I doubt that even Barack Obama can save us from our anger now. That’s because the anger that lately pervades our politics is more than just an after effect of six years of Democratic setbacks (although the strikingly angry Democratic response to their six bad years does call for an explanation).
An explaination…did you say? Well…how about this one…
You should go read the rest of Digby’s post. Digby says of the Kurtz review that, "It’s fascinating because it once again illustrates the degree to which conservatives have absolutely no self-awareness", but I don’t think it’s a lack of self awareness so much as a lack of conscience. When they kick people in the teeth, conservatives don’t see that as anything less then their god given right as superior beings. The role of all the rest of us lesser beings is to just stand there and passively take it because…well…they have a god given right to dish it out to us and if we object, we’re the ones being mean. To them. And of course, if we decide to dish it right back then we are being positively uncivil.
Speaking of which…have you noticed how the word, "civility" has become some kind of watchword recently? Civility. Civility. The news media has suddenly discovered that it is important for us to be civil. Now that the democrats are back in power. Goodness knows it wasn’t important when people like the lady in the photo above were in power. Goodness knows it wasn’t important back when Rush Limbaugh was playing "It’s Raining Men" right after news broke that a New York Times reporter had committed suicide by jumping out an office window. Goodness knows it wasn’t important when Ann Coulter said the only problem she has with Timothy McVeigh is that he didn’t go to the New York Times building. Now that democrats are back in power, the news media that treated Limbaugh and Coulter like elder statesmen have suddenly discovered that incivility is a bad thing. Gosh.
Digby reminds us about the little list of words the father of the new incivility, Newt Gingrich made for republicans to use every time they talked about democrats…
He became famous (with some help from his cohorts) for being a manipulative, vicious asshole and the lesson was well learned. He went on to create a lexicon of derision, used by Republicans everywhere, to describe Democrats and liberals. He called these words "contrast":
Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.
I realize it is churlish of us liberals to attempt to defend ourselves from this kind of bad faith and even worse for us to lose our Gary Cooper cool. But, you know, when you push people far enough and hard enough they start to fight for their survival. The level of vitriol and hate emanating from the right — and encouraged by Republicans leaders of all stripes — has been overwhelming. These past twelve years alone have been characterized by smears, toxic rhetoric, impeachments, abuse of power, stolen elections, power mad governance, corruption and ineptitude. So yes, we’re angry — but more importantly, we are fearful for our country.
Until Republicans admit what they have wrought and recognize that their trash talking and boot-to-the-throat mode of fetid politics are responsible for our state today, then for the good of the country, I hope the left remains angry and battles them back with everything they’ve got.
This is ugly, I admit. But the country just can’t take another couple of decades of Republican politics and Republican rule. We have to stop it — and it won’t be stopped if Democrats play nice.
No. It won’t. I say this over and over again but it’s true: we’re in a knife fight with these people. You either fight back to win, or you just stand there and let them laugh in your face and kick your balls, because that’s just what they’ll do, and keep doing, even after you’ve curled up in the fetal position. They don’t care. They hate you. They hate you with a passion that your gay and lesbian neighbors have seen first hand for decades now. Digby’s right. Until the republicans are held accountable for the past couple decades of vitriol and hate they’ve been spewing into the political well all that this newly discovered concern about the level of incivility amounts to, is just another way of keeping us passive while they get to keep kicking everyone they despise in the face. It won’t stop until they’re held accountable.
"[W]e are leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion, rather than working within the Judeo-Christian principles that have made us a beacon for freedom-loving persons around the world."
— Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA), in an op-ed published in today’s USA Today, explaining why he believes the United States should refuse immigrants from the Middle East.
You may recall, this is the wanker who pitched a fit when congressman elect Keith Ellison announced he would take the oath of office in a ceremony using the Koran, instead of the Bible, and then went on to pitch a fit about Muslim immigrants pouring into the United States, and then went on to avow that he would never take the oath on the "Kor-Ran" (I watched him on a newscast…that’s how he keeps pronouncing it) and that he only wanted to "…draw attention to the need to acknowledge the Bible as the basis of America’s moral values. Judeo-Christian values are the greatest single protection against another Holocaust".
Well Virgil…it’s really swell that you’re so busy defending American from people who want to mold it into the image of their religion. Now…how about you go find yourself a mirror and tell it to the gutter crawling jackass you see in there. Kor-Ran. Kor-Ran. Kor-Ran.
There’s Knowing…And Then There’s Not Wanting You To Know Too…
There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent. -Ezra Pound
The raging debate about gay rights ultimately turns on one simple question. And, bizarrely, the fact that answering this question will put a definitive end to the national battle over gay rights is almost completely unknown, not only in America in general, but among gay people as well. At its core, the answer to this question is the only one that matters, the one that determines the most appropriate public policy course, and the one that will win the political struggle over gay rights: Is homosexuality a lifestyle choice or is homosexuality an inborn biological trait? Put another way, does someone choose to be gay or are they just born that way? You may be surprised to find out that we already know the answer to this question. In fact, surprising as it may be, we’ve known the answer for several decades.
I disagree that this is the only question that matters. But never mind. The brilliance I’m referring to here, isn’t in Burr’s framing of the question, but of his framing of the answer. We’ve known the answer for several decades. Yes. Just so. If the question is a pitch by the religious right, then Burr smacks it clear out of the ballpark with this…
A bit of Biology 101: For every human trait they study, clinicians and biologists assemble what’s called a "trait profile," the sum total of all the data they have gathered clinically (clinical research basically means research done through 1. questions and 2. empirical observation to answer the questions) about a trait. Researchers gather groups of subjects from different areas of the world, question them about their trait, observe the trait in them, and record the data. The various aspects of the trait are precisely described: gradations and variations in eye color are assessed, eye color’s correlation or lack thereof with gender, geography, race, or age is noted, scientists observe the way eye color is passed down through generations—all of which are clues as to whether or not eye color is a biological trait. The data are summarized in papers and charts and published in the scientific literature. That, in sum, makes up the trait profile.
