"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde
Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Tuesday, November 06, 2012

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: Brief Republican Vote Suppression Edition
Posted by Jill | 6:01 AM
Brad Friedman on the unverified "mystery software patch" installed in 39 counties in Ohio, and the last-minute lawsuit hoping to stop it.

Digby: Disenfranchisement is a feature, not a bug.

Charlie Pierce on Sandy's secondary disaster.

No surprise here: So-called "True the Vote" forged signatures on their applications to be election observers in Ohio.

SemDem at DKos: Rick Scott is in a class by himself. All he's missing is the dogs and firehoses.

TBogg. 'nuff said.

You know, my good friend and blogbuddy jurassicpork and I disagree o what to do today. JP lives in Massachusetts, so he has the luxury of a protest vote. I disagree that a vote for a Green Party candidate, even as good a candidate as Jill Stein, will send a message to the Democratic Party. If Ralph Nader 2000 didn't send a message, nothing will. Third parties have to start at the local level and work their way up, not the other way around. I respect JP's decision and even agree with his reasons, even though I disagree with it. I disagree with it if for no other reason than I look at all the young women in this country and I see America's future -- a future that a bunch of grey-faced men want to take away from them, regarding them as little more than vessels -- incubators for producing enough white people to keep people like Willard Rmoney in power forever. If you think there's no difference between the two candidates on drones, or war, or banks, or multinational corporations, fine. But in my view, a protest vote in a state that could swing either way does nothing for those being murdered overseas, but does consign the next generations of American women to less-than-human status.

And the last word (heh) on the stakes today comes from, of all people, Tweety:



Yeah. What he said.

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Saturday, October 27, 2012

Pre-Storm Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said
Posted by Jill | 8:38 PM
Today's honoree: Melissa Harris-Perry, for reasons you will know when you watch this:



Any woman who votes for the Rmoney/Ryan ticket, knowing that Willard Rmoney has refused to withdraw his endorsement of Richard Mourdock and that Paul Ryan regards rape as just another method of conception, is just plain sick.

No, we do not judge women who are raped, though Goddess knows I've questioned the wisdom of painting oneself as a victim for eternity. But we do judge women who would willingly give power to men who regard them as subhuman, as mere vessels for potential babies that those same men can use as political footballs before they're born and then tell them that they are on their own afterward.

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Sunday, August 19, 2012

Can This Nation Survive This Much Stupid?
Posted by Jill | 10:41 PM
We always knew there were yahoos out there. Us left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers in the Godless Heathen Liberal Northeast especially have always had images of guys with no teeth living in shacks with cars up on blocks in the front yard, a houn' dawg on the porch, and a whole messa guns. Or at least that's what the right thinks we think. They don't bother to explain this:



We expect guys like this to be out there in pockets of the hinterlands where they still refer to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression. But in the last few years they've been tempted by the siren song of K Street money and their Christian Crusade and started sending guys just like them to Washington. And as long as there were only a few of them, like Louie Gohmert (otherwise known as The Stupidest Fucking Moron Ever To Sit In Congress), we could point at them and laugh. But now, they're starting to make inroads into the upper house of Congress, and there's a very real chance that Democratic sellout Claire McCaskill may be booted out in favor of this guy:



Would someone please tell me what a "legitimate" rape is?

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Monday, June 06, 2011

What part of this is so difficult for the punditocracy to understand?
Posted by Jill | 5:13 AM
There's still this delusion in this country that the people who have populated the Sunday gasbag shows are somehow "smart" or "informed" or "knowledgeable." The week-long flogging (sorry) of the recent Weiner weiner "controversy" shows you that the Washington press corps has a lot more in common with TMZ and Perez Hilton than with any kind of policy analysis. And yet the Usual Suspects who populate Morning Schmoe continue to insist that the Paul Ryan If You Still Can't Afford Or Get Private Insurance Then Fuck Off And Die Plan is a "serious" plan for "reforming" Medicare.

