Stand back! Conservatives are revolting (on that you’ll get no argument from me). Here’s a scene from the “Conservative Uprising” yesterday in Washington DC:
WTFOMGLOLOLOL! You’d think with all that pron they consume, they’d know what teabagging is.
Or here’s an even more sinister thought: maybe they do know.
(from the Washington Independent)
Now this is change I can believe in:
President Barack Obama plans to revoke a last minute rule from the Bush administration to shield health workers who refuse to participate in abortions or other medical activities that go against their beliefs. [...]
The rule issued by Bush health chief Michael Leavitt prohibited groups that take U.S. money from firing, denying professional certification to or otherwise discriminating against medical providers who refused to perform or assist in abortions or give referral information.
I can already hear the shrieking and whining about how unfair this is to anti-choice health care workers — conveniently overlooking the fact that those workers are already protected by existing conscience rules — 3 of them. This new one just increases the scope of services that can be denied to the point of absurdity, not just abortion but everything from contraception to HIV tests to blood transfusions — basically whatever “offends” the health care worker.
Most bizarrely, the new regs stipulate that health care workers don’t even have to inform prospective employers of procedures they object to. Hypothetically, an anti-choicer could get a job at Planned Parenthood and wreak all kinds of havoc.
Besides, this is what it comes down to:
But why should the religious beliefs of others trump those of patients and employers? People who don’t want to participate in medical procedures they find abhorrent have a simple solution: They can choose to work elsewhere.
Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, aka Daddy D, is finally hanging it up:
Conservative evangelical leader James Dobson has resigned as chairman of Focus on the Family but will continue to play a prominent role at the organization he founded more than three decades ago.
Dobson notified the board of his decision Wednesday, and the 950 employees of the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based ministry were informed Friday morning, said Jim Daly, the group’s president and chief executive officer. [...]
At the same time, Focus officials have acknowledged difficulties in raising money from younger families critical to its future. The economy also has hurt. Last fall Focus on the Family eliminated more than 200 staff positions, its largest employee cutbacks ever.
Dobson is taking a hike because Focus on the Family is losing support and hemmorrhaging money. Maybe nobody wants to listen to their sanctimonious horseshit anymore, or maybe people have figured out that there are more important things to be concerned with than other peoples’ sex lives. Or maybe, as Pam Spaulding said:
I guess after blowing the coffers on Prop 8 and having to lay off staff, it’s time to exit.
Then again, maybe Dobson just wants to spend more time with his dog.
Dobson might be officially stepping down, but he’ll still be lurking around in the shadows, mouthing off about things that are none of his business and excreting his inky, poisonous bigotry. So this probably is just a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the religious right’s sinking ship of fools. But it means FotF is hurting, and if it’s hurting that much in the US, it’s only a matter of time until the axe falls on its metastasis here in Canada. Can’t happen soon enough for me.
(h/t Bruce @ Canuck Attitude)
Whether it’s the pressure of all the media attention or just the excitement of the Biggest CPAC Ever, Joe the Plumber seems to be really getting his Weird on lately. But who could have predicted that he’d go sideways and spiral into violence?
Gah! Just when we’d finally gotten rid of it all and everything was green…
I need a little hot weather music…
Last week amid much pearl-clutching and with fainting couches packed to capacity, the Pope met with US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a pro-choice Catholic. Some hoped the Pope would have taken the opportunity to force Pelosi to don a hair shirt and submit to a flogging for her pro-choice views, but she apparently got away with just a light scolding. However, Professor Doug Kmiec points out one aspect of the Vatican’s statement on the meeting that might be a bit radical:
“His Holiness,” the statement read, “took the opportunity to speak of the requirements of the natural moral law and the church’s consistent teaching on the dignity of human life from conception to natural death which enjoin all Catholics, and especially legislators, jurists and those responsible for the common good of society, to work in cooperation with all men and women of good will in creating a just system of laws capable of protecting human life at all stages of its development.” [...]