Here is the profile of a trait on which clinical research has been done for decades. It is taken from the published scientific literature. The trait should be rather obvious:
1) This human trait is referred to by biologists as a "stable bimorphism"— it shows up in all human populations as two orientations— expressed behaviorally.
2) The data clinicians have gathered says that around 92% of the population has the majority orientation, 8% has the minority orientation.
3) Evidence from art history suggests the incidence of the two different orientations has been constant for five millennia.
4) The trait has no external physical, bodily signs. That means you can’t tell a person’s orientation by looking at them. And the minority orientation appears in all races and ethnic groups.
5) Since the trait itself is internal and invisible, the only way to identify an orientation is by observing the behavior or the reflex that expresses it. However—and this is crucial—
6) –because the trait itself is not a "behavior" but an internal, invisible orientation, those with the minority orientation can hide, usually due to coercion or social pressure, by behaving as if they had the majority orientation. Several decades ago, those with the minority orientation were frequently forced to behave as if they had the majority orientation— but internally the orientation remained the same and as social pressures have lifted, people with the minority orientation have been able to openly express it.
7) Clinical observation makes it clear that neither orientation of this trait is a disease or mental illness. Neither is pathological in any observable way.
8) Neither orientation is chosen.
9) Signs of one’s orientation are detectable very early in children, often, researchers have established, by age two or three. And one’s orientation probably has been defined at the latest by age two, and quite possibly before birth.
These data indicated that the trait was biological, not social, in origin, so the clinicians systematically asked more questions. And these started revealing the genetic plans that lay underneath the trait:
10) Adoption studies show that the orientation of adopted children is unrelated to the orientation of their parents, demonstrating that the trait is not created by upbringing or society.
11) Twin studies show that pairs of identical twins, with their identical genes, have a higher-than-average chance of sharing the same orientation compared to pairs of randomly selected individuals; the average rate of this trait in any given population— it’s called the "background rate"—is just under 8%, while the twin rate is just above 12%, more than 50% higher.
12) This trait’s incidence of the minority orientation is strikingly higher in the male population— about 27% higher—than it is in the female population. Many genetic diseases, for reasons we now understand pretty well, are higher in men than women.
13) Like the trait called eye color, the familial studies conducted by scientists show that the minority orientation clearly "runs in families," handed down from parent to child.
14) This pattern shows a "maternal effect," a classic telltale of a genetic trait. The minority orientation, when it is expressed in men, appears to be passed down through the mother.
Put all this data together, and you’ve created the trait profile. The trait just described is, of course, handedness.
Yes. What we’re all seeing with regard to human sexual orientation, is nothing new or surprising. Burr compares the two traits, handedness and sexual orientation side-by-side and the likenesses are striking, as is the obvious conclusion. We already know this… I entered first grade back in 1959. I remember vividly the sight of a classmate having his left arm tied down to his side by the teachers (two of them). The boy’s parents had asked them to do that, if they saw the boy using his left hand to write or draw with. The thinking being that if you just forced a kid to use their right hand, they would eventually grow out of using their left. That was 1959. You may notice that they’re not doing that to left handed kids anymore. But there was a time when left-handedness was considered a mark of the devil.
It’s an image that has stuck in my mind ever since, and all the more so after I began my own process of coming to grips with my sexual orientation. I’m gay. You can pressure me into acting against it…teach me one lie after another about homosexuality, make me come to fear and loath my sexual nature so much I might never touch another male with desire without experiencing waves of guilt and self hatred and fear. You can pass one law after another, penalizing and even criminalizing same sex relationships…in effect tying that part of me down. And yet I am still gay. The idea that you can make me not-gay by tying that part of me down is false. You can no more make me not-gay then you can make me left handed by tying down my right arm. That model of sexual orientation, as a learned or adaptive behavior is wrong. It isn’t like that. Neither was handedness. But…we know that.
We’ve known the answer for several decades… Burr, and many other people of good conscience, need to look at that simple fact. I mean…really look at it. Ironically, Burr gives it a glancing shot here:
Behavior isn’t sexual orientation, and the difference between behavior and orientation is as obvious as lying: When you tell a lie, you know perfectly well what the truth is inside…
And so do people like James Dobson, and all the others of his kind in the religious right, who routinely lie about the work of real scientists in order to incite anti-gay passions. Because inciting anti-gay passions translates into money in the collection plate, and votes at the polls, and tens of thousands of obediant followers who jump whenever you tell them to…and more importantly, bend their knees. You can’t distort the science the way the leaders of the religious right are, without knowing that you’re distorting it. That’s lying. And when you lie, you know you’re doing it. They Know.
This is where Burr, and others, chiefly honest men and women of science and other civilized people, get it wrong. Yes, facts matter, because ultimately you cannot fool nature. But this isn’t a matter of convincing the opposition that they’re wrong. They know they’re wrong, or they wouldn’t be lying. The only question that matters isn’t whether sexual orientation is chosen or not, it’s whether the people who still insist that it is, have a conscience or not. Because if they don’t have one, then appealing to it is utterly futile.
But…you should go read the rest of Burr’s piece. For the shear pleasure of watching him smack the ball out of the park. For the next time next time someone like Dobson goes babbling on about homosexuality and choice, so you can see with sickening clarity what a moral runt they are. We don’t force right handedness on left handed kids because we know how damaging that is to them. It’s damaging to gay kids too. Profoundly so. And yes…the religious right knows that too. They’ve known for several decades.
