrence.”

“Obviously, there’s been some tough moments in here,” he said. “When you know that somebody lost their loved one as a result of a decision that I made, that’s a tough moment. If you’re a faithful person, you try to empathize with the suffering that that person is going through. On the other hand, there is a knowledge that the good Lord can comfort during these moments of grief. And that’s what I ask for in my prayer.”

And what can only be described as the public ramblings of a sociopath, our president said he shows his solidarity with families who have lost loved ones in his military misadventure by...not going out on the links anymore. I’m not sh*tting you.

See the video below the fold.
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If you haven’t seen it, here’s the highlight reel of my last reading at Book People.

Amanda Marcotte book reading from Marc Faletti on Vimeo.

It’s a good time! Luckily, for those in Austin who missed the experience the first time around, I’ll be reading at Book Woman tonight at 7PM. Show up and buy some books, yo. Feminist bookstores were the backbone of feminism for a long time, and we’re lucky to have one of the remaining ones in Austin, and they could use the support. I’m sure readers of this blog will find many tempting tomes at Book Woman. I won’t make it out alive with my hands empty, I’m sure. Much to the consternation of those who have to share my living space, because the piles of books around here on my “To Read” list is getting insane.

So I was listening to the latest episode of “On The Media” on Mighty Ponygirl’s suggestion (because they have a great report on the Cult of Ayn Rand and how they’re trying to buy themselves credibility they can’t generate honestly), and I heard this story that I think should be an iconic example of how the Bush administration is both evil and stupid. It’s about the corruption in the Office of Special Counsel, which is a whistleblower protection agency. As you can imagine, the Bush administration is opposed to whistleblowing (and puppies and kittens and sunshine), so they went out and found the craziest asshole wingnut possible to head up this office: Scott Bloch. He did an admirable job of refusing to do the job he was appointed, and in proper BushCo fashion, this exemplar of malfeasance is now facing a cavalcade of subpoenas and general calls for his head. Bloch ran into trouble when he squelched a complaint that came from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, because it turns out they were able to get the FBI to care enough to raid Bloch’s offices, take his computers, and subpoena 17 employees to testify against him. The executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is suggesting that Bloch successfully destroyed the office to the point where it’s easier now to dismantle it and rebuild how the government handles whistleblowers than to salvage the office.

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Via. Most of these that get passed around the internet strike me as hoaxes, but sabotabby got this one from an APA publication that seems to have vetted it for authenticity. Unfortunately, this only seems to be one page, so it’s hard to really get a good idea of your score. I don’t wear red nail polish and my seams are never crooked, but I think that’s probably not going to help me much because of the issues regarding church and children.

The rapist/murderer-releasing, Christian Reconstructionist-supported, Man-On-Dog wannabe, former Arkansas governor, and Baptist minister-without-a-theology-degree Mike Huckabee is back in the news — at least at U.S. News & World Report, in its Capital Commerce column.

A top McCain fundraiser with access to McCain’s inner circle, as well as one of those infamous “top GOP strategists” are saying that the Arizona senator has Pastor Huck at the top of his VP pick list. U.S. News’s James Pethokoukis on the purported logic of picking Huckabee.

1) He is a great campaigner and communicator who could both shore up support in the South among social conservatives (Huckabee is a former Baptist minister) and appeal to working-class voters in the critical “Big 10″ states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio.

2) As any pollster knows, voters search for candidates who “care about people like me,” and Huckabee would probably score a lot higher on that quality than millionaire investor Mitt Romney. Plus, given all the turmoil on Wall Street, 2008 would seem to be a bad year to pick a former investment banker for veep.

3) Economic conservatives and supply-siders may balk, but the threat of four years of Obamanomics and higher investment, income, and corporate taxes might be enough to keep them on board.

More below the fold.
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Jeebus! It must be Americans for Truth Against Homosexuality’s fundraising quarter as we’ve hit the jackpot again, along with Box Turtle Bulletin. It’s completely over the top batsh*t insane beauteous:

The Left knows hate

In their continuing effort to steal the legacy of the real civil rights movement, homosexual activists and their allies posit an analogy between racism and “homophobia” — their smear term of choice to denigrate traditionalists. It is a deeply flawed comparison: what does unchangeable skin color and ethnicity have to do with aberrant, immoral and changeable sexual behavior?