Paul Krugman once again explains today in the New York Times what a government check to buy health insurance from companies that can reject you for any reason, charge you exorbitant premiums if they take you, and drop you at any time for any reason (because "take all comers" is part of the Affordable Care Act that Ryan wants to repeal) will mean in real life for real people:

Medicare is a government-run insurance system that directly pays health-care providers. Vouchercare would cut checks to insurance companies instead. Specifically, the program would pay a fixed amount toward private health insurance — higher for the poor, lower for the rich, but not varying at all with the actual level of premiums. If you couldn’t afford a policy adequate for your needs, even with the voucher, that would be your problem.

And most seniors wouldn’t be able to afford adequate coverage. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that to get coverage equivalent to what they have now, older Americans would have to pay vastly more out of pocket under the Paul Ryan plan than they would if Medicare as we know it was preserved. Based on the budget office estimates, the typical senior would end up paying around $6,000 more out of pocket in the plan’s first year of operation.

By the way, defenders of the G.O.P. plan often assert that it resembles other, less unpopular programs. For a while they claimed, falsely, that Vouchercare would be just like the coverage federal employees get. More recently, I’ve been seeing claims that Vouchercare would be just like the system created for Americans under 65 by last year’s health care reform — a fairly remarkable defense from a party that has denounced that reform as evil incarnate.

So let me make two points. First, Obamacare was very much a second-best plan, conditioned by perceived political realities. Most of the health reformers I know would have greatly preferred simply expanding Medicare to cover all Americans. Second, the Affordable Care Act is all about making health care, well, affordable, offering subsidies whose size is determined by the need to limit the share of their income that families spend on medical costs. Vouchercare, by contrast, would simply hand out vouchers of a fixed size, regardless of the actual cost of insurance. And these vouchers would be grossly inadequate.

Mr. Brilliant and I have insurance through my employer, which has just made available a full wages and benefits statement so that we know at any time just what the company pays for the various benefits we have. The health plan we have, which pays 90% of "usual and customary" (read: ridiculously low) to in-network providers with a $500 per person deductible every year but covers preventive procedures such as mammograms and colonoscopies and routine physical exams at 100% to in-network providers, costs about $13,000/year. I pay about $3600 of this premium.

An individual policy at this level would cost far more. Perhaps some of you who DO purchase individual policies might want to weigh in with what your coverage is and at what cost. I'm guessing that right now, at my age, a similar policy would probably cost upwards of $20,000/year -- if we could even get one. Now imagine me in ten years, at age 66, trying to buy an individual policy from an industry that has been cherry-picking for years.

Republicans are painting the Ryan plan like an all-you-can-eat buffet, in which America's senior will have a vast array of health insurance "products" from which to choose, offered by a wide variety of providers who are just salivating at the thought of getting hold of all those people who are going to need actual payouts for health care. In what kind of universe does anyone actually believe this to be true?

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Monday, March 07, 2011

Ross Douthat's obsession with the sex lives of American teenagers
Posted by Jill | 5:25 AM
There are days when I wake up and read something, and I'm about to write about it, but it pisses me off to such a degree that I just can't. Today, Ross Douchebag writes about how young people aren't having sex because they are developing a strong moral code. In Douchebag world, it has nothing to do about the slut/whore rhetoric coming out of the Republican Party, the churches, and right-wing pundits like Douchebag that keeps the double standard alive. It has nothing to do with the right-wing war on contraception that makes birth control less available to young women. It has nothing to do with a judgmental climate that allows David Vitter and John Ensign to remain Senators while casting judgments on girls who won't keep their legs closed. Nor does it have anything to do with the fact that they're tending to live with their parents longer because they can't find jobs and it's icky to have sex in mom 'n' dad's house. In Douchebag-world, it's all about finally embracing what is inevitable: that the only way a woman can be moral is to not have sex.

I'm quite sure Amanda will have something more cogent to say about this, but for now I'm going to leave it to TBogg, who is always my first source for concise Douchebag analysis and translation:
Shorter Ross Douthat:
If Chunky Reese Witherspoon was a teenager today, she probably wouldn’t want to fuck me. I mean for reasons besides the most obvious ones. This gives me great comfort.


Don't forget to click the link embedded in that quote. And also be sure to click TBogg's name for some serious graphic fun.

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Saturday, February 19, 2011

Under proposed legislation in Georgia, if you have a miscarriage, you will be investigated
Posted by Jill | 7:37 AM
I've been saying for years that by the time Christofascist Zombie Brigade is done, you'll have to send your used tampons to the government for inspection to make sure there are no fertilized eggs in them.

