Justice Souter retiring from SCOTUS

The first Obama SCOTUS appointment will be happening sooner than expected:

NPR has learned that Supreme Court Justice David Souter is planning to retire at the end of the current court term. The vacancy will give President Obama his first chance to name a member of the high court and begin to shape its future direction.

Justice Souter is 69 years old, which by SCOTUS standards isn’t that old at all. Justice Stevens is 89, nobody having delivered on Ann Coulter’s suggestion to poison him. Although Souter was a Republican appointee, he usually voted with the liberal wing of SCOTUS. So the Obama appointee, likely to be a solid liberal, won’t change much:

Given his first appointment to the high court, most observers expect Obama will appoint a woman, since the court currently has only one female justice and Obama was elected with strong support from women. But an Obama pick would be unlikely to change the ideological makeup of the court.

No, it won’t change the court’s ideological makeup, but it’s one more opportunity lost for Roe v Wade opponents who thought they could change it with “just one judge“.

That’s just sad

I don’t often feel sorry for fetus fetishists (okay, never), but I was almost… almost… driven to that point when I read this, from lifeshite:

This morning representatives from the office of the Canadian Governor General received a petition of 18,222 names opposing the award of the Order of Canada to the man most responsible for the legalization of abortion in Canada – abortionist Henry Morgentaler.  The petition marks the second large petition submitted in opposition to the award.  A petition launched by Campaign Life Coalition with 30,000 names was submitted in August.

In over 10 months, they’ve been able to gather less than 50,000 signatures combined on petitions protesting what was supposedly the most red-hot and galvanizing Canadian anti-choice issue in years (cue ominous music, key of A minor):  the Morgentaler Order of Canada.  Shit, I’ve signed anti-war petitions that boomed past 50,000 signatures in a day.

It’s not like they didn’t relentlessly flog the shit out of this thing, either — they were shrieking about it all summer and fall.  They petitioned, they protested, they polled (massively), they astroturfed, they tried to get the Order revoked and when that didn’t work, they tried to get other recipients to return theirs in protest (9 returns to date, 4 from beyond the grave)… they turned on the Governor-General and they turned on Justice Mclachlin.  Their outrage went on and on and on and on… and then it just kind of crapped out like a wet fart.  If the whole doomed sorry-ass campaign could somehow be distilled into a single image, it would be primo material for FAILblog… “EPIC FAIL“.

And to top it all off, now along comes this new petition that brings their total number of signatures all the way up to about 1/4 of 1% of the voting-age population.

That’s just sad…

But I’ll take it!  BWAHAHA!

That was then

Remember when a “coalition with socialists and separatists” was a bad idea?:

Tory insiders say the party is hatching a survival plan to keep the surging Liberals at bay and delay any potential election long enough to enjoy the international limelight at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. [...]

However, the Tories will need the NDP and the Bloc to play ball if they hope to stave off a non-confidence vote before the 2010 Winter Games, to be held from Feb. 12 to 28.

So far, it appears the NDP and the Bloc are willing to back up the Tories — at a price.

All together now: IT’S OKAY IF YOU’RE A CONSERVATIVE!

The Tale of the Terrible Tweet

The story of the Zerb/Malkin Twitter fauxtrage just cries out to be set to music, don’t you think? Something heavy and important-sounding, as befits the seriousness of the situation. Beethoven? Mahler?

Try “Gilligan’s Island“:

Just sit right back and you’ll read a tale
A tale of a Twittering twat
Who misunderstood someone else’s tweet
As a call to get her shot…

She foamed and she frothed and the spittle flew
As she gave forth a hue and cry
To the braindead monkeys at her feet
She shrieked, “Fly, my pretties, fly!”

And off they winged through the intertubes
To scold and complain and kvetch
And demand that Zerb apologize
For a joke they were too dumb to get.

It’s been going on for a long long time
Since at least November or so
Such fragile sensitivity
The wingnuts are starting to show.

