In another slide from what Matt Taibbi calls "protocapitalist buddhism: the endless life-cycle," Goldman Sachs announced this week that ex-SEC chairman, Arthur Levitt was being hired as advisor on public policy issues, whatever that is; according to a press release by Goldman Sachs, it has something to do with “strategic advice to the firm on a range of matters.” OK. He is also a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group; enough said.

If there is no conflict of interest in this cluster-fuck that we call the financial services industry, then I don't know what planet I'm on anymore. It' getting very hard to keep track of the reshuffling going on in the ashes of the crash, but this should be illegal. These guys just keep turning up like some sorta bad pennies.

I couldn't say it better than Matt, but, honestly, it is completely, utterly,unbelievable that Goldman Sachs is hiring the very guy who oversaw the Financial Services Modernization Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Since he is responsible for teaching me the gory details of this via his must-read, Rolling Stone article, which I had to go-over, like, 3 times before I found myself mindlessly spewing the information to my son in the car, I'll have to refer you over to him for the ramifications of our leadership and our society not looking hard at where these guys are landing...of course, it could be that this suits the leadership just fine. As the man said then, "we're officially, royally fucked," ....Still.

Labels: finance

Newt Gingrich, that good, virtuous Christian man who is converting to Catholicism so he can wipe his first two marriages and his adulteries off the map, is concerned that Americans are surrounded by paganism:

Two leading voices of the Republican Party's evangelical wing visited Rock Church on Friday for a forum aimed at recapturing some of the movement's political momentum.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee urged Christians to get involved in politics to preserve the presence of religion in American life.

"I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history," Gingrich said. "We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism."

They and other speakers warned about the continuing availability of abortion, the spread of gay rights, and attempts to remove religion from American public life and school history books.

Gingrich and Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, argued the rights of Americans stem from God and to ignore that connection is perilous. The two were among several speakers, including former U.S. Senate candidate Oliver North, at the three-hour "Rediscovering God in America" event. The event was closed to reporters but was broadcast live on God.TV, an evangelical Web site.

Huckabee told the audience he was disturbed to hear President Barack Obama say during his speech in Cairo, Egypt, on Thursday that one nation shouldn't be exalted over another.

"The notion that we are just one of many among equals is nonsense," Huckabee said. The United States is a "blessed" nation, he said, calling American revolutionaries' defeat of the British empire "a miracle from God's hand."

Uh....what did I say yesterday about God micromanaging people's lives?

Here's what I never understood: Why is it that so-called Christians like Gingrich and Huckabee are so insecure in their faith that they need constant affirmation of it in the public square? If they are so certain that theirs is the One True Way, isn't that enough?

Labels: Christian Dominionism, Christofascist Zombie Brigade, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich

Why I never wanted children:

I don't care who started it! Knock it off!

Labels: animals, Teh Funny

And so should you be. You might find her abrasive. You might question her emotional stability. You might not like the way she interrupts, refusing to allow the hypocrite Randall Terry to filibuster with the same bullshit he's been spouting for twenty years. She might be an egomaniac. You might not want to know her in real life. But while others in the media treat Randall Terry as though his is a legitimate voice for the fetophile movement and for Christianity, Randi has the guts to call him for the Christian terrorist he is. You go, girl:


And don't tell me Terry was trying to have a civilized conversation and she wouldn't let him speak. Randall Terry has never once had a civilized conversation with anyone who disagrees with him. This publicity hound has been terrorizing people for decades.

Media Matters has the goods on this pendejo:

On his own website, Terry noted that he "has been arrested over forty times for peaceful opposition to abortion," but he neglected to mention the details of his anti-abortion activities with Operation Rescue in the 1980s and 1990s. In an April 22, 2004, Washington Post article, staff writer Michael Powell summarized some of Terry's anti-abortion actions:

In 1988, Terry and his legions started standing in front of local abortion clinics, screaming and pleading with pregnant women to turn away. They tossed their bodies against car doors to keep abortion patients from getting out. They waved crucifixes and screamed "Mommy, Mommy" at the women. When Terry commanded, hundreds went jellyfish-limp and blockaded the "death clinics."

In 1989, a "Holy Week of Rescue" shut down a family planning clinic in Los Angeles. More than 40,000 people were arrested in these demonstrations over four years. Subtlety wasn't Terry's thing -- he described Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger, as a "whore" and an "adulteress" and arranged to have a dead fetus presented to Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic National Convention.

Additional evidence suggests that actions by Terry and Operation Rescue may have provoked violence at abortion clinics. As the New York Times reported on July 20, 2001, "One of his [Terry's] most avid followers in Binghamton was James E. [sic: C.] Kopp, now charged in the 1998 murder of a doctor who performed abortions in Buffalo [New York]." Kopp was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. A November 6, 1998, Times report further detailed Terry's connection to Kopp:

In July 1988, when Randall Terry drove through the night from his home in Binghamton, N.Y., to Atlanta to start the series of anti-abortion protests that would finally put his new hard-line group, Operation Rescue, onto America's front pages, James Charles Kopp was in the van riding alongside him, said former leaders of Operation Rescue.

And when Mr. Terry was arrested on the first day of Operation Rescue's "Siege of Atlanta," Mr. Kopp followed him into jail, said the leaders, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Along with more than 100 other Operation Rescue members, according to some people who were there, Mr. Kopp remained in jail for 40 days and adhered to Mr. Terry's orders not to give a real name to the police or courts.

After his release, Mr. Kopp returned to Operation Rescue's Binghamton headquarters, and was there working alongside Mr. Terry as the group's power and influence in the anti-abortion movement surged in late 1988 and 1989, according to the former leaders of Operation Rescue.

Further, the Miami Herald reported on March 20 that Operation Rescue's "sympathizers continue to make an impact, some serving for the Bush administration."

As CNN noted on March 4, 1998, Terry was named in a lawsuit -- seeking to "force anti-abortion leaders to pay for damages caused in clinic attacks" -- which was filed by the National Organization for Women (NOW) under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, and Terry settled with NOW out of court. The New York Times reported on November 8, 1998, that Terry "filed for bankruptcy last week in an effort to avoid paying massive debts owed to women's groups and abortion clinics that have sued him." As the Los Angeles Times reported on February 28, Terry's use of bankruptcy law to avoid paying for the judgments against him helped prompt Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) to propose an amendment to the bankruptcy bill recently passed by Congress that "specifically would prevent abortion opponents from using the bankruptcy code to escape paying court fines," although it was not included in the final version of the bill. Versions of that amendment appeared in earlier versions of the bankruptcy bill, which stalled action on it in 2002 and 2003 when "a core of House Republicans balked" at the provision, the Los Angeles Times noted.

According to a June 14, 2003, report by the conservative World Magazine (no longer available online, but reprinted on the right-wing bulletin board Free Republic), Terry solicited donations by declaring on his website that "The purveyors of abortion on demand have stripped Randall Terry of everything he owned," but failed to disclose that the money would be used to pay for his new $432,000 house. The report noted Terry's defense: "Terry told World that he wanted a home where his family will be safe and where 'we could entertain people of stature, people of importance. I have a lot of important people that come through my home. And I will have more important people come through my home.' " World noted that the same month he paid the deposit on his new home, a court ruled that Terry, who divorced his first wife and has remarried, "was not paying a fair share of child support." In an article on his website, Terry denounced the World report as "journalistic trash, a 'hit piece' of malice and misinformation."