If the Holy Father is pointedly telling not only Congresswoman Pelosi but also judges that they must use their office to undo the legal protection for abortion, how is this consistent with their judicial oath, or with the fact that the Constitution in Article VI puts religious belief off-limits for selection or qualification for office, including judicial office? In particular, precisely what is a Catholic jurist to do when confronted with the application of laws restricting abortion that, as interpreted by the courts in rulings like Roe v. Wade, would be unconstitutional?
Hmm… “judicial activism” anyone?
the batshit didn’t g
et any thicker than in that last post about “Covenant News”, here’s another bugfuck nutty Republican in Colorado who wants babies to get HIV in order to punish “promiscuous mothers”:
Democrats were outraged Wednesday morning when Republican state Sen. Dave Schultheis said he planned to vote against a bill to require HIV tests for pregnant women because the disease “stems from sexual promiscuity” and he didn’t think the Legislature should “remove the negative consequences that take place from poor behavior and unacceptable behavior.” The Colorado Springs lawmaker then proceeded to cast the lone vote against SB 179, which passed 32-1 and moves on to the House.
And these people wonder why anyone with two halves of a brain to rub together want nothing to do with them?
Reason, thankfully, prevailed:
“What this bill will do and why it’s so important to test the woman when she is pregnant — if she is HIV-positive, treatment is started immediately to protect the baby, the unborn baby,” the Thornton Democrat, who is also a nurse, said.
And here you thought it was conservatives who were all about “protecting the unborn”.
I’ve found a new wingnut site and it makes Lifeshite look sane. I kid you not — it’s called “Covenant News”, and it’s enough to make a normal person retch.
With regard to that nutcase senator in Utah, Chris Buttars, who compared gays to… err… Islamic terrorists (!?), here’s their puke-worthy commentary:
The first one is just a link to the story, but the second one — whoa, what the fuck’s up with that?? And remember, this “Jim Rudd” guy isn’t just some asshole on the street foaming away in a spittle-flecked letter-to-the-editor, he IS the editor and he really believes that vile bullshit. I guess that’s what the fundies mean when they whine about their “free speech” rights being stomped on. Though not a fan of speech laws by any stretch, it’s hard to see how that article doesn’t promote hate and even violence, especially given the kind of nuts who usually read this stuff. Jesus, save us from your followers.
Poor SaWah, everyone’s always trying to trip her with those gotcha questions… even her own party:
A couple of weeks before the Alaska legislature began this year’s session, a bipartisan group of state senators on a retreat a few hours from here invited Gov. Sarah Palin to join them. Accompanied by a retinue of advisers, she took a seat at one end of a conference table and listened passively as Gary Stevens, the president of the Alaska Senate, a former college history professor and a low-key Republican with a reputation for congeniality, expressed delight at her presence.
Would the governor, a smiling Stevens asked, like to share some of her plans and proposals for the coming legislative session?
Palin looked around the room and paused, according to several senators present. “I feel like you guys are always trying to put me on the spot,” she said finally, as the room became silent.
Palin in 2012!
…to bumper stickers:
The atheist advert campaign is spreading from buses to cars with the release of a “There’s probably no God” bumper sticker.
The 12in stickers are being sold to raise money for groups including the British Humanist Association, which organised for atheist posters to be displayed on the side of 800 buses around the country.
That campaign attracted complaints from more than 300 people, but the provocative messages now look set to get a wider airing on the windows of non-believing motorists.
Great idea, especially for those stuffed-shirt towns that rejected the busboard ads. Let’s do it!
Stand back! For the next 3 days, keep your helmets on and your heads down and watch out for flying fragments teh crazy and teh stupid — this week’s “Conservative Political Action Conference” in Washington DC is expected to be the Biggest Ever:
Conservatives expect their largest turnout ever for the Conservative Political Action Conference this week, despite the Republicans’ recent electoral batterings, the economic free fall that began under a Republican administration and only one Republican senator’s having scored a perfect 100 in the American Conservative Union‘s just-released ratings.