When the president and vice-president are killed by domestic terrorists (of unknown political identity), a radical leftist army calling itself the Progressive Restoration takes over New York City and declares itself the rightful government of the United States. Other blue states officially recognize the legitimacy of the group, thus starting a second civil war. Card’s heroic red-state protagonists, Maj. Reuben "Rube" Malek and Capt. Bartholomew "Cole" Coleman, draw on their Special Ops training to take down the extremist leftists and restore peace to the nation. The action is overshadowed by the novel’s polemical message, which Card tops off with an afterword decrying his own politically-motivated exclusion from various conventions and campuses, the "national media elite" and the divisive excesses of both the right and the left.
It is chilling to note that this man, who detests homosexuals down to the bedrock of his being, wrote the Hugo Award winning novel Ender’s Game, which as it happens, attempts to elicit sympathy for someone who commits genocide (he didn’t really mean to, you see…) against an alien race that just happens to be called throughout the novel "the buggers". Gosh…I guess I shouldn’t read anything into that. And here he is now, thumping a novel that begins with the premise that liberals and progressives intend to start a civil war. You can read the first few chapters online Here. Have a sample, via Alicublog:
"You look pissed off," said Malich.
"Yeah," said Cole. "The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy."
"They won’t be so happy when they see where it leads. They’ve already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders."
"I bet they’re already ‘advising’ Americans that this is where our military ‘aggression’ inevitably leads, so we should take this as a sign that we need to change our policies and retreat from the world."
"And maybe we will," said Malich. "A lot of Americans would love to slam the doors shut and let the rest of the world go hang."
"And if we did," said Cole, "who would save Europe then? How long before they find out that negotiations only work if the other guy is scared of the consequences of not negotiating? Everybody hates America till they need us to liberate them."
"You’re forgetting that nobody cares what Europeans think except a handful of American intellectuals who are every bit as anti-American as the French," said Malich.
What the good guys are fighting for is to get the war stopped before it’s fully started. To enable the country to bind its wounds and end this horrible division, so one of the key decisions I made was having Maj. Reuben "Rube" Malek be a true-blue, red-state soldier, but he’s married to a committed blue-stater who is politically active and involved in Congress but is able to speak the language of both sides. She’s a conciliator. In the novel, her sensibility becomes vital to establishing the nature of the resolution, so that we have a happy ending no matter which camp you’re in.
It’s the same way in the game. When you’re fighting, you’re definitely fighting one side against the other. There are situations that you’re only fighting that way because they’re shooting at you. And all along, you want this sucker to end. It’s a war between brothers, it’s a civil war, but our people never forget that they’re brothers with the people on the other side.
If America becomes a place where the laws of the nation declare that marriage no longer exists – which is what the Massachusetts decision actually does – then our allegiance to America will become zero. We will transfer our allegiance to a society that does protect marriage
So much for binding wounds and brotherhood. But it’s not civil war, or genocide for that matter if you thought it was just a game.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That’s not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
If you read nothing else this weekend, you should read this article by Mark Danner in The New York Review of Books. Reprinted with permission by Tom Engelhardt on his blog, TomDispatch, it’s the best account I’ve seen yet of how that right wing separate reality that Ron Suskind was writing about in that New York Times Magazine article above, dragged this country into the war in Iraq. Read it if for nothing else, to understand that the people responsible for the worst military debacle in U.S. history are Still living in that fantasyland.
…the War of Imagination draped all the complications and contradictions of the history and politics of a war-torn, brutalized society in an ideologically driven vision of a perfect future. Small wonder that its creators, faced with grim reality, have been so loath to part with it. Since the first thrilling night of shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm by the American television networks, the Iraq war has had at least two histories, that of the war itself and that of the American perception of it. As the months passed and the number of attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two histories opened wider and wider. And finally, for most Americans, the War of Imagination — built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about "spreading democracy" and "greetings with sweets and flowers," and then about "dead-enders" and "turning points," and finally about "staying the course" and refusing "to cut and run" — began, under the pressure of nearly three thousand American dead and perhaps a hundred thousand or more dead Iraqis, to give way to grim reality.
Why was there no plan for what to do After Saddam fell? The only figment of a plan existed at the Pentagon, and that was simply to install Ahmad Chalabi and his exiles as the new Iraqi government. But President Junior vetoed that plan as running too Obviously counter to his professed goal of spreading democracy in the region. It just wouldn’t do to be Seen imposing a new set of rulers on the Iraqi people. So plan A was discarded, and they never came up with a plan B.
And if you’re asking why Junior didn’t notice that there was no plan B, you probably weren’t paying attention back when he was running for president in 2000 either. This entire debacle is what happens when you give a pampered jackass who never learned the value of a dollar and never had to fix anything he ever broke, responsibility for something. His entire skill set in 2000 consisted of knowing how to bully people into giving him what he wanted, and getting them to clean up after the messes he made. That’s all there was on his resume, because that’s all he’s ever had to do in his life to get by. And when the republicans on the Supreme Court short circuited the electoral process to get him in, Bush brought his skill set right into the White House with him. That he’s made an unmitigated mess of everything he could get his hands on in the Executive branch since, plus everything he could bully his rubber stamp republican congress into giving him, should surprise no one. There was no plan B for Iraq, not because of overconfidence, but because in Bush’s entire life failure was always someone else’s fault, and someone else’s problem.