Terry's words and personal life have also stirred controversy. As the Fort Wayne (Indiana) News Sentinel reported on August 16, 1993, at an anti-abortion rally in Fort Wayne, Terry said "Our goal is a Christian nation. ... We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism. ... Theocracy means God rules. I've got a hot flash. God rules." In that same speech, Terry also stated that "If a Christian voted for [former President Bill] Clinton, he sinned against God. It's that simple." According to a March 18, 2004, press release, Terry declared on his radio program that "Islam dictates followers use killing and terror to convert Western infidels." As The Washington Post reported on February 12, 2000, in his 1995 book The Judgment of God Terry wrote that "homosexuals and lesbians are no longer content to secretly live in sin, but now want to glorify their perversions." In a May 25, 2004, interview about his gay son with The Advocate, Terry stated that homosexuality is a "sexual addiction" that shouldn't be rewarded with "special civil rights."

According to the February 12, 2000, Washington Post report, Terry was censured by his church, the Landmark Church of Binghamton, New York, for a "pattern of repeated and sinful relationships and conversations with both single and married women." Terry denies the accusation.

Another false Christian, another huckster, another loud-mouth publicity-seeking hypocrite. That's Randall Terry. He incites to murder and then says, "Who, me?" His own morals are reprehensible, but he judges others. He advocates a Christian nation because he cannot control his own base self. This man deserves nothing but scorn -- and few in the media other than Randi Rhodes have had the guts to call him on his bullshit to his face.

(via The Political Carnival)

Labels: Randi Rhodes

OK, here we go; US Military law does not really allow for guilty pleas in cases where the death penalty is a possible outcome. According to the New York Times today, President Obama and his administration are looking at ways to make this law less ambiguous. The push to clarify this comes from military prosecutors who don't want to have to put on an entire case if a defendant pleads guilty....really?...Isn't putting on cases sorta what they do?

But American military justice law, which is the model for the military commission rules, bars members of the armed services who are facing capital charges from pleading guilty. Partly to assure fairness when execution is possible, court-martial prosecutors are required to prove guilt in a trial even against service members who want to plead guilty.

Why?
Well, what comes to mind immediately for me is that the military is a very controlling apparatus, just like, say, a terrorist group, in that there is a strong belief system so deeply held that one would gladly die for it, to keep a code of silence, or to become a martyr. When young recruits are broken down and built back up, they are imbued with a code that could maybe, in some off chance, in a system that has been proven time and again to be imperfect, falsely incriminate themselves.
If that part of the law was left "ambiguous" maybe it was so that cases could be decided on their individual merits and depending on the judge. I'm happy to have all of the evidence presented if we are going to put anyone to death, much less a soldier or an enemy combatant. There are certain standards of morality and ethics that have to be upheld, even if it seems like an exercise to these supposed prosecutors.

I'm no law expert, and I'm definitely no military law expert, but in the middle of a certain amount of confusing backpedaling by the Obama Administration, I find it incredibly disconcerting to hear that the idea is being kicked around to allow certain Guantanamo detainees to plead guilty to the 9-11 attack and therefore be executed without a full trial.

This is not because there is some 100% way to know they are guilty. Their stated intent has been to die as martyrs by execution, and because their confessions are completely the fruit of torture techniques that have been proven to elicit false confessions, it would seem to be a little counter intuitive to just give them what they want. It would, however, make the problem of what we did to them go away pretty nicely!

It appears to me that Obama has had to backtrack on the military tribunals because in a regular court these guys might just go free under the weight of how these confessions were coerced out of these very same detainees. The idea of cutting out the tribunal altogether is not only far fetched but pretty unbelievable! We may need a new set of laws and a new sort of prison to deal with this sort of detainee over the long term, but I've got to say that putting them to death on the strength of confession elicited by torture is not the way to go.

As much as the New York Times seems to be sure that this idea has legs in the administration, it seems like a long shot that it could ever work. The administration is, for some reason, going to great lengths to try to prevent the details of torture on the Bush watch from coming out, but in so doing they are implicating the Obama administration as more of the same. This is a slippery slope that none of us wants to start sliding down; and I'm afraid that we are already there.

It seems that alot of this revolves around the 9-11 case and our usual need for vengeance by death penalty. According to the Times:

Lawyers who were asked about the administration’s proposed change in recent days said it appeared to be intended for the Sept. 11 case.
“They are trying to give the 9/11 guys what they want: let them plead guilty and get the death penalty and not have to have a trial,” said Maj. David J. R. Frakt of the Air Force, a Guantánamo defense lawyer.

I can just hear the wheels turning in the conspiracy theorists minds. But, if this is just about that pound of flesh, and also serves to cover up the crimes committed by the Bush Administration, its not worth the long term effect on the law and our constitution, which will be skirted in a way that will not serve anyone but the Bush folks, who really need to be at least investigated!

Further:

Cmdr. Suzanne M. Lachelier, a Navy lawyer for one of the detainees in the Sept. 11 case, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, said of the Obama administration, “They’re encouraging martyrdom.”

Which is exactly right, and a shortsighted band-aid on a long term problem, exacerbated by the very treatment that is now being glossed over in this way. The Bush answer to martyrs would be "Martyr This, You Asshole...Bring it On!" But that reverberates across the world and creates thousands of more of these same guys. Hiding what happened is not goign to prevent more terrorism; its going to incite it. The best thing that we can do is, if they want to plead guilty, have a trial and then keep them in a small cell forever; take the execution option off the table, at least. The need to make the torture facts go away is a crime in itself, and the need for a pound of flesh in regards to 9-11 is a big example of human weakness. What would Jesus do, after all?

I say that as a non-religious person trying to understand the methods and logic of how these things work in the minds of good religious and community minded people of all ilks. If heaven and martyrdom is the ultimate gift to some, and death is the ultimate punishment to others, where do logical people find a common ground?

Considering that we each live on this earth for a speck of time in the grander scheme of history, and considering that it seems like a relatively long time to us, during which we go through many changes mentally, doesn't it make sense that perhaps the better punishment for a criminal is to make them live out their lives in a high security facility with little contact with the outside world? Is our need to cover up our own misdeeds so strong that we would, in their minds anyway, let them go freely to their reward in heaven? And if there is the slightest possibility for these guys to ever fully realize the gravity of what they've done and to suffer the anguish of having to live with it, day in and day out, into old age, isn't that a worse punishment?
The real story may lie in the fear that we have of realizing the gravity of what was done in our names while we crumbled to the terra and went shopping. We are all guilty of that, but our system and our way of being should allow for us to look at that so that it never can happen again. The ruined cases of these alleged 9-11 conspirators will go down in history as a reason that we don't torture; you cant make a real case out of what you find out that way.



If President Obama is behind this misguided idea, I'm going to have a very hard time reconciling the image that he presents in his wonderful speeches around the world with this ass backward, Bushian idea. I never thought I would agree with President Obama on everything, but on the issue of torture and holding the previous administration accountable, its going to be very hard to get past what seems to be purposeful governmental roadblocks to justice! I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: We can not heal and learn from the past unless and until we look hard at what went on, the good and the bad; there is no moving on! There is only repetition of our mistakes until we fully understand what went into making them. Alot of that may be fear, and fear is an issue that human beings have alot of trouble looking at. But, if we don't look, we can be controlled by it; and thats exactly what happened!! So, face it, and move ahead; but do it in the right way, like real Americans, not scared and embarassed children.