So let’s all remember to watch our asses
Whenever we Twitter and Tweet
So as not to offend sensibilities
Of the delicate wingnut clique…

‘Cause they’re clearly about to freak!

From the “too little too late” department

The pope tells Canadian aboriginals he’s sorry:

Pope Benedict XVI expressed “sorrow” to a delegation from Canada’s Assembly of First Nations on Wednesday over the abuse and “deplorable” treatment that aboriginal students suffered at residential schools run by the Roman Catholic Church.

In a statement, the Vatican said the Pope “offered his sympathy and prayerful solidarity” to those whose anguish was caused by some church members. The comments came during a private audience with the delegation, which included Assembly of First Nations Leader Phil Fontaine, aboriginal elders and residential school survivors.

Is “sorry for all the abuse (and death) at residential schools” kind of like “sorry for covering up for all those diddler priests” or “sorry I couldn’t force that 9-year-old rape victim to carry twins until her uterus exploded“?

I’m also sorry that I take apologies from this fascist freak with a massive grain of salt.

UPDATE: This wasn’t an official apology as such; the word “apology” was never used.  So while the pope expressed “sorrow” and according to this account, said he was “sorry”, he wasn’t actually apologizing on behalf of the church.   Just to clarify.

Look! Up in the sky!

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No! It’s… SUPER-FETUS!:

The controversy over President Obama speaking at Notre Dame’s Commencement has taken to the skies.

At around 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, I heard the droning noise of a small plane and looked out my window to see one flying low over campus. It carried a banner behind it featuring a picture of an aborted fetus and words, in bold white letters, that described it as a 10 week abortion. The plane circled the boundaries of campus for at least two-and-a-half hours.

Earlier in the day, I had seen a press release from The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR), an anti-abortion activist group, that threatened to fly banners over campus and drive billboard trucks around featuring abortion photos on the side.

Oh, fuck. It’s them again, the “Center for Bio-Ethical Reform”, also know as “the Wankers That Cruise Around in the Fetusmobile©” — now they’ve blasted off into the Wild Blue Yonder to protest President Obama’s speaking engagement at Notre Dame.  Time to get an anti-aircraft paintball gun!

But never mind that.  The all-important issue is what to call this new mobile fetus freighter.   Air Fetus?   Trans-Fetus Airlines?

Keep up the good work, fetus fetishists.  I may never stop laughing.

The “Specter” of a shrinking GOP

Conservative reaction to Senator Arlen Specter’s defection yesterday ranged from “Oh shit” to “Don’t let the door hit your ass” to the ever-popular “Traitor!!!” to “Take McCain with you“.

One of the more reasonable voices from the right (and I still can’t get used to saying this) was David Frum:

The Specter defection is too severe a catastrophe to qualify as a “wake-up call.” His defection is the thing we needed the wake-up call to warn us against! For a long time, the loudest and most powerful voices in the conservative world have told us that people like Specter aren’t real Republicans – that they don’t belong in the party. Now he’s gone, and with him the last Republican leverage within any of the elected branches of government.

For years, many in the conservative world have wished for an ideologically purer GOP. Their wish has been granted. Happy?

The more extreme right will argue that Frum, like Specter, is a RINO, but that in itself is telling. If the Specters and the Frums of the world are considered RINOs, what exactly is the GOP these days? Increasingly it’s becoming the Dittohead Club, a shrinking subculture of ill-informed brain-damaged nitwits and rabid theocratic fascists to which moderates need not apply.

“Mr. Conservative” Barry Goldwater, by today’s standards a relative moderate and by the GOP’s current definition a flaming liberal, must be spinning in his grave.

Hmmm… there’s a scent in the air…

THUD!

That was the sound of a million anti-choicers dropping their clutched pearls and hitting the fainting couches en masse.

While wingnuts foamed and spewed spittle over the defection of Arlen Specter, something else just happened:

The U.S. Senate voted 65 to 31 Tuesday to confirm former Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as the health and human services secretary.