Voters didn’t reject conservatism – they just said “no, you can’t” to the Republican Party after it had failed to walk the conservatism it had talked, ACU Chairman David A. Keene said this week.
And they’ll all be screaming “We lost because Bush was a LIBERAL!”
“Republicans lost their credibility as the party of the center-right when they became specialists in earmarks and the Bush White House presided over huge increases in discretionary spending,” he added.
Of course. To get more of an idea of how the GOP plans to revitalize itself and get back on the road to relevance, here’s the star of the show:
Seriously!?? If they still haven’t learned that their first step should be to make people like Rush radioactive, they deserve their imminent slow and painful demise.
Ooooh, looks like someone didn’t get an invite to Margaret Atwood’s Christmas party!
Further to this post about an idiotic parent’s shriekout over “The Handmaid’s Tale” at a Toronto area high school, the NatPo’s Barbara Kay also wrote about the story, and I can’t let her verbal gallstone pass without comment.
Never one to miss a feminist-bashing opportunity (whether real or imagined), and stroke her brain-damaged readership into a feverish circle jerk of misogyny, Kay weighs in on the story with characteristic sourness, describing Atwood’s book a “nasty trifecta of feminist bigotry”. It goes downhill from there:
A Handmaid’s Tale isn’t drivel because of the sex and violence, the parent’s concern. It is drivel because it is a scaremongering fantasy cut from whole ideological cloth, whose principal purpose and effect is to stir up hatred of men.
And for over 20 years I thought it was a fictional story about an imaginary futuristic dystopian society. But wait — she’s just getting revved up. Kay then takes furious issue with the book’s premise that the Republic of Gilead (probably modeled on the Islamic Republic of Iran) is a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. Ridiculous! Because as we all know,
Conservative Christians are the last people on earth to impose government-run programs of any kind to govern private sexuality.
Pardon?
Conservative Christians are the last people on earth to impose government-run programs of any kind to govern private sexuality.
Say what!??
Conservative Christians are the last people on earth to impose government-run programs of any kind to govern private sexuality.
That’s the point where the column spun out and burst into flames. Because as anyone who’s been paying attention knows, conservative Christians spend an embarrassing amount of time obsessing over private sexuality and longing to invite the state into the bedrooms of the nation. In fact, they think of little else — the economy could crash and burn around them and they’d still be whining about abortion and gay marriage.
It’s just another one of Kay’s typically delusional anti-feminist, anti-secular and anti-progressive diatribes, using a book that it’s questionable if she’s even read cover-to-cover to support her case. In other words, a nasty trifecta of wingnut bigotry, full of sound and fury, signifying sweet fuck-all.
The US Presidential Election is just a speck in the rearview mirror at
this point, but some people on the losing side of the equation seem intent on stretching their 15 minutes out of all proportion.
When former GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin looks back on the campaign, she doesn’t see the mistakes she made or the things she could have done better. She doesn’t see why over half of the electorate (including a fair number of conservatives) were appalled at the prospect of her being a gasp and thud away from the presidency. No, like most whiny wingnuts, she believes that as a hapless pedestrian jogging along the road to the White House, she was run over by the drive-by media:
Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) believes that the media deliberately tried to bring her down during her vice presidential run.
As part of an interview with conservative filmmaker John Ziegler for his new film out this week, Palin said she believes the media made a decision that “we’re going to seek and we’re going to destroy this candidacy of Sarah Palin’s because of what it is that she represents.”
“Obviously something big took place in the media,” she added. It is “very frightening, I think, what the media was able to get away with, this go around.”
Palin suggested that unbalanced media coverage posed a threat to democracy.
The same thing about unhinged vice-presidential candidates, I guess.