My theory at this point is to wait and see, but I would hope that some sort of check and balance system would kick in in order to give the people a voice. In the meantime, I am heading over to the White House page to drop him a note.

c/p RIP Coco

Labels: guantanamo, lies, President Barack Obama, torture

God Does Not Micromanage Individual Lives.

From the "No Matter How Young and Newly Rich You Are, There's Always Someone Younger and Newly Richer Coming Up Right Behind You file comes this news that just a few weeks after the preposterously adorable Alabama cattle rancher James (J.T.) Thomas walked off with $1.1 million on Survivor, another even younger cattle rancher has just walked off with a $232 million Powerball lottery jackpot:

If this were a movie, nobody would believe it: A rancher struggling to eke out a living in one of the poorest corners of America claimed one of the biggest undivided jackpots in U.S. lottery history Friday _ $232 million _ after buying the ticket in a town by the name of Winner.

Neal Wanless, 23, said he intends to buy himself more room to roam and repay the kindness other townspeople have shown his family.

"I want to thank the Lord for giving me this opportunity and blessing me with this great fortune. I will not squander it," he promised, wearing a big black cowboy hat and a huge grin.

Wanless, who is single, lives with his mother and father on the family's 320-acre ranch near Mission, where they raise cattle, sheep and horses. They don't own a phone, a mobile home of theirs was repossessed last year, and records show they have fallen $3,552 behind in their property taxes.

Wanless bought $15 worth of tickets to the May 27 30-state Powerball drawing at a convenience store in Winner during a trip to buy livestock feed. He will take home a lump sum of $88.5 million after taxes are deducted.

The Wanless home stands in a grove of trees in Todd County, home to the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. It was the nation's seventh-poorest county in 2007, according to the Census Bureau.

At least Thomas had the good sense to give himself credit for his gameplay, rather than deciding that some Great White Alpha Male in the sky moved him like a chesspiece across a TV reality show. But here's a guy -- the kind of guy who would usually give Bill O'Reilly fits because his family was foreclosed on and he spent fifteen bucks on lottery tickets -- who just happens to luck into the winning tickets in a town called Winner.

And what does he do? He has the hubris to think God himself selected him to win this money.

This is a lovely story in which an American family right out of a Dorothea Lange photo gets the kind of break of which most of us only dream. It's the kind of warm, fuzzy story that helps you get through the day. But seriously...what about all the other people facing foreclosure and tough times? God turned his back on them and picked YOU?

I really wish we could have an end to football stars thanking God for catching the pass at a pivotal moment, baseball players pointing to the sky every time they hit a home run, movie stars thanking God for their award statuettes, and on and on and on. It doesn't demonstrate humility before God, it's an announcement of hubris that you are Just So Special that God Himself picked YOU for good fortune.

Don't you think God has more to do than make sure YOU win the lottery? You were lucky. Nothing wrong with that. You sound like a good kid, and your family deserves to finally get a break. Now go enjoy your good fortune. But leave God out of it. He was probably off playing pinochle with Walter Matthau, Paul Newman, and David Carradine (now THERE's an image for you) while you were buying that ticket.

Labels: rant, religion

...on the Wikio list of most widely-referenced blogs, that is. Of course if I didn't have to do things like earn a living, we could probably be higher. But given how many blogs there are out there, being 1029 places behind Huffington Post isn't too shabby.

But congratulations to those Big Boys 'n' Gals who have deigned to link on occasion to our humble little selves and who cracked the top 100:

Crooks and Liars (#13)
Brad Blog (#75)
Newshoggers (#81)
The Sideshow(#99)

Labels: bloggers, Does This Mean I'm a Real Blogger Now

I was actually hoping for orange rather than pea green. An orange jumpsuit would be better color-coordinated with Hal Turner's Halloween brain. The important thing, however, is that this fat prick will be going away for a while. It won't matter if he refuses to waive extradition, which is obviously intended to waste more taxpayer money and time in extradition hearings. He's going to Lieberman Land, yesirree Bob, and with Joementum.

It's perhaps fitting that no major newspapers and a very few minor ones had bothered carrying Hal Turner's arraignment today on felony charges of inciting injury. I don't know why the Connecticut authorities won't go for the whole enchilada and bring him up on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. After all, the Connecticut assemblyman and state senator who were threatened are both openly gay.

Therefore, according to the existing statutes, that's a hate crime, which would carry a much stiffer penalty. Speaking as a layman, I think that Turner's own post on the matter provides them with black and white proof that Turner obviously intended (and he did use the word "intent") to murder two gay lawmakers, an OSE official and any states' attorneys and law enforcement officials who went after him. Even if they can't make the original charges stick, the DA would still have some decent space to plea bargain down to inciting injury. This way, there's not much to plea bargain down to.

But for now, I feel more at ease knowing this animal is finally off the streets for the time being. And I doubt that Turner will watch his big mouth before he shoots it off again, which means he'll be a much softer target for those who will be paying attention to any death threats this jailbird will make in the future.

The crash of Air France #447 is starting to look more like a case of life imitating art every day. Turns out that the debris found in the Atlantic yesterday wasn't from the jet after all:

The search for clues into the crash of Air France flight 447 was thrown into confusion Thursday, after the Brazilian military said initially that it had recovered the first piece of floating debris from the plane, a structural support piece about eight feet long that might have come from the jet’s cargo hold. But by Thursday evening, the military said that information had been incorrect, and that the debris had probably come from a ship or another source.

Based on the initial reports from the military, experts postulated that the plane had broken up in flight, an idea for which there is now less evidence.

So what DID happen?

As much macabre fun as it may be to envision the plane as having crashed off some island where Ben Linus is running a ragtag band of people, the reality may be even more sobering:

The revelation came as Airbus, the manufacturer of the missing jet, issued a warning on Thursday to all its customers to follow established procedures when pilots suspect airspeed indicators are not functioning properly. The bulletin appeared to be the first hint that malfunctioning instruments indicators might have played an important role in the crash.

The message, approved by French investigators, said that the message had been sent “without prejudging the final outcome of the investigation,” but clearly it pointed to the possibility that mismanaging the plane’s speed could have been one step in a cascade of on-board failures, leading to the crash northeast of Brazil on Monday and the death of all 228 people on board.

The message noted that “there was inconsistency between the different measured airspeeds” in the Airbus 330 that crashed, one of several error messages that were sent by the plane’s automatic systems to an Air France maintenance base.

Airspeed on jets is measured by the combination of a tube that faces forward, called a Pitot tube, and an opening on the side of the plane known as a static port. The plane’s speed is determined by comparing the pressure in the Pitot tube that is created by the oncoming wind with the pressure from the static port.

The model that crashed, an A330, has three pairs of tubes and static ports. But other instruments can also be involved in calculating air speed, and the notice to airlines, called an Accident Information Telex, did not specify the nature of the inconsistency.

The message went to airlines that operate all Airbus models, from narrow-body A318 models to the double-decker jumbo A380.

Failure to manage an inconsistency properly has been cited in several crashes of big jets from various manufacturers. In 1996, a Boeing 757 taking off from the Dominican Republic crashed because the airspeed indicators of the captain and the first officer disagreed, and the crew mismanaged the problem. Mud wasps had nested in one of the Pitot tubes.

I'm no expert on flight. In fact, I'm a nervous nellie about flying. But this sounds like something that could happen more often than we want to think about.

Labels: airline industry, things that make you go "hmmmmm....."

And just when she'd struck a reasonably sane tone on the murder of Dr. George Tiller, too, the Wasilla WhatTheFuck is back:

In a speech introducing Michael Reagan — the son of former President Ronald Reagan — to an audience in Anchorage, Palin warned that the government is planning to "bail out debt ridden states" so it can "get in there and control the people."