Subtract Iraq from the books, and you have a disaster. There’s the wreckage he’s left in the constitutional balance of powers. There’s the wreckage he’s left of the rule of law. There’s the wreckage in the arts and sciences. There’s the wreckage of the City of New Orleans. We Lost A City On His Term. This Thanksgiving nearly one-hundred thousand refugees from an American City were still living in FEMA trailors. There’s the staggering debt he’s piled up in just six years, dispensing favors to cronies. There’s the wreckage of the health care system. And not just domestically. In Africa, the rates of HIV infection have started to rise as a consequence of Bush’s ideological opposition to condom use. And there is the wreckage of the American political landscape. Republican scorched earth politics have made it nearly impossible for Americans to talk with each other across the isle. The cold war has turned inward. Subtract Iraq and you still have a disaster of mind boggling scale. Factor it back in and you have an unmitigated nightmare. And that nightmare will be running its course long after he is out of office.
We are well down the road toward this dark vision, a wave of threatening instability that stands as the precise opposite of the Bush administration’s "democratic tsunami," the wave of liberalizing revolution that American power, through the invasion of Iraq, was to set loose throughout the Middle East. The chances of accomplishing such change within Iraq itself, let alone across the complicated landscape of the entire region, were always very small. Saddam Hussein and the autocracy he ruled were the product of a dysfunctional politics, not the cause of it. Reform of such a politics was always going to be a task of incalculable complexity.
Faced with such complexity, and determined to have their war and their democratic revolution, the President and his counselors looked away. Confronted with great difficulties, their answer was to blind themselves to them and put their faith in ideology and hope — in the dream of a welcoming landscape, magically transformed. The evangelical vision may have made the sense of threat after September 11 easier to bear but it did not change the risks and the reality on the ground. The result is that the wave of change the President and his officials were so determined to set in course by unleashing American military power may well turn out to be precisely the wave of Islamic radicalism that they had hoped to prevent.
How did it come to this? The blame for it cannot rest entirely on Junior’s stooped shoulders alone. It isn’t as though anyone with half a brain couldn’t see him for what he was back in 2000. There’s talk since the election about how Bush fooled a lot of people. Perhaps. But not the majority of those who voted for him. It is worth bearing in mind that the changes that swept through congress and the statehouses last election day, came largely on very thin margins of victory. In the face of one major Bush administration scandal, one disaster after another after another, these voters simply cannot be taken for chumps. No. They know what they’re voting for.
The politics of resentment has a large constituency. The fact that Al Gore was the more qualified candidate in 2000 counted against him with that voting block. His intelligence and wonkish grasp of the issues was like nails on a blackboard to them. They liked Bush precisely for his know-nothing sense of entitlement, his cheapness of spirit, and all his simmering resentments which were theirs too. He was their ideal man, living the good life they’d always dreamed of. A life of power over others, new toys every day, and the canned respect of doting sycophants who always have to smile at you, and do whatever you tell them, and never ever ever tell you that you’re wrong about anything, because you never are, everyone else is.
The support the Bush republicans have today now rests on nothing more profound then a desire to put a thumb in the eye of everyone who can deal with the world as it is, not as they might wish it to be. The more their imaginary world collapses around them, the more they’ll be blaming the reality based community for it. And when the bills come due, the constituency of resentment will blame everyone else for the mess it made, probably including Bush too.
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq’s civil war worsened Friday as Shiite and Sunni Arabs across the country engaged in retaliatory attacks following coordinated car bombings that killed 215 people in a Shiite slum the previous day.
They’ll say Bush deceived them. He didn’t. He promised them their dreams would come true. They have.
Buoyed by a national tide against Republicans, Mayor Martin O’Malley declared victory in the governor’s race last night, appearing to have prevailed in his long and difficult campaign against a popular incumbent. Despite a poor showing in the crucial Baltimore suburbs, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. said he will not concede until thousands of absentee ballots are counted.
With more than four-fifths of the state’s precincts reporting, Ehrlich, Maryland’s first Republican governor in a generation, faced a large deficit that he could overcome only by capturing the vast majority of absentee votes.
…
Ehrlich told several hundred backers at the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore early this morning that his administration had a "decent shot" at another four years.
"We don’t know, folks, we just don’t know," Ehrlich said. "We will count the votes. We will count all the votes. … We’ve been around 20 years, and we’ve got a decent shot to be around four more."
Ehrlich’s speech interrupted O’Malley’s televised victory declaration, prompting boos from the crowd at the Hippodrome who could see the governor’s image on a big-screen television.
"I’m still waiting for the call, by the way," O’Malley said.
He’ll be waiting a long time. A lot of people in this state are under the mistaken impression that Ehrlich is a moderate. He’s nothing of the kind. He’s an Ellen Sauerbrey right wing republican kook who’s only real difference from Sauerbrey is that he was willing to put up the appearance of being a moderate so he could win elections. He has not governed as a moderate, except when he knew damn he didn’t have the votes in the statehouse to win on a particular issue. Maryland limits governors to two terms, so you would have seen a much more hard line Ehrlich in his second term, particularly if he had presidential aspirations. You can see what he’s really made of now. It’s Ellen Sauerbrey loosing badly all over again.
Republicans said they believe the governor can make up ground when the record number of absentee ballots are tallied. More than 190,000 people requested absentee ballots after calls by Ehrlich and Democratic leaders to use them as a means to bypass the state’s new electronic voting machines. More Democrats than Republicans requested absentee ballots, however.
Election workers will begin counting those ballots on scanning machines tomorrow, but election challenges from the lawyers who have been retained by both political parties could prevent a winner from being officially declared for weeks. The last time an election was this close, in 1994, the losing candidate, Ellen R. Sauerbrey, pursued a legal challenge for two months and never conceded defeat.
Go for it Bob. Let the people in the rest of the state see the real you finally.