…Moreover, the homosexualists are in the uncomfortable position of making actual descendants of slaves — like Pastor Ken Hutcherson of Antioch Bible Church and ex-lesbian Janet Boynes… — the target of their opprobrium. Men and women of color (like Crystal Dixon, a Black woman who recently was suspended from the University of Toledo after publicly making points similar to these) are mere “religious anti-gay bigots,” according to the homo-fundamentalists’ warped formulations.

Being lectured on intolerance by anti-Christian bigots like Tim Kincaid and Barney Frank — or run-of-the-mill leftist hate sites like Daily Kos — is like the USA being scolded for human rights violations by North Korea. If you think I jest, check out the hate-filled comments and vile anti-Christian insults that flow liberally on lesbian Pam Spaulding’s blog (try doing a search on “Jeebus” — a substitute for “Jesus” that secular snobs use to mock Christians).

Pam’s and Tim’s sites are further proof that nobody hates like the Left. And few on the Left hate like the homosexual activists (with radical pro-abortion-on-demand feminists a close second).

Past endorsements:

A “vicious anti-Christian lesbian activist.”
(Concerned Women for America’s radio show [9:15], 1/25/07)

“A nutty lesbian blogger.”
(MassResistance radio show [16:25], 2/3/07)

Related:
* Pam’s House Blend’s Peter LaBarbera files
* This I believe

Hat tip, Eva.

God, I’m so scared this will turn out to be a forgery, but let’s hope not. I mean, it makes perfect sense that Einstein would have been an atheist, but he’s been held up by religious people as a “good” guy who said all the right things about how god is real and great and the universe is beyond comprehension, that part of me has bought into it. Maybe he issued pandering statements in public but felt differently in private?

But what really makes this letter awesome is that he doesn’t play around.

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

“No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this,” he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper……

“For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions,” he said.

“And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people.”

Please let this be true. It’s just so awesome.

A reminder to Americans with short fucking memories.

The number of anti-vaccination cranks out there on the interwebs seems to be multiplying. It seems you can’t make reference to any kind of vaccination lately without people, sometimes pretending to be liberals (sometimes actually misguided liberals) wailing and moaning about how terrible vaccinations are. It’s the new fluoridation. I’m somewhat surprised that no one wailed and moaned that I mentioned on Pandagon a tetanus vaccination I got the other day, but rest assured, while my arm has been kind of sore, I haven’t yet developed autism.

I have very little patience for cranks as a general rule (which is why working for this site is so fun, because it’s about pushing back against anti-choice cranks), but I reserve a special contempt and loathing for anti-vaccination cranks. They remind me of nothing so much as women who make their living as professional anti-feminists in terms of denial and idiocy levels. Anti-feminist professional women create a special kind of loathing, because they don’t acknowledge that their very ability to be out there earning a paycheck lambasting feminism would not be possible without feminism giving them the right to be women in the public sphere. Anti-vaccination cranks have a similar parasitic relationship to the existence of vaccines. If it weren’t for vaccination, our country would have far more immediate infectious disease health concerns to worry about that the largely imaginary health drawbacks of the vaccination wouldn’t have a chance to ruffle any feathers.

(more…)

As we’ve seen this election cycle, there’s a desperation seen in the MSM talking heads and newpaper columnists, even some blogs, to declare Barack Obama’s success a post-racial triumph in this country — that racism is rapidly becoming a distant memory.

First, take a look at this lovely T-shirt being sold at Mulligan’s Bar and Grill in Marietta/Cobb County, Georgia (h/t Jeremy from Cobb).

Marietta tavern owner Mike Norman says the T-shirts he’s peddling, featuring cartoon chimp Curious George peeling a banana, with “Obama in ‘08″ scrolled underneath, are “cute.” But to a coalition of critics, the shirts are an insulting exploitation of racial stereotypes from generations past.