Now wait a minute. Is she talking about California? The land of Godless heathens and homosexuals? I thought a good Xrazy Xtian like Sarah Palin WANTED to control Godless heathens and homosexuals through government designed to foster a Christian Nation? I'm so confused now.

Maybe we should see what she actually said:

"We need to be aware of the creation of a fearful population, and fearful lawmakers, being led to believe that big government is the answer, to bail out the private sector, because then government gets to get in there and control it," she said. "And mark my words, this is going to be next, I fear, bail out next debt-ridden states. Then government gets to get in there and control the people."

Where has this idiot learned English? From George W. Bush? Does she have Wernicke-Korsakoff's Syndrome too?
So now Federal aid is "bailing out states"? OK, then let's see all the red states in the south give back the two-bucks-for-every-dollar-they-put-in, shall we?

I'm waiting.

Still waiting.

Oh, so when it's a Southern red state, Federal money is just fine. Got it.

She also brought back the good old days of George W. Bush in talking about Iraq:

Though the bulk of her remarks focused on government encroachment into the private sector, and praise for former President Reagan's views on limited government, the former vice presidential candidate briefly touched on national security. She told the crowd that "the terrorists are still dead set against us" and that her son Track is still deployed in Iraq.

"It is war over there, so it will not be war over here," she said. "And it had better still be our mission that we win, they lose."

OK, what's your strategy for that, Champ? And do you have an original thought in your head?

But what I really want to know is this: How on earth did Alaska ever elect this woman Governor? I realize that men outnumber women in Alaska, but is this moronic aging prom queen really the best they can do?

Of course for All Things Alaska, I go to Mudflats, where AK Muckraker does not disappoint, because she was actually present at this Fesitval of Moronitude and Ritual Butchery of the English Language:

I have, out of some sense of morbid fascination, typed for your reading displeasure, almost the entire text of what she said. It was 17 minutes long. Everyone got your plastic cows? Let the waterboarding begin.

(I’ll make a couple interjections now and then so you’re not alone. You can just imagine sitting next to me in the theatre, and me leaning over and whispering into a pair of parentheses now and again…)

We have an awesome guest, a guest who is affecting our culture in such a positive way. We need him to keep on being bold and we’re counting on Michael Reagan to help educate America.

(Should we keep count of how many times she says “bold?” I bet it’s at least three.)

I want to welcome tonight our good Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell who I can’t see, but I know he’s here. (applause) My brother Chuck Heath is here, and my husband Alaska’s First Dude Todd Palin is here somewhere. (applause)

(I thought we weren’t calling him that anymore. I guess “First Dude” is back in.)

So I have the honor of getting to speak with you for a bit here before I get to introduce to you Michael Reagan, and what I want to do in introducing Michael is to continue to encourage him to continue to be bold

(I elbow you in the ribs)

and to call it like he sees it, and to screw political correctness that some would expect him to have to adhere to.

(Oh my God….did she just say “Screw Political Corectness?” Will there be t-shirts?)

We want him to be bold. We need him to be bold.

(We are stifling laughter)

Mr. Reagan, we need your voice to be loud and strong, and we appreciate him. He doesn’t shy away from the tough issues and that is so good. He never lets anyone tell him to sit down and shut up, and I would hope Alaska our voice too will be heard across this nation. I look forward to hearing from Michael Reagan tonight because America must learn from him, from his remarkable father, and that remarkable presidency.

(”You’re going to transcribe this, right?” you whisper. “Yeah, looks like I’m going to have to,” I answer.)

More snarky goodness here.

But all snark aside, here's the guy whom this fetophile lunatic was praising so highly:

How much of a sick fuck do you have to be in order to advocate putting exploding hand grenades into the rectums of infants?

How about advocating the murder of people who disagree with you? I mean, the 9/11 "truth"-ers may be tiresome, but seriously. Murder?

Michael Reagan sees Sarah Palin as Dad With Boobs, which clearly means that he has Daddy issues that put those of George W. Bush to shame.

Labels: idiocy, right-wing hatemongers, Sarah Palin

And that's a lot of shit of which to be the biggest, let me tell you. But what can you say about a Vice President who puts the blame for the 9/11 attacks on the head of counterterrorism who time and time again warned the Bush Administration that Al Qaeda was a real threat planning real attacks -- and was ignored? Well, if you're Jon Stewart, you can do something other than just scream into the ether:

Labels: Dick Cheney, liars, You can't make this shit up

Marc Maron has succumbed to the siren song of Twitter.

I am now the only one on earth who hasn't.

Labels: Marc Maron, Teh Funny

He was an old soul, and maybe sometimes he believed his own publicity a little too much, but for someone who lived a life as a true popular culture icon, he managed to be as good of a person as any of us could hope to be.



I hope it was an easy death. Godspeed, David, you will be missed.

c/p RIP Coco

Labels: RIP

Sometimes you just have to name an Asshole of the Day. It's hard to imagine any asshole beating out Rush Limbaugh for sheer assholery, but today I've just got to give a special You Are Such An Asshole shout-out to steroidal short-duration home run king Sammy Sosa, who plans to retire and go home and wait for his Hall of Fame induction.

Labels: assholes

I can actually relate to the concept of being in the White House with the world's most fabulous woman -- and all you want to do is pet the dog:

Labels: Teh Funny

(Tip o' the tinfoil hat to PhoenixWoman at Mercury Rising by way of reader Bridget Magnus, aka the Short Woman.)

This is a better way to start your day than a cup of joe and a blowjob. In a way, ya gotta feel sorry for Hal, considering that he just got his radio show back on the air. Then again, you don't have to if you don't want to.

Not too long ago, I said to Hal Turner, "But the great thing about luck is that the law of averages will eventually will out and even the obscenely lucky will eventually start pumping air."

Well, apparently it did because at 4:15 yesterday afternoon, Hal Turner was arrested in North Bergen, NJ on a warrant sworn out by the Connecticut state Capitol police. I wish I could say that I had something to do with this but it was over another crime of Turner's that I didn't even know about. In case you think this is a prank or hoax, someone posted news of Hal Turner's arrest on his cesspool of a blog.

The post in question, as per Hal's usual MO, was to disseminate over the Turner Radio "Network" the home addresses of the Office of State Ethics' Thomas K. Jones and two Connecticut lawmakers, Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven and Sen. Andrew McDonald, D-Stamford.

Luckily, the Ct. Capitol police somehow found out about Turner's threat and he was taken into custody at the North Bergen, NJ PD less than four hours before air time. At this time, he awaits extradition back to Connecticut for his arraignment. So, what was this all about?

Apparently, Reps. Lawlor and McDonald had introduced legislation through their judiciary committee that would've made the archdiocese register as lobbyists. The action, in Turner's own words, "would reorganize the internal structure of local parishes to remove priests and bishops from financial oversight to replace them with boards of laypeople.

It turns out that Lawlor and McDonald are adamant advocates of same-sex marriage legislation and are apparently trying to punish the church for standing against their agenda."

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head, Hal. If you won't let total strangers marry within their own gender, which they can do in Connecticut, anyway, I'll make it harder for you to engage in political activities which you shouldn't be doing if you enjoy tax-exempt status.

So Hal found his inner Bill Donohue (oddly enough, Donohue's Catholic League never even bothered writing either about the Connecticut bill or Turner's arrest) and he said of these "tyrannical scumbags",

After all, if they are so proud of what they're doing, they shouldn't mind if everyone knows where they live.