Next time some republican half-wit starts yapping at you about how Militiant Homosexual activists and Liberal Activist Judges hate the democratic process because they don’t want the voters to decide the issue of same sex marriage…laugh in their face.
Laura Ingraham has asked her listeners to call the Dem Voter protection hotline — and they are now being flooded with calls from crank callers. Please call Laura and tell her what you think about this: 800.876.4123. You can e-mail her here. Apparently, voter intimidation and fraud are a joke to Laura Ingraham. Let’s let her know that it is no joke […]
More on Laura Ingraham: "caller indicated she is running a tape of Bill Clinton over and over saying "call 1-888 Dem Vote to report problems" — and then making fun of him, thus producing a spike in crank calls to the number" Protecting voter integrity is no joke. And I am not laughing. If anyone has audio of this, I’d love it.
The headquarters for Jay Fawcett’s campaign for Colorado’s 5th Congressional District was vandalized overnight and a death threat – the third such threat – was also emailed to Fawcett. Both incidents have been reported to the police.
As voters headed to the polls, Fawcett campaign volunteers arriving at campaign offices were greeted with a vile "Skunk" aroma, making it virtually impossible to conduct work there. The campaign is expecting more than 200 people to come through the offices today to help with Get Out The Vote and Poll Watching efforts.
"Don’t let these hooligans deter you from exercising your Constitutional right to vote," said Fawcett. "It’s time to take a stand against these attacks."
This is the second time the Fawcett Campaign has been vandalized. Last Tuesday the Campaign Finance Director’s car was covered in the skunk smell, while parked out front of the El Paso County Republican Office.
"I find it disgusting that, as we are fighting for Democracy in Iraq, people are besmirching Democracy here in Colorado Springs," said Fawcett Campaign Manager Wanda James. "Death threats and childish illegal activities will not deter us from getting out the vote to victory today."
Bush republicans. They love America. Really. It’s just democracy they hate.
I’m stealing this from Steve Gilliard, because I want to make sure you read it. But then he reposted from Wonkette. Late Night Shots is a young republican social networking website. Next time you hear some republican halfwit on Captial Hill bellyaching about welfare moms and raising the minimum wage, remember this…
As we’re sure you know by now, Late Night Shots is a closed social networking site for DC’s best and whitest. We turbos have a lot to learn from them. Their message board is home to some of the best entertainment on all the internets — but because of the closed nature of the site, not everyone can join in the fun. Thankfully, Intern Lauren is a card-carrying LNS member, and she’s gathered excerpts from some of last week’s best posts on the LNS forum. See what the fuss is about, after the jump.
My boyfriend’s dad
Posted By: HHHS00 on 10-23-2006 12:40 pm
I recently found out that the dad of the guy I am hooking up is a dentist. Where I come from dentists are looked at as sheisters. I think this guy may have been hiding it from me, and in my mind he lost some serious points after this revelation.
Lying about Greek affiliation
Posted By: very concerned on 10-19-2006 11:20 am
At age 29 if you’re dating a chick, how big of a problem is it if you’re digging through her desk and you find out that she was lying about what sorority she was in. This happened to a friend of mine.
RE: Lying about Greek affiliation
Posted By: problem on 10-19-2006 11:23 am
I think that’s a bit of an issue. More than the lying, you don’t want to date a girl who couldn’t get into a good house. It spells problems down the road.
Interview Mentality
Posted By: Williams College on 10-26-2006 1:49 am
Am I wrong to think it is a big advantage to go into an interview on the hill with a chief staff assistant knowing that he was an R.A. during college and that you were a D3 varsity athlete. It has always given me a leg up, both in terms of toughness and maturity, and I feel like it always will.
what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: cashmoney on 10-25-2006 6:21 pm
gifts? education? do you draw your line at maintenance?
RE: what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: taxman on 10-25-2006 6:23 pm
Someone should receive absolutely no more than 30 k/yr and car payments from parents. If you’re above that, you really have problems. Girls may be entitled to a bit more than that with shopping and everything, but I feel like 30k is pretty reasonable.
RE: what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: the cleaners on 10-26-2006 11:07 am
What is an acceptable allowance to give your girlfriend. $200 per week?
Absolutely no more the 30k a year. And car payments. Absolutely no more. Geeze pal…I guess you’d have committed suicide or something if you’d had my childhood, and mine wasn’t so bad by comparison. I never went to bed hungry. Never. But I wore a lot of second hand clothes until I was about 12 or so. And it wasn’t until I was 14 that we even had a car in the household. Color TV didn’t come into the house until I was about 15. A fine night eating out was a trip to Howard Johnson’s or Hot Shoppes. Vacations were to Ocean City New Jersey or Rehoboth Beach. The most exotic vacations I had when I was a kid were the two trips we made by train to Fort Lauderdale Florida when I was 7 and 8. I lived in apartments my entire life, until June of 2001 when I settled on Casa del Garrett, the little Baltimore rowhouse I have now. Home ownership did not come into my life until I was 47. And for all that, I’ve had it good compared to a Lot of other Americans.
My first real job was flipping burgers at a fast food joint. There was no money for college but I did manage three semesters of community college until dad died and I had to work full time to keep the household afloat. Mom was able to co-sign for the loan on my first car when I was 20, but I had to make the payments myself. Does it really hurt that much to have to buy your own goddamned car when you’ve clearly had the best education money can buy and on top of whatever golden job the republican network has dropped in your lap, your parents are throwing 30k a year at you too?
If I hear one more jackass pundit bellyaching that democrats are out of touch with America’s working families I’m going to fucking scream.
It makes me so angry that gay and lesbian people have this need to fully define themselves by their sexual preference. Is there nothing else about their lives that is worth talking about? Honestly, most homosexuals I have known are the most creative, energetic people. Can’t they think of themselves as something other than "gay?"
