Why is this guy still in business?
Sheriff Joe Arpaio's volunteer investigation into documents pertaining to President Barack Obama's place of birth and citizenship now includes the services of a taxpayer-funded ...
The lies roll off the man's lips like music off Yo-Yo Ma's cello. Both are virtuosos - one a cellist, the other a liar.
A partial list.
Bush had nothing to do ...
Happy Friday.
The best from Political Humor‘s collection of the week’s late night political humor.
"Barack Obama supports same-sex marriage. Mitt Romney doesn't even support same-sex car pools." –David Letterman
"The head of ...
Republican Rep. Mike Coffman at a Saturday afternoon fundraiser in Colorado.
I don't know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. I don't know that. But I ...
Rand Paul:
Call me cynical, but I didn’t think his [Obama's] views on marriage could get any gayer.
We won't call Rand cynical. Ignorant, bigoted asshole is more fitting. An adult using ...
Happy Friday.
The best from Political Humor‘s collection of the week’s late night political humor.
"President Obama came out with approval of same-sex marriage. He said that over the years, he has ...
I've never understood Log Cabin Republicans - gay conservatives who give their support to a homophobic political party that derides their sexuality and refuses to grant them equal rights under ...
Finally.
“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own ...
Election roundup:
Indiana.
As polls forecast, the Tea Party's efforts to cleanse the GOP of any impure conservatives has Dick Lugar out and teabagger Richard Mourdock in. Mourdock is the new Republican ...
There are lies...and then there are lies.
My own view, by the way, was that the auto companies needed to go through bankruptcy before government help. And frankly, that’s finally what ...
From the papers captured last year at Osama bin Laden's Pakistani hideout comes this.
Like any public figures, bin Laden and his advisers were mindful of the media. Adam Gadahn, one ...
The best from Political Humor‘s collection of the week’s late night political humor. Happy Friday.
"Today Mitt Romney visited a firehouse here in New York City. Of course, he was disappointed ...
It happened to Kerry. Can it happen to Obama? Nope says Margaret Carlson.
Obama’s belief system -- in that hopey-changey business and the post-partisanship thing -- has been altered by reality. ...
Sullivan:
What do Republicans call a gay man with neoconservative passion, a committed relationship and personal courage?
A faggot.
Exactly right, but then could one expect anything different from a political party that ...
And they claim that atheists are immoral?
The ugly side of religion shows its face once again. The words below were spoken at a Sunday sermon by Sean Harris, a pastor ...
It's been fun watching conservatives and Romney twist themselves into pretzels trying to undo Mitt's past words on GM and bin Laden.
Romney, April 2007:
It’s not worth moving heaven and earth ...
In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, a couple of scholars from liberal and conservative think tanks, discuss the state of American politics.
We have been studying Washington politics and ...
Romney's VP-in-waiting, Marco Rubio, is perfecting the conservative sleaze play.
He has proposed his version of the Dream Act in which people who entered the country illegally as children will be ...
Beyond the rhetoric, the political BS, the lies - that is, the concerted effort by the right-wing noise machine to distort and misinform at every opportunity - is the very ...
…the unreported story of our times is that birtherism isn’t an isolated example of paranoid lunacy taking hold of a disturbingly large segment of the population — in fact, modern conservatism is driven by multiple lunatic theories that are precisely as delusional as birtherism.
True…but the mulitple lunacies have been reported time and time again. The problem is that the people who should be paying attention aren’t listening to anyone whose first name isn’t Rush, Glenn or Sean.
The theories:
Birtherism
Obama is a Muslim
Obama is a Communist
Obama is the anti-Christ
Obama eats little white babies on Tuesdays (made that one up…but not by much)
Tax cuts for the rich creates jobs
Homosexuality is a perversion and can be cured with prayer
The Tea Party is a grassroots movement
Corporations are people
Bush, Palin and Bachmann have functioning brains
Abstinence education prevents teenage pregnancies
Climate change is a hoax
The GOP in its current state is a serious political party
FOX News is fair and balanced
The Affordable Care Act creates death panels
Creationism is science
Evolution is a flawed theory
And on it goes…the delusional theories of a self-destructing political party.