It is our intent to foment direct action against these individuals personally. These beastly government officials should be made an example of as a warning to others in government: Obey the Constitution or die.

If any state attorney, police department or court thinks they're going to get uppity with us about this; I suspect we have enough bullets to put them down too.

No doubt, Thomas Jefferson is pinching the bridge of his nose up in heaven and wishing he'd chosen his words more carefully.

My question is, why did it take so long for this to happen? Another question: Earlier this year, Turner threatened to disseminate the private home addresses of 246 federal lawmakers and, despite a massive email campaign waged by yours truly in which I'd warned the FBI, the TSA, the North Bergen PD, the Washington DC Capitol Police and the lawmakers themselves, not a single thing was done. How come Turner was allowed to post with utter impunity instructions on how to make ricin and bombs and was allowed to threaten the lives of at least two presidents and two presidential candidates?

Yet Turner threatens two state lawmakers and eponymous law enforcement agencies and suddenly that's more actionable than all of the above? So the police will respond only if they're threatened even in the abstract and everyone else is left to fend for themselves?

I guess we ought to be grateful for small favors. Myself, I'd rather chain Turner's fat, nasty ass in a cornfield somewhere and wait for aliens to abduct him so he can be anally probed forever in the cold dark void of outer space. Yet one has to wonder how much and how long this paid informant was shielded by his handlers at the FBI (principally Stephen Haug) and whether or not the Bureau ought to be investigated for their collusion with this lunatic.

The intrepid Batocchio has come up with a convenient scorecard you can use to connect the dots, as it were, of the public statements of torture advocates.

Labels: Bush Administration, torture

Apparently Minnesota Governor and alleged Republican rising star Tim Pawlenty has decided not to hinge his 2012 hopes on depriving Minnesota of a second Senator.

Via Bradblog:

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) informed MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell:

I can't sign the certificate until the State court process is complete. We don't know who the winner is, but as soon as that process is complete and they give direction as to signing the certificate, I'm going to sign it…

Pawlenty's remarks are consistent with MN Election Law as interpreted [PDF] by the MN Supreme Court in Franken v. Pawlenty. MN law prevents either Governor Pawlenty (R) or Secretary of State Mark Ritchie (D) from signing the certificate once an election contest has commenced and before it is completed in state court. It is also consistent with the legal argument presented by Al Franken in his MN Supreme Court brief [PDF] that the MN Supreme Court should order the Governor and Secretary of State to perform what amounts to a "ministerial duty" to sign and countersign the certification of election upon the completion of the state court process. This statement follows, within one day, Pawlenty's announcement that he would not seek a third term as Governor.

Labels: Al Franken, Norm Coleman, Republican id-driven two-year-olds

An Air France jetliner with over 200 people on board drops off of radar somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean during thunderstorms through which two Lufthansa jets had passed without incidents a half-hour earlier. For a full day, no one has any idea what happened. Nervous fliers all over America for whom this is their worst nightmare make the obligatory jokes about "the Island".

Over the next few days, attention is focused on weather conditions in the area, despite the safe passage of at least two other jets through the same storm not long before. Everyone hates flying in thunderstorms for just this reason -- the sometimes violent turbulence makes us feel as if the plane is going to break apart in midair, which investigators now think is what happened to Air france #447. But as journalist and former airline pilot Patrick Smith points out, the industry and its crews can no longer say that there is ZERO chance of weather causing a plane to crash all by itself. The chance may be infinitesimal, but it is not zero.

But can we be absolutely sure? Perhaps it's a function of no longer having George W. Bush and Dick Cheney whipping people into a frenzy o'fear 24 x 7 (though it isn't for lack of trying on Cheney's part), but the quick dismissal of sabotage when a plane very likely breaks up in midair seems odd. Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim told reporters that the presence of a 12-mile oil slick "could" defuse (heh) the possibility of midair explosion. That would seem to be relatively compelling evidence against sabotage, but there is one little nagging thing that makes me wonder: It seems that France just opened up a military base in Abu Dhabi less than two weeks ago. And we know just how much Al Qaeda and related groups love having Western military bases in Middle Eastern countries.

A connection between the two seems unlikely, but to rule it out entirely this quickly seems strange.

Labels: air safety, things that make you go "hmmmmm....."

If this country is dumb enough to do this, it deserves what it gets. Unfortunately, the nimrods who elect these people will take the rest of us with them.

Labels: Bush family, nightmare scenarios, Rachel Maddow

Rachel Maddow last night on how the FBI knew that Scott Roeder was vandalizing women's health clinics for years and DID NOTHING TO STOP HIM:

She also shows how Operation Rescue's director of policy was in touch with Roeder, which makes Operation Rescue a terrorist organization as well; one that has been permitted to operate freely and in the open for years. Yes, folks, terrorism cells like Operation Rescue have been operating within our borders with the full cooperation of the United States government.

Perhaps that's why Dick Cheney wants you to keep looking at Scary Men with Muslim Names.

Now the question is whether anything will be different with a new Administration, or if a) if the FBI operates like a lone wolf, outside the purview of the rest of the government, and b) Barack Obama is too busy trying to make nice with Xtian Xrazies to enforce laws designed to ensure the safety of women seeking health care.

I think that with the murder of George Tiller, we already have our answer.

Labels: American terrorists, FBI, right-wing hatemongers, selective prosecution

New to our blogroll today (h/t): Margaret and Helen: Best. Blog. Ever.

Hey, Lynn? That's going to be us someday.

Labels: bloggers, Teh Funny

The OTHER queen of the blues is gone:

Koko Taylor, the Grammy Award-winning "Queen of the Blues," died Wednesday afternoon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital of complications from surgery, according to Marc Lipkin of Alligator Records. She was 80.

Taylor, born Coral Walton on a sharecropper's farm outside Memphis, came to Chicago in 1952 and worked as a house cleaner. She began to sit in with blues bands and in the early 1960s signed a contract with Chess Records after being approached by Willie Dixon. In 1965 she recorded her signature song, "Wang Dang Doodle."

Everyone else is going to be posting her signature song, Wang Dang Doodle, so let's take a look at her at age 79 at the Kennedy Center Honors for Morgan Freeman last year:

Thanks for the gift of your voice, Koko.

UPDATE: Blue Girl has a remembrance.

Labels: obituaries

Remember after the 9/11 attacks, when the Hummer became the must-have vehicle, the tough guy symbol to end tough guy symbols? It was one thing to slap a photo of Osama Bin Laden in crosshairs and a bumper sticker reading "These colors don't run" on the back of your Ford Expedition. But to do that on a Hummer meant you were REALLY an American patriot. You were Protecting. Your. Family.™ Never mind that you lived in Nebraska and had about as much chance of being hit by terrorists as you had of stepping out of bed and falling into the ocean. After all, the Hummer was Ah-nuld's vehicle of choice. It was big, it was badass, and in a Hummer you owned the road, your dick became bigger, and you could bully all those pussy-asses in their Civics.

I wonder how all those super-patriot Hummer owners feel now that the brand of the vehicle they love has been sold to a Chinese company:

The buyer is the Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company, based in Chengdu, G.M. said Tuesday. The price was not disclosed, but industry analysts had estimated that the Hummer division would sell for less than $500 million.

The deal, expected to close in the third quarter, would make Tengzhong the first Chinese company to sell vehicles in North America, though Hummer’s operations would remain in the United States.