Hey lady…maybe we should think of ourselves the way this online pal of yours does…
Homosexuals are *not* "ordinary people" nor are they or ever will be "normal". They are biological, genetic, sexual, and cultural, defectives.
Lady…we’re not defining ourselves by our sexual orientation…your kind are defining us by it. You brick-brained jackasses just can’t see the people for the homosexuals, can you? And for that reason a lot of us by the time we are adults can’t think of ourselves as anything other then biological, genetic, sexual, and cultural, defectives…let alone gay. But most of those are living desperately in the closet and they take great pains not to bother your delicate sensibilities. You don’t actually have a problem with homosexuals that can’t see themselves as anything other then homosexuals. It’s those of us who Do think of ourselves, mostly, as something other then gay, that you have a problem with…because we’re living our lives openly and proudly. Human beings do that.
Lady…you think the closet is such a great place…you fucking live there then.
There are attributes of marriage that same-sex couples will never achieve. But in the minds of radical activists, getting the label and a piece of paper saying so will be close enough.
For instance, a woman who engages in lesbianism will never know the joy of lovemaking that creates within her the product of that union — an actual human life. She will never know the security of a true man protecting her from the dragons of the world and providing for her an environment where she can nurture and give love to that little life once it arrives, or the stamp of approval that God puts on such an experience. And because she and her partner know this, they must defy reason, biology and sexual function to create children and experiences that serve as faulty substitutes for that God-ordained picture.
You have to figure a true man is someone who prefers his women helpless, which somehow doesn’t make any sense but then expecting sense from a brick brained idiot like Kevin McCullough (the author) is a bit like expecting a pig to shit pearls. McCallough isn’t just pissing on the happy couplehood of lesbians there, but also every heterosexual couple that cannot have children of their own too. So any children they manage to have must also serve only as faulty substitutes for the God-ordained picture thing.
You need to notice this: What McCullough is saying there, is that Any Child not naturally brought into a family can only be a faulty substitute for the Real Thing. Adopted children cannot be loved and cherished like Real Children can. Children conceived by various medical means likewise cannot be loved and cherished like Real Children. Their families can never be as loving, as caring, as nurturing as Real Families can…they can only be faulty substitutes for the God Ordained picture thing. You have to love how, in attacking the households of gay couples, these gutter crawling maggots show just how much they regard themselves as holier then…well…just about everyone else, not just gays. And if you think they don’t mean their rhetoric to apply equally to childless heterosexual couples too, think again.
But even when it comes to reason, biology, and sexual function, McCullough doesn’t get it right.
Likewise, a man who seeks his perverse kicks by depositing the seed of life in, shall we say, non-life-giving cavities, may know orgasm, but never complete union, as he uses anatomy in ways for which the Creator did not create it.
It’s called the prostate gland Kevin. Massaging the prostate gland, which is what happens during a certain kind of male to male sex, can bring a human male to a right dandy orgasm. Now…I am unaware of any other gland in the human body that will produce such a result when it’s rubbed. In fact, most of them will probably produce a sharp stab of pain when you do that to them. But not that particular gland, in that particular location in the male anatomy. The conclusion is obvious. God did, in fact, intend for males to be fucked. It probably helps if they’re gay though.
I keep bringing up the prostate because it’s something worth paying attention to. It wasn’t lax moral standards that did that. It wasn’t hedonism. It wasn’t Godlessness. It was millions of years of adaptive evolution that gave that to human males, even the ones with absolutely no use for it at all. Or, if you don’t believe in evolution, fine. Then God did it. But there it is. If you’re going to go on a pulpit thumping rant about God’s design, the fucking take some notice of God’s design willya? Open your goddamn eyes every now and then and fucking take a look at what God hath wrought…okay? Just a suggestion.
By coincidence I came across this article in the Economist just prior to reading that Pam’s House Blend post, which seems to do nothing more then idly wonder why homosexuality exists in nature. It starts off with a pretty good observation though…
WHAT is taught in a country’s schools reveals much about the national psyche. The Norwegian curriculum requires that all 14-year-olds learn about homosexuality. Assisting with this education, the National History Museum at the University of Oslo has just opened an exhibition of gay animals.
“Against Nature?” does not tell zoologists anything new. Homosexuality has been recorded in some 1,500 species so far, and been well documented in about a third of these cases; it has been known since the time of Aristotle, who thought he witnessed two male hyenas having sex with one another. But the exhibition’s purpose is not to educate zoologists. It is to persuade the public that, as there are gay whales and worms, gay humans do not disturb the natural order.
And ends with another…
Taking lessons on sexuality from the birds and the bees itself requires first accepting something not taught ubiquitously outside Norway—that evolution occurs by natural selection.
Ya think? Well that leaves a large swath of the United States out. We have crackpots here who can’t even divine God’s will from the evidence of our own bodies, let alone the workings of nature.
Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been staring into this sewer for decades now and the only thing that keeps surprising me personally, is how big the lies have to get before anyone in the mainstream news media notices the stench. But it isn’t the big outrages like Foley you should be paying attention to. It’s the quick little moments of flinching guile, when even though honesty won’t hurt them, they still can’t own up to anything. Let me show you one I came across this morning, while reading the news.
Pure. Think about that word for a moment. Think about the images it conjures. Pure. Edinburgh University’s course on Christian marriage is called, "Pure". It teaches students Orthodox Christian teaching on relationships and sex. It teaches chastity before marriage and so on. Oh, and incidentally, that homosexuality can be cured. Well…maybe not just incidentally …
Students nationwide have expressed their outrage after a Christian course aiming to ‘cure’ homosexuality piloted at Edinburgh University.