Let no heads be left unexploded today! BWAHAHA!

UPDATE: “With Specter’s support” — oh my…

UPPERDATE: Fetus Fetishists, always a day late and a dollar short:

I wonder how much more money Operation Rescue will haul in from all their nitwit followers before they finally decide to take this down from their site:

Act now, rubes!  At those low low prices this offer won’t last long!

UPPER-UPPERDATE (Wednesday):  Get your helmets on, those bits of brain and skull (okay, maybe just skull) are gonna be flyin’!

Filibuster-proof majority

W00t!

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter will switch his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat and announced today that he will run in 2010 as a Democrat, according to a statement he released this morning.

Specter’s decision would give Democrats a 60 seat filibuster proof majority in the Senate assuming Democrat Al Franken is eventually sworn in as the next senator from Minnesota. (Former senator Norm Coleman is appealing Franken’s victory in the state Supreme Court.)

“I have decided to run for re-election in 2010 in the Democratic primary,” said Specter in a statement. “I am ready, willing and anxious to take on all comers and have my candidacy for re-election determined in a general election.”

Teabag that, suckahs!

“Judge not”, etc.

Okay, progressive and/or liberal (presumably small and Large “L”) Christians.

I despise being the bearer of bad news, but someone has to break it to you and since I don’t really have a dog in the fight, it might as well be me.  Why not?  So stand back, sit down and rock steady, because here it comes:

You’re not Real Christians.

Thus spake the haughty, the arrogant, the self-appointed arbiter of all that is Christian (and all that is not), Ste. Nitouche:

If Christianity were that easy, it weren’t [sic] be worth it. Why accept Christ only to live as if you never accepted him, as if he didn’t require anything of you? If you want a faith that isn’t “too hard”, just stay a non-believer. You can still dres [sic] up your faith in Christian symbolism if you like. But it’s not Christianity.

So ends the sermon post about the self-flagellating side of conservative Christianity, specifically where sex and chastity is concerned.  Atheist animale that I am, it took a couple of reads to make sense of it, but here’s the gist:  liberal (or Liberal) Christians can sacrifice time, money and energy doing good works and living their faith, worshipping God and Jesus, doing unto others appropriately and loving one another, but if they see no percentage in being certified hair shirt punishment freaks about sex, they don’t make the cut.

That sound about right?

Of course it’s always possible that God and JC really do care more about your sex life than they care about how you treat other people and animals and the earth, and whether you lie, cheat, steal, hate or kill things.  But if they do, that’s, well, fucked up.

That said, I can’t say I’m unhappy when hyperconservative religious ideologues isolate themselves by insulting and rejecting those who might otherwise be allies. But that doesn’t stop me from being fascinated, in a purely anthropological sense, by the demented arrogance of it all.

On falling asleep in meetings

Ooh! Ahh! SHRIEEEK!!!

Yeah, that never happened during the Bush Administration. Just like Bush never bowed to the Saudi king. Or kissed him.

Seriously, is this all they’ve got?  SAD!!!

Bea Arthur

With Rock Hudson, singing about drugs in a way that would be unimaginable in today’s Zero Tolerance world:

A controversial moment from Maude (cue SHRIEEEEKs)

And a couple of decades later, in a Sex And The City parody:

RIP, dear lady.

September teabaggers march planned

But this time the theme won’t be teabagging, as you can see by their Official Logo:

Feel free to “insert” your own joke.

(h/t Frank Frink)

Josephine the Plumber

You just knew this was coming, didn’t you?:

If you’re asking whether anti-gay-marriage groups have wrapped their Jesus-lovin’ arms around Carrie Prejean‘s perfectly tanned spine, the answer is: They certainly are trying.

“She’s gotten several requests to speak from statewide pro-marriage-and-family groups,” her (brand-spankin’ new) spokeswoman just told me.

Uppity-ups in the Republican party also tell me Prejean definitely will be approached by some arm of theirs, though whether she’ll be game is another story.