“The Hummer brand is synonymous with adventure, freedom and exhilaration, and we plan to continue that heritage by investing in the business, allowing Hummer to innovate and grow in exciting new ways under the leadership and continuity of its current management team,” Yang Yi, the chief executive of Tengzhong, said in a statement released by G.M. “We will be investing in the Hummer brand and its research and development capabilities, which will allow Hummer to better meet demand for new products such as more fuel-efficient vehicles in the U.S.”

[snip]

Tengzhong is a privately owned company, but Tuesday’s deal required preliminary vetting by Beijing officials, who retain the right to veto any effort at an overseas acquisition by a Chinese company and who give special attention to deals of more than $100 million.

Tengzhong is known in China for making a wide range of road equipment, from bridge piers to highway construction and maintenance machinery. But even before the Hummer deal, the company had been moving more into heavy-duty trucks, including tow trucks and oil tankers.

“Over all, we’re pretty pleased,” said a Hummer spokesman, Nick Richards. “If you think about the qualities we’d want in a new owner for the brand, this buyer really met all the criteria. They’ve got a proven track record in international business, and they’ve got a long-term vision for the brand. They’ve got the capital to invest in more efficient vehicles, which is what’s necessary to grow the brand.”

If the deal is completed, it would be the first acquisition of a well-known American auto brand by a Chinese company, after many months of speculation about such a deal. Chinese automakers have already purchased the MG and Rover brands, two of the most famous names in British automotive history.

As a Chinese company, Tengzhong could face a challenge in presenting the deal to American Hummer owners. The brand has long sought to emphasize patriotism, stressing that the Hummer H1 was essentially the same vehicle built in the same factory as the Humvee that carries American soldiers into battle in Iraq and elsewhere.

It should be noted that the Hummer that we see on American streets is no longer the one that was made for the U.S. military, so there's no need for wingnuts to have the vapors about the capacity for manufacture of American military vehicles being sold to the Chinese. But the symbolism of the vehicle that more than any other embodied the faux masculinity and toughness of the Bush years is now just so much detritus to be sold off to China for a relative pittance.

Labels: automobile industry, faux masculinity, h, I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning

As if I weren't angry enough over the murder of Dr. George Tiller, this segment from last night's Countdown made me want to just run down the street screaming:

If law enforcement is going to be selective when dealing with the threat of violence at funerals and medical clinics, when local police refuse to protect physicians and women from violence from terrorists, when protection is only for the insane who call themselves "Christians" and "patriots" and other false monikers of the extreme right, then there is no law. If the right to self-determination can be taken away at the barrel of a gun, then there is no right. And then all the talk about preserving Roe is preposterous. Because where women are concerned, we are now allowing individual white men with a grievance and a gun to decide our destinies. For women seeking to control their reproductive destiny, there is no equal protection under the law in many states. The rights of men to channel their rage over watching their world change into violence against women and their doctors trump all.

And if you think I'm being overly dramatic, Blue Girl has unearthed the information that Scott Roeder, the terrorist who murdered Dr. George Tiller, vandalized a women's health care clinic the day before he murdered Dr. Tiller:

Scott Roeder was no stranger to law enforcement, and in fact, he should have been under surveillance since he was caught with bomb making supplies in the mid 90s when he was involved with the "sovereign citizen" movement and militant anti-abortion groups.

On May 23, he vandalized a clinic in Kansas City, Kansas then returned on Saturday morning, May 30 to vandalize the clinic again. The clinic manager filed police reports in both instances, and on Saturday, about 24 hours before Dr. Tiller was gunned down in the foyer of his church, the clinic manager gave the FBI Roeder's license plate and a description of his car.

He had a radical, militant history that ought to have drawn flags all over the field.

I don't know about you, but I would rather police resources be spent tailing and infiltrating the circle of guys like Roeder, who had already threatened a physician in the KC area, where he walked into a clinic, asked to see the doctor and waited patiently for him to come out to talk to him. When the doctor came out, Roeder stared at him for about 45 seconds before saying "Okay, I've seen you now," and turning and walking out. He had also posted on the Operation Rescue website that he wanted to confront Dr. Tiller in his church.

All the warning signs were there, and he had escalated his direct actions recently. His previous bomb-making conviction and ties to domestic terrorist groups should have popped up the minute his plate was run, and agents should have made a visit to his house and brought him in for questioning and held him in the clinic vandalism and this whole tragedy could have been avoided.

But in Kansas, it's clear that the law enforcement apparatus didn't WANT this tragedy to be avoided. And it's quite clear that in the state of Kansas, terrorists are allowed to run freely, vandalizing clinics and threatening doctors, because in Kansas, the police only enforce the laws they want to.

That's a notion that should scare us no matter where we live.

Labels: abortion, American terrorists, misogyny, right-wing hatemongers

This is one man who definitely has the right to remain silent.

Those all-too-rare few of you whose memories go back a little further than American Idol, Season Five may remember a disgraced Republican asshat by the name of Manuel Miranda. Miranda was the counsel for then Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and he was hounded out of the Senate after illegally mining thousands of emails and memos written by staffers for Democrats.

Well, it seems Miranda's belched one back in return. Spearheading an effort to oppose Judge Sonia Sotomayor despite the GOP having neither the manpower nor the firepower, Miranda midwifed this letter that was signed by 145 conservatives including such worthies as Grover Norquist, Richard Viguerie and Gary Bauer (no relation to Jack).

Among other things, the letter calls for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who for decades has been a human jersey barrier impeding any and every progressive agenda, to resign. Forget the fact that back in 1998 McConnell had opposed Sotomayor's nomination by President Clinton to serve on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and has maintained that his objections to Sotomayor of over a decade ago are still in full force despite her having never justified McConnell's "concerns" about judicial activism.

In fact, the letter called McConnell, quote, "limp-wristed," which is to say he's a homosexual for not wanting to bash in the judge's skull with a Lester Maddox axe handle then eat her brains with fava beans and a nice Chianti on general principle.

Because those are just about the only Republicans and conservatives who wouldn't be in bad odor with this Kabalistic Kavalcade of Konservatives. And make no mistake about it, people, this is a pogrom, plain and simple. It's a pogrom that's designed to filter out anyone who looks as if they've spent an hour in a tanning booth at Planet Fitness and especially those who choose to use their life experience and their ethnicity when making decisions that may require empathy.

And we all know how adept Republicans are at things such as empathy.

They're so adept, in fact, that they get dry heaves at the thought of standing in an auditorium full of black people when they sponsor a GOP presidential debate. So adept that people like Bill Frist tried to block a roll call vote in 2005 when Mary Landrieu tried to introduce a bill (in the dead of night) apologizing to surviving relatives of lynching. So adept that Republican Virginia legislators tried to block a bill that would have apologized for slavery. So adept that Jesse Helms vomited out the most despicable filibuster in the history of the Senate when Congress tried to make Dr. King's birthday a national holiday. So adept that Ronald Reagan kicked off his campaign with a speech about "state's rights" in the same town in which three civil rights workers were murdered just 16 years earlier.

Empathy such as that.

It's an empathy that was heartwarmingly put on display when Alberto Gonzales was poised to become our nation's first Latino Attorney General and was not motivated at all by the simple fact that if Bush wanted him to head the DOJ despite his moral turpitude and lack of qualifications, then that's what Boss Man gets and to hell with nonpartisan law enforcement, the fourth amendment and due process.