Students at the university began protesting the PURE course after it was discovered to recommend homophobic literature, such as What Some of You Were by Christopher Keane, which details the stories of "ex-gays" who have been “cured” of their homosexuality by the power of Christianity, and how "gay relationships are characterized more by promiscuity than by fidelity."
In response to the course, students at Edinburgh set up a Facebook group called "Stop Pure", which has enlisted 1,400 members within a fortnight. Students from around the country have joined from universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews and Kings College London.
Group creator Lucy Chambers said: "We want to use the group to help make students aware of the issues raised by the presence of this course on our campuses and to encourage them to make a stand. Facebook is a great means to contact lots of students up and down the country in the space of a few minutes.
"We have already set in motion a process whereby our students’ association is investigating the course and it is our hope that we will be able to use the group, or perhaps set up a new one, to affect change nationwide."
Which, in their own way, is something the creators of "Pure" also have in mind…
The controversy surrounding the course called Pure, began after pilot courses were held at Edinburgh University. The pilot was deemed a success and the Edinburgh University Student newspaper printed details of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship plans to roll out the courses across Britain.
But just because the Colleges Christian Fellowship is teaching kids that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex, and that they can pray their dirty godless habit away, that doesn’t mean they’re homophobic mind you…
The [University’s Student Representative Council] has already been backed by the university’s chaplain, who said the course can no longer be held at the chapel for fear of upsetting people. But Matthew Tindale, a [Christian Union] staff worker, has denied it is discriminatory against homosexuals.
He said: "This is looking at the orthodox view on marriage, which says there should be no sex before marriage.
"If a heterosexual man came along who sleeps around, I am sure he would find it uncomfortable too.
Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
"This is not about discriminating against homosexuals.
"Christian teaching shows that all sin is treated the same way, whether you are homosexual or heterosexual."
Now, look at that for a minute, look at the flinching guile in that statement. He could have said, "Yes but the bible calls upon us to discriminate." But he didn’t do that. Instead he threw out a cheap sophistry. Now think again about what "pure" means. Does the word "truth" also come to mind? As in, Honest? Genuine. Real. Pure. Here we have a course that is ostensibly about marriage, which is in fact more about spreading ex-gay propaganda then it is about marriage, and it’s called "Pure". The only thing that’s pure about it is its animus toward gay people. But the defenders of "pure" cannot even be honest about that much.
If a totalitarian state, like the old Soviet Union, decreed a law forbidding Christian religious worship, could it plausibly argue that the law did not discriminate against Christians, because everyone had to obey it, even the atheists? Yet here is a man from the Christian Union claiming that their course does not discriminate against homosexuals, because even heterosexuals are forbidden from having homosexual relationships. A fact which has heterosexuals all over the world crying in their beer I’m sure. Or…you know…not.
A course on purity in relationships taught by louts like these is a bit like a course on economics as taught by Ken Lay and the board of Enron, or Dick Cheney and Haliburton. All the lofty concepts of mutual honor and respect and trust and faithfulness between lovers, are merely waved around here like a street gang’s colors, and serve no higher purpose then to ennoble bigotry and make bigots respectable. And what the students attending this course pay in tuition, is everything fine and noble and decent within themselves, that they could have become. The reason this course and the people teaching it should be thrown off campus isn’t so much that it’s anti-gay, but that it degrades the very thing it purports to elevate and preserve, and thereby every trusting kid who sits through it, gay or straight.
No stream rises higher then its source… "Pure" makes the sacred a slave to the profane. But it had to. Look at the sort of people who created it. Now look at every other thing this sort has ever done in the name of Values and Morality. If you’re still wondering how the figureheads of the religious right, James Dobson and his like, could instinctively jump to the GOP’s defense in the matter of Mark Foley, you must still think that they really believe the things they say about morals and values and righteousness. No. They only wear those things, so you won’t see them for the gutter crawling scum that they are.
Washington – The Republican Party last night refused to cancel commercials that claim Sherrod Brown was a longtime tax scofflaw – even though the state of Ohio says the ad’s claim is untrue.
Brown, the Democrat running against incumbent Mike DeWine, paid the tax bill years ago, soon after receiving a tax lien, according to newly released records from the Brown campaign and authenticated by the state.
But the Republican National Committee, supporting DeWine’s reelection bid, is running commercials saying that Brown "didn’t pay his unemployment taxes for 13 years."
DeWine ran his own commercial all day Wednesday with a DeWine family friend saying that Brown didn’t pay "an outstanding tax bill for 12 years."
Hours after Brown campaign lawyers complained, DeWine spokesman Brian Seitchik said last night that the campaign would change its ad "as soon as possible," but that it still would reflect the fact that Brown "failed to pay a delinquent tax bill."
The RNC, however, said last night that it had no plans to change its ad.
Well I guess we can put a fork in the republican party now…because it’s done. For decades they waged a long bitter battle to gain total control of the federal government. They told us the liberals were wicked, immoral, godless, anti-American, anti-family. They said democrats were corrupt tax and spend big government pigs, lining their pockets with money taken from hard working people. They waged a scorched earth campaign for power. And then they got it. And look at them now.
What most of us with a functional conscience and a sense of basic human decency see as the sexual exploitation of teenage congressional pages, the republicans now see only in terms of political warfare. Their pathological hatred of anyone outside of the tribe has so completely gutted them of any sense of decency and humanity, of anything at all beyond the reflexive need to attack liberals and democrats, that they are utterly incapable of seeing the sexual exploitation of teenagers for what it is. They cannot see, cannot even grasp, Mark Foley’s actions apart from the political war.