Oh, please please please let this woman run for office for the GOP!  That could be what Focus On The Family wants to talk to her about:

“Dr. Dobson would very much like to speak with her, at least privately,” a Focus spokesman tells me.

Just what the Republicans need — another slow-witted, semi-coherent, spittle-flecked bigot in their ranks.  That should attract the moderates!

Dobson: “We will have our day!”

This is a bit late, but I thought it was worth posting as a followup to my post about the report that Daddy Dobson was admitting defeat and throwing in the towel in the (cue thunder SFX) “Culture Wars”.

The supposed admission of defeat, which originated in the UK’s Telegraph, caused a minor media explosion (along with the sound of a billion corks popping), so a distressed Dobson appeared a few days later (last week) on the Hannity Show to set the record straight. DD explained that while he and his ilk have been defeated on every front in their ridiculous “Culture Wars” (which is kind of like, oh I don’t know, admitting defeat?), he wasn’t admitting defeat. So without further ado, heeeeeeeere’s Daddy:

Predictably, the whole thing is just a ploy by the “Left Wing Media”, who want the religious right to wave the white flag of surrender and hand the country over to them…??? Huh? Since when is “the country” the religious right’s to hand over? Talk about delusions of Grandeur.

But oh, that pornography is horrible, wretched stuff, ain’t it? And there’s no avoiding it — you just “stumble across” it on the internet. Over and over and over and over and over… Funny, I’m on the internet all the time, and I never “stumble across” porn. But anyway!

Dobson’s still flogging the same tired old bullshit that nobody cares about anymore, and even though he and his ilk “lost the white house, lost the house, lost the senate and will probably lose the courts”, he still doesn’t get that. The disconnect is just amazing.

GOP blocks Sebelius vote

Aw, how cute! The Party of NO! wants to pretend it still has a modicum of leverage:

President Obama will have to wait a bit longer to round out his Cabinet. Senate Republicans refused today to allow a confirmation vote on his health secretary nominee Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kan.). She is the last Cabinet member awaiting Senate approval.

At the start of the session today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) proposed taking a vote after five hours of debate. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) objected, arguing that lawmakers needed more time to consider her “fairly contentious” selection.

A handful of Republicans have complained about Sebelius’ support for abortion rights and her failure to report the full extent of campaign contributions she received from a physician who performs abortions.

This ultimately meaningless obstructionist tactic was initiated at the behest of religious right fetus fetishists, who’ve been trying in vain to get the Sebelius nomination scuttled. Although the GOP can be assholes and delay the final vote, that’s all they can do — put off the inevitable. Since the Sebelius confirmation is all but a done deal, the GOP’s delay tactics are silly, wrong and stupid political posturing, (not to mention a waste of taxpayers’ money — teabaggers, call your office!).

But this is actually great — it’s not like the confirmation is in any jeopardy, and it’s the GOP behaving exactly the way that got it where it is now, out of power. Objecting to someone like Sebelius, who’s such a moderate that she once chose a former Republican as a running mate, just cements the GOP’s reputation as a minority party in the pocket of the religious right. Nice work guys, keep it up!

5… 4… 3… 2… 1…

…SHRIEEEEEEK!!!:

Seventeen-year-olds will soon have access to emergency contraception without a prescription, U.S. health regulators said on Wednesday, complying with a court order to ease restrictions on over-the-counter sales of the so-called “morning-after” pill.

Last month, a U.S. court ruled the Food and Drug Administration under the Bush administration had allowed politics to cloud its decision-making process regarding availability of the Plan B drug which had been restricted to those 18 and older.

It ordered the agency to allow nonprescription sales to 17-year-olds, and to reconsider its decision regarding over-the-counter access to Plan B.

Another idiotic Bush administration intrusion into reproductive liberty bites the dust!! And just in time for “the Pill Kills, 2009“! W00t!