The Republican presidential race appears to have shifted from debating the economy to discussing social issues – same-sex marriage, abortion and, amazingly enough, birth control. The year is 2012 and Republicans are discussing the morality of birth control. Go figure.
In the kerfuffle involving the health care law, religious-affiliated organizations and birth control, the Obama administration neatly stick handled responsibility away from the organizations and onto the insurers.
Mr. Obama announced that rather than requiring religiously affiliated charities and universities to pay for contraceptives for their employees, the cost would be shifted to health insurance companies. The initial rule caused a political uproar among some Catholics and others who portrayed it as an attack on religious freedom.
As for the Catholic Church’s concerns over birth control, I’m going with Bill Maher on this one.
” The Catholic Church was livid about this. They should not be forced to pay for something they hate and they don’t believe in. The vagina.”
And you can throw in hardcore conservatives along with the Church as people and organizations showing disdain for women’s rights. Here’s the latest from the Party of the Insane.
But Republicans and some conservative Catholic groups are not satisfied with the accommodation and hope to use their false claim of “religious persecution” to deny women access to preventive health services. Despite Obama’s decision to shield nonprofit religious institutions from offering birth control benefits, next week Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) is expected to offer an amendment that would permit any employer or insurance plan to exclude any health service, no matter how essential, from coverage if they morally object to it:
What more can one say about these people than to note that they have found the perfect man to lead them to the promised land. Rick Santorum.
No two ways about it, Rick Santorum had a good night. Not only did he sweep Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri but he also got off the best line of the night.
“I don’t stand here to claim to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. I stand here to be the conservative alternative to Barack Obama.”
A slap to the side of the head of Romney while pushing him aside and casting himself as the one and only true conservative who has the creds to take on the Kenyan guy – and he did it with a single sentence. Impressive.
Is there more to this Santorum fellow than any of us give him credit for?
Not really. He’s still the bigoted, narrow-minded, gay-bashing, religious zealot you always knew him to be. The only reason people are still talking about Santorum at this stage of a Republican primary is that he’s fortunate enough to be running at a time when the GOP decided to put on a clown show instead of a true presidential nomination race where thinking adults articulate intelligent ideas based on strong conservative ideals.
Instead, the GOP has offered the likes of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich who have embarrassed themselves and insulted the intelligence of Americans with…
Wanting to do away with the minimum wage. (Bachmann)
Wanting to build a 20 foot high electrified fence at the border that would kill Mexicans attempting to cross it. (Cain)
Wanting to eliminate Dept. of Education/Energy/Health and Human Services, the Federal Aviation Administration, IRS and implement a $1 trillion budget cut in the first year. (Paul)
Wanting to deregulate the oil industry further because the Gulf oil spill was simply an “act of God”. (Perry)
Wanting to colonize the moon. (Gingrich)
You could fill pages with stuff like this. Whatever world Republican candidates are hoping to make better, it sure as hell isn’t the one we’re living in.
And into this field of misfits, loons, pretenders and grifters comes a Rick Santorum whose main appeal is to social conservatives who agree with Santorum that:
women who get pregnant by way of rape or incest should be forced by their government to give birth to the baby because that pregnancy is a “gift” from God.
“Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
Fear not. Rick Santorum will not be the Republican nominee. While he may be the anti-Romney flavor of the week, he lacks the the organization and money to take on Mitt Romney nationwide. He also lacks the support of the Republican establishment which is putting its money on Romney. They understand that selling Romney to the masses in a general election will not be an easy task but selling a hardcore crazy evangelical like Rick Santorum would be an impossible task.
Enjoy the moment, Rick, as fleeting as it may be.
(The Rick Santorum source image for this illustration is a Creative Commons licensed image from photographer Gage Skidmore.)
___
The Planned Parenthood/Susan G. Komen story is another clear example of how right-wing ideology has forced its way into just about every aspect of American life. Pushing conservative social policies involves demonizing organizations like Planned Parenthood which provides vital breast cancer screenings to low-income and uninsured women.