And in the blogosphere, all those fine honorable men who once upon a time fancied themselves liberals, but then supposedly 9-11 changed everything, and who keep on yap, yap, yapping that they didn’t leave the democratic party, it left them…all those fine honorable men with all their ostentatious regard for America and virtue and civilized behavior. What do they do when confronted with a man in their own party who regarded the congressional page pool as his own little sexual buffet? What do they do when confronted with evidence that their party leadership covered up that man’s behavior so as not to rouse the ire of the voters?
Well of course…they start attacking the teenagers Foley was hitting on…
Pajamas Media, Instapundit Facilitate Outing Of Foley Victim
An obscure right-wing blogger, Wild Bill, has outed one of Mark Foley’s victims, a former Congressional page. It is a despicable act. Wild Bill however, gets almost no traffic, so the damage done to the victim’s life could have been minimal.
All that ended, however, when some of the most highly-trafficked right-wing bloggers decided to direct their readers to Wild Bill’s site. First, Roger L. Simon, co-founder and CEO of Pajamas Media – a portal and advertising broker for nearly every major right-wing blog – posted a link to Wild Bill on his personal site. (The Pajamas Media portal also linked to Wild Bill.) Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit – probably the most highly-trafficked right-wing blog – followed suit by linking to Simon’s post and the Pajamas Media post.
You may recall this is generally how the right wing smear machine works. First the smear appears in some obscure nutcase’s blog. Then someone like Drudge picks up on it. Then Instapundit links to it. Then it starts appearing in a few right wing tabloids and magazines. Then the more respectable conservative press gets into it. Then it goes mainstream. Instapundit has been facilitating smear campaigns now for years, and it’s given him a high place in the right wing honor roll. Recently the hack novelist Roger L. (I didn’t leave the democratic party, it left me) Simon formed Pajamas Media to share in some of that glory. It now comes to this: Glenn Reynolds and Roger L. Simon are facilitating child sexual predators, if that’s what it takes to keep the republican party in power.
They both know perfectly well that outing this one teenager, will make other teens who have been victimized by congressmen, or anyone else holding a position of authority on Capital Hill think twice before coming forward. It increases the pressure on the entire family to keep the kid’s mouth shut. It Is Supposed To.
The complete shitheads that are the leading lights of the conservative blogosphere.
No ethics, no scruples, no morals, no compassion, no sense. Just really bad people.
Brad DeLong likes to say that the Bush administration is worse then you think, even accounting for the fact that it is worse then you think. But that’s true of all of them…every…single…one of them…in the Bush base. That 35 percent who will support the republican party no matter what. Because there is nothing worse then the prospect of a democratic congress…not even the sexual exploitation of minors. Not even covering up the sexual exploitation of minors. Garrison Keiller was right…they are republicans first, and Americans second. Every time you think you’ve found the bottom of that cesspool you soon realize that…no…there is no bottom.
A Denver-area man filed a lawsuit today against a member of the Secret Service for causing him to be arrested after he approached Vice President Dick Cheney in Beaver Creek this summer and criticized him for his policies concerning Iraq.
Attorney David Lane said that on June 16, Steve Howards was walking his 7-year-old son to a piano practice, when he saw Cheney surrounded by a group of people in an outdoor mall area, shaking hands and posing for pictures with several people.
According to the lawsuit filed at U.S. District Court in Denver, Howards and his son walked to about two-to-three feet from where Cheney was standing, and said to the vice president, "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible," or words to that effect, then walked on.
Ten minutes later, according to Howards’ lawsuit, he and his son were walking back through the same area, when they were approached by Secret Service agent Virgil D. "Gus" Reichle Jr., who asked Howards if he had "assaulted" the vice president. Howards denied doing so, but was nonetheless placed in handcuffs and taken to the Eagle County Jail.
This being the same vice president (and president) who insist that the president of the United States simply must have the power to arrest, imprison and torture even American citizens, without due process, without any recourse to the courts, on their say-so that they’re suspected of involvement in terrorist activities. The man is lucky he’s not in Gitmo now, and that anyone even knows what happened.
Via Firedoglake… Behold the open sewer that is the republican party today…
I…words simply fail me.
In the fine tradition of George W. Bush standing under the "Mission Accomplished" sign, or any one of the Katrina backdrops (where no expense was spared to bring power to an area for a photo op, and then just as quickly cut off), we now have the head of the NRCC, Tom Reynolds, using small prop children as set decoration in a press conference devoted to the topic of…yes, predatory online sexual solicitation of minors.
Even the reporters present could not contain themselves:
Reporter: Congressman, do you mind asking the children to leave the room so we can have a frank discussion of this, because it’s an adult topic. It just doesn’t seem appropriate to me.
Reynolds: I’ll take your questions, but I’m not going to ask any of my supporters to leave.
[]
Reporter: Who are the children, Congressman? Who are these children?
Reynolds: Pardon me?
Reporter: Who are these children?
Reynolds: Well, a number of them are from the community. There are several of the "thirtysomething" set that are here and uh I’ve known them and I’ve known their children as they were born.
Reporter: Do you think it’s appropriate for them to be listening to the subject matter though?
Reynolds: Sir, I’ll be happy to answer your questions, I’m still, uh…
Swell. Just swell. They have a uTube up of the press conference at Firedoglake, and the still clearly shows Reynolds surrounded by a room full of very small children and a few other adults. So. We have one congressional republican using kids for Internet sex, and another one using them as literally human shields to deflect hard questions from the press. I don’t think America can take much more of all this Family Values stuff.
Years from now…when hopefully this episode in American history is just a bad dream…take this one thing away from it if you take away nothing else: It isn’t the quest for virtue and morality and values that turns people into this. It’s the belief that you embody those things. It isn’t power that corrupts absolutely…it’s arrogance.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