If Palin wants to blame the loss on anything other than her own performance, she might look to the McCain campaign itself, who first refused any press access to its unknown and unvetted VP candidate, then wisely left it to a correspondingly surly media to do the vetting. Ya think!??
Free speech! Free speech! Yes! Yes! Yes! No:
The Handmaid’s Tale, a story about a totalitarian society where women have few rights, are subservient to men and are forced to bear babies for barren couples in a more elite class, was the subject of a recent review by the Toronto District School Board.
A parent whose child was studying the novel in a Grade 12 class complained to Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute that he disapproved of its sexual content, violence and religious themes.
Here we have another Sensitive Suzie who can’t bear the thought of his little darling reading the same words he probably hears every day from his friends and online. Why??:
Robert Edwards says if students repeated some of the words from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in the school halls, they’d be suspended, so he questions why it is okay in the classroom.
I’m only guessing but I think what makes the difference is that the book is, you know, a book, and the school halls are, you know, Real Life.
And what about the foul language, the anti-Christian overtones, the violence and sexual degradation, asks the parent who launched a formal complaint about the Canadian novel. Don’t they violate the Toronto board’s policies of respect and tolerance?
Foul language, anti-Christian overtones, violence, sexual degradation… to paraphrase HST, I hate to advocate those things to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me. (I’m kidding.) (No I’m not.) (Yes I am.) But look what else the sensitive Mr. Edwards had to say:
He said if the book was anti-Islam, it wouldn’t be allowed.
I just love how these people always return to that idiotic meme… “You wouldn’t make a chocolate Mohammed, would you!!???!?”
When Islam is the majority religious faith in Canada (something that won’t be happening anytime soon in spite of all the dire, brain-damaged wingnut warnings), it too will feature in fictional futuristic tales about regressive theocracies. In fact, A Handmaid’s Tale has been accused of being anti-Islam because the women are veiled. Islam is also referred to in this passage:
It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the President and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. [...]
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary.
Written in 1985: who knows, maybe the book is just too prescient for comfort to Mr. Edwards and his ilk.
North Dakota’s passage last week of the “Personhood of Children Act”, a bit of batshit insanity that bestows the rights of you or me onto a fertilized egg, has farther-reaching consequences than merely(!?) banning abortion. Those include contraception, reproductive health services, IVF and stem-cell research, and are summarized here.
Of course, fetus humpers as a class tend to be catastrophically dull-witted and rarely think ahead to things like “consequences” and “repercussions”. The only way to properly enforce an egg-as-person law and protect fertilized eggs from being knowingly or unknowingly “murdered” would be to limit and monitor the activities of all women of childbearing age. Sorry honey, no snowboarding for you. Get that drink out of your hand. Drop those barbells, hang up those running shoes. You are a potential incubator, act like one.
Rolling on down Bad Craziness Avenue, consider what else the POC Act could impact: tax law, for example — fertilized eggs are the ultimate dependents, so certainly they should be claimable on a tax return. And welfare — a woman carrying a fertilized egg should be able to claim not just for herself but for her 2-celled blasto-child.
Why not? If state governments plan on conferring the rights of personhood to an egg to the point where the egg’s rights supersede those of the woman carrying it, they should at least be consistent about it.
It’s hard to say whether this thing will make it past the Senate, or if indeed it does (the state senate and governor are both anti-choice), whether it would stand up to any legal challenges. But this is the new anti-choice strategy in the USA, and it’s only a matter of time before they start banging the same gong up here. Last year’s aborted Bill C-484 was the first incremental step, this session we will undoubtedly see more of the same. Forwarned is forearmed.
(h/t CC for the vid)
Further to the input received by TVO/The Agenda with regard to their
February 12th discussion panel on Atheism, moderator Steve Paikin had more to say on Friday at his blog.