Proposed legislation by Georgia state representative Bobby Franklin goes far beyond banning abortion:

According to this law, any human intervention other than delivering a living fetus is a crime. Every physician must make an equal effort to save the life of mother and fetus, but if the fetus does die after such an effort, it isn't a crime. It allows an exception for spontaneous abortion AKA miscarriage--but only if there is no human intervention involved.

That banging sound you hear is me beating my head against the stone wall of sheer stupidity.

It goes on to state that any attempt to remove a fetus from the mother except to facilitate a live birth is murder. The doctor MUST do everything to save the life of both fetus and mother, but if the fetus doesn't survive despite this, it's not a crime. Abortion is now a form of murder.

I can see so many issues with this bill.

There are situations where you can't save the life of both fetus and mother.

* What if the woman learns that she has cancer and must terminate the pregnancy in order to get treatment? No exception for that in this bill.

* What about a case where the woman is hemorrhaging, the bleeding can't be stopped and the doctor must save her and abort the fetus? No exception for that.

* What if she has a partial miscarriage, and is bleeding heavily. Must she wait until her body naturally ejects the dead fetus, even though carrying a dead fetus can lead to septic shock? Doesn't sound like there's an exception for that.

* What if it's an ectopic pregnancy? You cannot save the fetus and the mother in such a case.

* What if the woman is told she's carrying an anecephalic fetus with only a brain stem which will be non-viable outside the womb? Must she carry that fetus full-term?

It gets worse. Franklin wants to create a Uterus Police to investigate miscarriages, and requires that any time a miscarriage occurs, whether in a hospital or without medical assistance, it must be reported and a fetal death certificate issued. If the cause of death is unknown, it must be investigated. If the woman can't tell how it happened, than those Uterus Police can ask family members and friends how it happened. Hospitals are required to keep records of anyone who has a spontaneous abortion and report it. Yup, we've been waiting for someone to suggest this--and Franklin has.

Here is the bill, and here is the Uterus Police clause, from section 2.14:
Preparation and filing of reports of spontaneous fetal death shall be as follows:
(1) When a dead fetus is delivered in an institution, the person in charge of the institution or that person's designated representative shall prepare and file the report;
When a dead fetus is delivered outside an institution, the physician in attendance at or immediately after delivery shall prepare and file the report;
When a spontaneous fetal death required to be reported by this Code section occurs
211 without medical attendance at or immediately after the delivery or when inquiry is
212 required by Article 2 of Chapter 16 of Title 45, the 'Georgia Death Investigation Act,' the proper investigating official shall investigate the cause of fetal death and shall prepare and file the report within 30 days; and
(4) When a spontaneous fetal death occurs in a moving conveyance and the fetus is first removed from the conveyance in this state or when a dead fetus is found in this state and the place of fetal death is unknown, the fetal death shall be reported in this state. The place where the fetus was first removed from the conveyance or the dead fetus was found shall be considered the place of fetal death."


Just another dispatch from the Republican war on women.

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Another of the dirty sluts that Mike Pence and Chris Smith believe should be punished for their unchastity
Posted by Jill | 6:50 AM
Here's another woman for whom Mike Pence and Chris Smith think THEY should have the power to make decisions:



Thanks to Mike Stark, whom if he didn't exist we would have to invent him. Go. Read.

UPDATE: Here's Jamie, another woman that Mike Pence and Chris Smith would rather see die than have an abortion of a much-wanted fetus that had no chance of survival anyway:


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Friday, February 18, 2011

Real women vs. misogynistic Republican men
Posted by Jill | 10:33 AM
California Rep. Jackie Speier vs. the sanctimonious, woman-hating Chris Smith of New Jersey:



Real women who have undergone abortions need to come forward. These men who would take away women's humanity and turn them into breeding machines who can be cast into the garbage, these men whose first priority is not creating jobs, or repairing our infrastructure, or ensuring that future children have some quality of life, but instead punishing people they believe to be nothing but dirty sluts, need to be called out on this.

Bravo, bravo, bravo to Rep. Speier.

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