So now we're hearing a litany of abuse and personal insults from the GOP that's akin to what President Obama had to suffer through except on a silly-speed pace. She's a judicial activist. She's a racist. She's a product of Affirmative Action. G. Gordon Liddy even recently thought that the 54 year-old, post-menopausal judge could still menstruate and that it could affect her impartiality.

Yes, Liddy actually said that. Oh, you think I'm making that up? This is what Liddy said on the air recently:

"Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when she's menstruating or something or just before she's going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."

Newt Gingrich has circulated his own letter, trying to use Sotormayor and his knee-jerk reaction to her as an opportunity to raise campaign funds. Forget the fact that neither Judge Sotomayor nor her fully documented history of rulings has anything in the slightest to do with the suffrage movement, civil rights and the Civil War, an obsession with Gingrich's that's even stronger than his obsession with Oval Office blow jobs.

"Humor Me, I'm Bleeding to Death."

The Republican Party's implosion of late that's almost sure to be hastened by Judge Sotomayor's nomination, brings many movies to mind but I think the one that's most apt, if you'll indulge me in my Frank Rich-ian moment, is The Suicide Kings. Those of you know the basic premise of this 12 year-old classic: A bunch of yuppies kidnap a retired mob boss named Charlie Barrett and duct-tape him to a chair. To make matters worse, they cut off one one of his fingers.

It doesn't require much of a stretch to see the parallels between this darkly comic movie and how the latter-day GOP has essentially held the classical GOP hostage and is slowly bleeding the life out of it.

The difference is that in my analogy, the yuppies in the movie are actually apologetic to the retired mob boss they've kidnapped and mutilated. The GOP, according to RNC Chairman Michael "Beatbox" Steele, "is now officially over." Oh wait. He didn't exactly say that. He said that the GOP's era of apologizing was now officially over. Gee, time flies when you're having fun listening to war criminals and profiteers apologizing for their various crimes against humanity and racist smear campaigns against a judge who looks a little too swarthy and greasy for them.

Or perhaps it's because they've yet to apologize and that they're, instead, hoarsely denying that they along with Bush, Cheney, Gonzo and Rove made the sky fall down on Chicken Little even though the last of the chunks of plaster are still raining down on their pointy heads and they're still vertically holding the broomstick that doubles as a sexual aide/enhanced interrogation tool at Gitmo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib.


And the more the GOP waves the flag, the more they wind up looking like the very same guys their forebears had sheltered, employed and even financed, the same guys who they like to use to smear anyone with whom they momentarily disagree.

You'd think the Democrats by now would've seized the gigantic cartoon hole thoughtfully painted on the side of the cliff wall by the GOP and driven a fleet of progressive omnibuses through it. Instead, like Wile E. Coyote, they just run smack dab into the wall.

Because the fact is, even with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a huge margin in the House, Democrats still can't get shit done. And this is after coming up against a party that's more and more resembling an old, blind epileptic junk yard dog that keeps biting its own hind leg thinking it's an intruder on what used to be its turf.

So here's an idea: Since Texas Governor Rick Perry had recently offered to graciously and considerately secede from the Union and since Republicans need safe haven where they can let down their hair and be themselves... You see where I'm going with this, right?



It would be like a Republican version of Jurassic Park only more dangerous and they could use this as their tattered banner. And Miranda could write their Constitution for them when he's not too busy stealing emails and memos.

Funny how none of the fetophile zealots will ever say that they think a woman should be prosecuted for having an abortion. They know that none but the most rabid zealots will want to see women put in jail, or executed, for wanting to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. And that is where their logic cracks. Because if abortion is murder, then it is the woman who first decides to have one long before the doctor who performs the procedure is ever contacted, who premeditates the crime. So why the squishiness about prosecution?

That should be enough to expose these people for the misogynist hypocrites they are. But perhaps they don't need to endorse prosecution. Perhaps the wages of sin being mutilation or death will suffice for them.

Denise Grady writes in today's New York Times about the very real results of botched abortions where the procedure is not available -- in Tanzania:

Abortion is illegal in Tanzania (except to save the mother’s life or health), so women and girls turn to amateurs, who may dose them with herbs or other concoctions, pummel their bellies or insert objects vaginally. Infections, bleeding and punctures of the uterus or bowel can result, and can be fatal. Doctors treating women after these bungled attempts sometimes have no choice but to remove the uterus.

Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. According to Unicef, unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Reliable figures on abortion in Tanzania are hard to come by, but the World Health Organization reports that its region, Eastern Africa, has the world’s second-highest rate of unsafe abortions (only South America is higher). And Africa as a whole has the highest proportion of teenagers — 25 percent — among women having unsafe abortions.

The 120-bed hospital in Berega depends on solar panels and a generator, which is run for only a few hours a day. Short on staff members, supplies and even water, the hospital puts a lot of its scarce resources into cleaning up after failed abortions.

The medical director, Dr. Paschal Mdoe, 30, said many patients who had had the unsafe abortions were 16 to 20 years old, and four months pregnant. He said there was a steady stream of cases, much as he had seen in hospitals in other parts of the country.

“It’s the same everywhere,” he said.

On a Friday in January, 6 of 20 patients in the women’s ward were recovering from attempted abortions. One, a 25-year-old schoolteacher, lay in bed moaning and writhing. She had been treated at the hospital a week earlier for an incomplete abortion and now was back, bleeding and in severe pain. She was taken to the operating room once again and anesthetized, and Emmanuel Makanza, who had treated her the first time, discovered that he had failed to remove all the membranes formed during the pregnancy. Once again, he scraped the inside of her womb with a curet, a metal instrument. It was a vigorous, bloody procedure. This time, he said, it was complete.

This is what the anti-sex zealots of the right want for American women. This is their agenda for women here in the U.S. Do they think that making abortion illegal will stop the practice? It never has before, anywhere in the world. Why do they think the U.S. will be different?

We can therefore only assume that the real agenda, once you get past their phony rhetoric about human life, is punishing women who are unchaste. And it's high time we called them on it. Because there is no common ground with such people.

Labels: abortion, misogyny, right-wing hatemongers

The man is President of the United States. Everyone knows who Barack Obama is. There is just no excuse for this kind of juvenilia anymore:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney confused the president of the United States with the world's most-wanted terrorist in a speech on Monday.

Speaking at the National Press Club, Cheney answered a question as to why his administration had not caught Osama bin Laden. But in a faux pas certain to end up on cable news networks and late-night talk shows, Cheney transposed bin Laden's name with that of the current president.

"I believe he's still out there someplace," Cheney said of bin Laden. "I'm sure the current administration will continue to search for him. He's an important figure, obviously. We would have loved to have captured on our watch. We didn't. I'm sure the Obama people feel the same way.

"The important thing is that I don't think he can have much impact in terms of managing an organization, because that link between Obama [sic] and the people under him is pretty fragile. I don't think he has the capacity to do as much harm as he did at one point, but we ought to still continue to chase him."

Asshole.

(h/t)

Labels: assholes, Dick Cheney, Republican id-driven two-year-olds

Given how Skeezix has teh vapors every time a liberal says something he doesn't like, it will be interesting to see him deny any culpability in whipping Scott Roeder and people like him into a frenzy.

A Great Orange Satan video presentation of Bill O'Reilly's jihad against Dr. Tiller:

Labels: abortion, American terrorists, right-wing hatemongers, wingnuttia

Today's honoree: Melissa, who writes a letter to President Obama.