Paikin’s got a point. However, though nobody has the right to censor anyone (and certainly not under threat of “consequences” to TVO), it’s easy to see why so many people would question TVO’s judgement in that case. To get an idea of the calibre of discussion people were concerned about, have a look at some of the moronic comments with the TVO post. (Bet you didn’t know Obama’s policies are straight out of the Communist-freaking-Manifesto.)
But far from gaining any undeserved intellectual gravitas or even relevance, idiots generally reveal themselves as such in the context of an intelligent discussion, and this time was no different. Sunshine, disinfectant, etc. — it works. So, more of this, please:
Double your outrage, double your fun! The Catholic League gets a Two-fer-One!
Last week the University of Georgia’s “Sexual Responsibility Week” got on the wrong side of Bill Donohue and the Catholic League — admittedly, not a hard thing to do. The problem was one of its fliers, which featured the hands from that famous Michaelangelo painting “The Creation of Adam“, Photoshopically-enhanced to add a condom between their fingers:
…and giving the sensible advice, “Don’t use a sharp object”. Well, there are no sharp objects around the Catholic League, and after they proceeded with the usual weeping and gnashing, the university apologized. “Sexual Responsibility Week” had already been over for 3 days at this point and the flyers were all coming down anyway.
So everybody’s happy, right? Hahaha, you silly. Of course not.
Now they’re complaining because none of the major networks except Fox covered “The Story”:
Catholics and Protestants alike are furious over a flier that appeared on the University of Georgia campus displaying the famous Michelangelo painting of God reaching out to touch Adam’s hand. The fliers included a condom between God and Adams’ fingers, accompanied by the text, “Condom Tip #5: Carefully open condom wrappers with your fingers- don’t use a sharp object.” The fliers were posted around campus as a promotion for the university’s Sexual Responsibility Week.
On February 20th, the combined eight hours of morning news shows on ABC, CBS and NBC never mentioned the ad or the outrage that ensued.
It’s worth noting that if it hadn’t been for the Catholic League’s whining, nobody outside of the university would know anything about the flyer, which would have come and gone within a week but instead is quickly becoming famous. AND they want it covered on network news, which apart from the fact that it’s utterly unimportant trivia in comparison to wars and the economy, makes them look a little ridiculous. Do these people ever think about the ramifications of what they’re doing, or if they just have a weekly outrage quota to fulfill?
Seriously, what next?
This video explains in very simple terms how the credit fiasco got started:
And where it all went sideways:
(from Crisis of Credit)
In what’s probably one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of that old Arab saying “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”, a Calgary Imam said today that Muslims will be joining Christianist nuts like Bishop Fred Henry and getting in on the action in the War On Atheism, Busboard Division:
The Islamic Supreme Council of Canada is fighting fire with fire.
It says plans are in the works to buy bus advertising space promoting an all faith approach to religion.
The move comes after an atheist group announced it had purchased bus advertising space questioning the existence of God.
The council says the side of a bus is an unusual place to debate religion. “It’s not an appropriate place but the other group decided to take this path. We would love to have them in our places of worship and in our community centres so we can sit down and talk,” says Imam Syed Sohawardy.
If the name Syed Sohawardy sounds familiar, it’s probably because it was Sohawardy’s human rights complaint that catapulted Ezra Levant to fame and fortune as a blogospheric Free Speech Warrior. The complaint was ultimately tossed, but Levant’s overwrought videos of his “interrogation” at the hands of the “HRC Jackboots” live on (and on and groaningly on) through the magic of YouTube. (Thanks for all that, Syed!)
That’s okay. By all accounts, the Calgary atheist bus campaign is a “GO”, so to paraphrase an ex-War President, bring it on!
Two new baby killer whales have been spotted off the coast of Vancouver Island:
Orcas are much-beloved out here, figuring prominently in indigenous lore and legend for millenia (they are known as the “sea wolf”). Recently the species has been under stress, threatened by environmental factors and declining salmon stock, so the arrival of new ones is always good news.
Welcome to the world, little orcas.
Not bad, a perfect score.
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