Komen’s choosing to cease funding to Planned Parenthood because the organization is under investigation by Congress is simply another attack on women’s rights. The real reason PP is being defunded by Komen is because the latter is controlled by right-wing ideologues who have allowed politics to guide their decision making. They have given in to anti-abortion zealots who have been running a boycott campaign against Komen.
Komen has been under pressure from anti-abortion groups to drop its funding for Planned Parenthood, which received $680,000 from the anti-cancer group in 2011. Most recently, abortion foes forced a Christian publisher to stop printing pink Komen bibles and pressured bookstores to take them off shelves. Groups have also called on supporters to boycott Komen entirely, and decried the group as a “lie from the pit of Hell.”
Breast cancer charity giant Susan G. Komen for the Cure on Tuesday did not renew a grant to Planned Parenthood to fund breast exams. The move comes less than a year after Komen hired a new vice president, who has publicly stated her opposition to abortion, a service provided at some Planned Parenthood facilities.
Komen’s new vice president, Karen Handel, had run for governor of Georgia in 2010 on an aggressively anti-abortion and anti-Planned Parenthood platform and was endorsed by Sarah Palin because of her opposition to reproductive choice. Handel wrote in her campaign blog that she “do[es] not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.”
Komen’s founder is pretty conservative, too. Komen CEO Nancy G. Brinker, who founded the foundation in memory of a sister who died from breast cancer, was the chief protocol officer for the United States from 2007 to 2009 under the George W. Bush administration, and before that served as his ambassador to Hungary.
Brinker is also a major Republican donor, and has given more than $175,000 to Republican candidates and the Republican National Committee since 1990…
sitting on Komen’s Advocacy Alliance Board is Jane Abraham, the General Chairman of the virulently anti-choice and anti-science Susan B. Anthony List and of its Political Action Committee. Among other involvements, Abraham helps direct the Nuturing Network, a global network of crisis pregnancy centers, organizations widely known for spreading ideology, misinformation and lies to women facing unintended pregnancy and to use both intimidation and coercion in the course of doing so.
Here’s the bottom line: given a choice between their personal agendas and helping low-income Americans deal with vital health issues, the Susan G. Komen charity made the decision to go with the former.
That Komen–an organization ostensibly dedicated to scientific exploration of cures for breast cancer–has invited on its advocacy board women so closely allied with organizations that so blatantly ignore science and medicine and spread outright lies to other women about their health and welfare speaks volumes about Komen’s ethical principles as an organization.
And as a result of Komen’s decision, women will needlessly die.
Give Gov. Rick Scott and his Tea Party pals in the legislature another year to screw around with Florida, its laws and it’s people and he’ll have successfully turned what was once a backwards state into a Bronze Age state.
Florida state Rep. Charles Van Zant (R) is starting 2012 with yet another radical effort to ban all abortions in the state unless the woman’s life is in danger. Declaring that “the Legislature acknowledges that all persons are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that first among these is their right to life,” the Florida for Life Act would essentially (and unconstitutionally) make it a felony to perform an abortion except when a physician meets very specific circumstances.
The proposed legislation would impose a maximum penalty of life in prison for any doctor who contravenes the law. What? No lethal injection? It appears that the right-wing’s call for smaller government only applies to Washington politics. In their view, states are free to impose their politician’s religious beliefs on the citizenry no matter how unconstitutional those beliefs may be. How convenient for small-minded anti-choicers.
Meanwhile, on another part of Planet Wingnut, Rick Santorum preaches on the evils of contraception.
“One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.” And also, “Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
And that last line pretty much says all anyone needs to know on how Republicans and conservatives view government’s role in people’s lives. From Florida’s abortion ban, to Santorum’s contraception ban, to the entire Republican party’s same-sex marriage ban, all the way to Newt Gingrich’s call to rid the courts of any judge who renders a judgement from the bench which differs with strict conservative ideology…the entire Republican party paradigm is based on the premise that ‘we’re always right, you’re always wrong – end of story.’
If ever there was a political party that needed to be told in no uncertain terms to go fuck themselves and to simply let people lead their personal lives as they wish, today’s GOP is that political party.
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