Money quote:

This was a terrorist act, one in an ongoing campaign against Dr. Tiller, who was one target among many in a bigger campaign against women and the people who provide abortion services and safe havens for them—but no one in our government will call it terrorism. There are, in fact, a lot of things that don't get called terrorism in this country, but few of them approach the breadth of the long-term, flagrant campaign of intimidation, harassment, exhorted violence, attempted violence, actual violence, and murder of abortion providers and abortion-seeking women.

Still, our government is unwilling to call this orchestrated, overt, unapologetic campaign against women and their healthcare providers terrorism, even as increasing numbers of doctors say offering the legal service to their patients is not worth the risk—the very definition of effective terrorism. Even as physician champions of women's right to choose are murdered in cold blood. Even as "pro-life" groups openly celebrate his death and take the position that he deserved it.

[snip]

Your statement, upon hearing of Dr. Tiller's death, was that you are "shocked" and "outraged," that you believe: "However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence." Mr. President, if you had been paying the slightest bit of attention to the realities of the front line of the fight to protect women's bodily autonomy, you would not be shocked. This wasn't even the first attempt on Dr. Tiller's life; it was the merely the first successful one.

I'm angry because you have been admonishing pro-choice advocates to respect the views of anti-choice activists, despite the fact there is very good reason not to afford a modicum of respect for a viewpoint that would force women to relinquish control over their own bodies to the state. I'm angry because you don't seem to get that both sides of this "debate" aren't equal, and it's not just because one side contains mainstream organizations who tacitly encourage the murder of doctors.

Labels: abortion, domestic terrorism, feminism, reproductive rights, right-wing hatemongers

Gloria Feldt has a passionate plea at Salon to stop assuaging our outrage at the murder of Dr. George Tiller with candlelight vigils:

I am done with candlelight vigils.

It is good and necessary that people gather together at a candlelight vigil to honor the memory of Dr. George Tiller, murdered in cold blood today at his Lutheran church by an assailant believed to be Montana “Freeman” Scott Roeder. Tiller was a compassionate and courageous doctor who provided abortion services to women in some of the most distressing circumstances imaginable, when their pregnancies had gone horribly, tragically wrong. He provided services when no one else would, and he was stubborn enough to fight against everyone who tried to stop him. So it is right that people express their grief in public ceremonies.

But I myself am done with candlelight vigils. I have participated in too many of them, from 1993 with the murder of Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola through the seven doctors, patient escorts and staff murdered over the horrifying five-year period thereafter. I can never forget the day before New Year's Eve in 1994. I was, at the time, CEO of Planned Parenthood in Arizona, talking on the phone to Pensacola patient escort June Barrett -- who had been wounded when her husband and the clinic’s Dr. John Britton were murdered by anti-abortion zealot Rev. Paul Hill -- when I received another urgent call from a friend whose granddaughter worked in Planned Parenthood’s Brookline clinic. The young woman had just witnessed the murder of two co-workers by John Salvi.

Each time, we held vigils all over the country. We wept and we pledged to continue our work. Which we did, increasingly, in isolation. We were the ones who had been wronged, and yet we were labeled controversial, to be shunned rather than supported. The murders were only the tip of the iceberg, among over 6000 cases of violence, vandalism, stalking, bombings, arson, invasions and other serious harassment. 

[snip]

When it comes to decrying Tiller’s unspeakable murder, I want to hear it from Congress. I want to hear it from clergy, the medical profession, the media and civic leaders: "This kind of violation will not be tolerated. Period." I want to see leaders and people at the grassroots joining hands together in support of those who provide women with reproductive health services, including abortion. I want them to put the yellow armband on, to assume Tiller’s name as so many took on the Obama’s middle name, Hussein, when he was disparaged during the election. Doctors have a special responsibility. David Toub M.D, MBA, who provided abortions when he was a practicing physician in Philadelphia, told me, "This could have been any of us who provide or provided abortion services. I'm just as annoyed by some of my own colleagues and the American Medical Association who marginalized us and even looked down at anyone involved in providing abortion."

The silence overall from leaders so far has been deafening, as attorney and longtime Arizona volunteer for reproductive rights causes Leon Silver pointed out. And if our leaders remain silent, I can tell you with perfect assurance what will happen next. There will be more violence.

For the last twenty years, we've watched as those in a position to make policy began to get "squishy" on abortion rights. We've watched our party become increasingly willing to throw women's rights to control our own bodies under the bus in an effort to include those whose stated concern for "THE BAYBEEEEZZZZZ" is belied by their own behavior. Yes, there are people of good conscience who oppose abortion but support efforts to support women making the decision not to abort -- including financial ones.

But for the most part (including the troll who commented on an earlier post here yesterday), scratch the surface of a fetophile and you'll find a misogynist -- someone who feels that the dirty sluts who can't keep their legs closed deserve to be punished. When you look at who it is who kills these doctors, it's the very same teabaggers who have been praised by right-wing television and radio hosts as American patriots. It is not considered patriotic on the right to murder those providing health care services to women.

There have always been abortions. There will always be abortions. Most of us who believe that there should be NO point in a woman's life in which she ceases to be a human being and becomes nothing but a vessel for a fetus have never had an abortion. I have never had an abortion. I wanted to make sure that this choice I support wholeheartedly is one I never had to make. I was both responsible and lucky -- responsible because I was dogged about contraceptive use, and lucky because in my case, the method I chose, which statistically has a higher failure rate than others, never failed.

"I don't like the idea of abortion used as birth control," we hear people say. Yes, there are women who have repeated abortions. But anyone who thinks that abortion is something that women choose blithely is clearly a) not a woman; or b) has never had a cold speculum shoved into him/her. I had a punch biopsy once, and that was quite enough pulling stuff out of my nether quarters, thank you very much. The very notion that there are millions of women in this country who decide to have a late-term abortino to fit into a prom dress, or who decide that it's such a nice day, let's go get our nails done, have a nice lunch, and then get an abortion, is preposterous on the face of it.

So why do we give these people any credence at all?

It's time to start digging beneath the surface of these people and reveal them for the frightened little weasels that they are. Women have sex. Women enjoy sex. This is a GOOD thing. Once we accept that, then we can open the door to teaching girls about the conscientious use of contraception without the added baggage of having to be "swept away" so that having sex doesn'tmake her a slut. If we want to reduce the incidence of abortion, we need to be teaching women not the madonna/whore dichotomy, but how to make affirmative decisions as to what is right for them at the appropriate times of life. An empowered, confident woman is one who makes smart choices. An empowered, confident woman won't feel unable to insist on condom use. An empowered, confident woman also has better ability to protect herself from disease.

We also need to make contraception more available, especially to low-income women, and not just send them home with pills or devices, but also teach them how to say yes -- or no -- and listen to their own hearts and minds instead of messages from men or churches or even traditions that are no longer relevant to life today. Over the last few decades, contraceptive choices have become fewer rather than more. Try getting a diaphragm these days without having to wait a week for the local Rite-Aid to get the damn thing.

And it's time to stop being squishy about this. I'm not happy about President Obama's statement yesterday, though I realize that it's about as good as we're going to get from him. But the issue isn't simply one of deploring the violence directed against abortion providers. It's time to stop demonizing women who choose abortions and the doctors who perform them. If you want to stop abortions, then support efforts to make contraception universally available, effective, and affordable, and support efforts to help women make independent sexual decisions for themselves. But those who paint their anti-abortion rhetoric with undertones of fear and loathing of women and our sexuality can just shut the fuck up. We don't want to hear you anymore. Guys like Scott Roeder have taken away any credibility you ever had.

Labels: abortion, feminism, reproductive rights, right-wing hatemongers, sexism