“It’s time to put an end to this,” said Rich Pellegrino, a Mableton resident and director of the Cobb-Cherokee Immigrant Alliance. It was among the organizations planning to gather outside Mulligan’s Bar and Grill Tuesday afternoon to protest the “racist and highly offensive” shirts.

Just down the street from Marietta’s famous Big Chicken, Mulligan’s has carved a provocative niche in an increasingly multicultural area, thanks to its owner’s ultra-conservative political views. If you live in Marietta, it’s impossible not to know what’s on Norman’s mind, as he posts his views on signs in front of Mulligan’s. Among his recent musings: “I wish Hillary had married OJ,” “No habla espanol — and never will” and the standard “I.N.S. Agents eat free.”

“I’m saying out loud what everyone in this town whispers,” Norman said.

…Norman said those offended are “hunting for a reason to be mad” and insisted he is “not a racist.” Why picture Obama as Curious George? “Look at him . . . the hairline, the ears, he looks just like Curious George,” Norman said.

Not a racist. I guess he doesn’t do Klan night riding on the weekends, so in his mind he’s free and clear of that label. Even sadder, he’s donating the proceeds to the Muscular Dystrophy Association. I wonder what the MDA thinks of this?

More below the fold.
(more…)

PZ reports that researchers have discovered a link between HPV and oral cancers in men, justifying another look at vaccinating young men for HPV (which also improves herd immunity). So now, as PZ notes, the religious right is facing a major dilemma. It’s one thing to tolerate thousands of deaths from cervical cancer, which only affects women, in order to show that the wages of sin are death. But the sin of fornication is a much different thing for men and women—which is why the nuts say that a woman who has sex is impure and contaminated, but a man who does has just let his integrity slip a little, which is something you can get back by giving your bus seat up to a few old ladies. Certainly, we don’t need straight men getting physically contaminated for real to show that sex is contaminating, when the only spiritually contaminated party is the woman. That’s why, after all, it’s not a sign of integrity for a man to have sex with a woman before marriage, because you’re fouling up someone else’s virgin.

Anyway, PZ has a question.

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It doesn’t seem like it’s been a whole year since the last International Mr. Leather. See The Peter’s report last year, “Photos Reveal Twisted Perversions at Chicago’s Palmer House Hilton Hotel.”

Since we know Peter LaBarbera reads my blog, I’ll just post the ticket information link for him (also, here’s the contest application form, Peter). The fetish event, which draws hets and homos, a fact that Peter tries to minimize, is celebrating its 30th year. It will be at the Hyatt Regency Chicago May 22 - May 26. If Peter plays his cards right, he might meet special guest Andy Bell of Erasure, who will perform on Sunday night at the International Mr. Leather Contest.

***

While we’re on the topic of the Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (in my basement) honcho, Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin has a couple of items on Peter. One is on a Christian web site’s embarrassment at the obsessive bleatings at AFTAH:

And why is it just homosexuality. They act as if that is the BIG sin in the scriptures, dismissing all other destructive behaviors and choices. So, I will faithfully be waiting for the following websites to emerge, if these people are really trying to get biblical truth out there

Americans for Truth about Lying
Americans for Truth about Gossip
Americans for Truth about Bitterness
Americans for Truth about Slander
Americans for Truth about Poverty
Americans for Truth about Widows

Jim’s other post concerns The Peter’s new interest in outing Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who has been rumored to be gay for quite some time. Since Crist’s stock has risen as a possible VP selection for McCain, LaBarbera apparently wants to ensure that homosexuals and/or homosexualists are crossed off the potential Veep list early on.

I say to McSame — please consider the recently heterosexually paired governor!

Am I behind the curve because I’ve never heard of one of these before?

A consumer report contains information about your personal and credit characteristics, character, general reputation, and lifestyle.

And how does the reporting agency get that information? By that most American of methods:

[I]nterviews with an applicant’s or employee’s friends, neighbors, and associates

I’m not crazy, right? This is a frighteningly invasive technique when it comes to employment, right?