UPDATE (Friday): What Cristina said. Especially this:

The era during which the likes of the religious Wright (pun intended) held sway on what should rightfully be medical and scientific decisions are, thankfully, over. And no group seems more relieved than the non-ideological researchers who’d watched years of hard earned effort for scientific integrity wasted in a matter of months. It’s telling that no one at the FDA has voiced a problem with the unprecedented mandate from the President Obama to overturn the decision. Conversely, senior staff resigned from the FDA over the political/ideological handling of the application during the Bush years and the Christian right’s destructive influence on agency policy.

A new day is at hand. Vindication is the order of business. Today we have prevailed and 17 year old women are the victors. We’ve always known Wright is wrong. The sweetest victory is her new found irrelevance. (Emphasis mine)

Testify, sister.

Keep the story straight

A few days ago, I caught some reaction to a Sun article by Michael Coren following the death in Afghanistan of another of our soldiers, Trooper Karine Blais.   Supposedly meaning “no disrespect”, Coren conjured up the usual rotten right-wing fantasies about the lesser standing of women — we’re dainty doilies far too delicate for the rigors of battle (even when we’re trained to use submachine guns and assault rifles).  Right:

So Canada sacrifices another victim on the altar of equality.

Last week a young girl dressed up as a soldier died in the increasingly futile and pointless war in Afghanistan. She was 21 years old, had been in the country for two weeks on her first tour of duty and probably weighed a little over 100 pounds.

Please know that I mean no disrespect to Karine Blais or to her family and I grieve for her and them. But what on earth was she doing in such a place and in such a job?

What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this, eh?  I wonder what he thinks of the women in the IDF?  They would kick his flabby ass, as would Trooper Karine Blais or any other female Canadian soldier.

Coren is an imbecile and a rotten douchebag, no news there.  But I couldn’t help noticing how different his addlepated ruminations about women are from the squirrelly brain spasms processed by one of his wankers-in-arms, the National Post’s equally-loathsome Barbara Kay, on the same subject.   Kay’s pet issue is domestic violence:  she routinely claims that domestic violence against women is a myth, and that women are responsible for just as much (if not more) domestic violence against their male partners.  To read Kay, one would think women are savage, bloodthirsty harpies whose violent tendencies know no bounds.  So why not turn that potent power on the Taliban?

Both Coren and Kay are wrong in more ways than I want to go into right now, but I will say that it’s kind of amazing that two such disparate views are drawn from the same putrid well of right-wing “thought”.   Do these people ever read each other?

Laugh

I can’t stop.

Oh shit, I’ll never have sex again without imagining that sound. I just hope I don’t start laughing when I think of it!

Out-NOMming NOM

This is too ridiculous not to post.

The bigoted imbeciles at the “Illinois Family Institute” have a video that goes the  mercilessly parodied NOM video (cue thunder sound FX), “The Gathering Storm“, one better.  Now the Gay Agenda is AFTER YOUR CHILDREN!!!

I hate to say it (okay, not really), but I did crack a smile at the sight of the Bible being tossed in the garbage.  Although I would have been happier to see it set aflame, along with the Koran, the Torah, and all the other tomes of mythology that drive so much intolerance and hate among the cerebrally-deprived.

And one other point of interest, if you please — fundies sure like taping their kids’ mouths shut, don’t they?  What’s up with that?

Hypocrisy for thee

Boom! Due to overwhelming and exhausting commitments in meatspace I’ve been forced to take a few days off blogging, but there’s always something (arrgh! there’s always something!) that drags me back to it.

This time it’s Sarah Palin’s sorry-ass admission that despite her absolutist anti-abortion position when it comes to other women, she herself considered aborting her last pregnancy:

Palin revealed more Thursday night, saying she was traveling when she got the result of the amniocentesis that revealed the chromosomal abnormality.

“There, just for a fleeting moment, I thought, I knew, ‘Nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know.’ “

Palin has long been a staunch supporter of abortion restrictions, and she pointed to her own “moment of doubt” to illustrate her support for carrying pregnancies to term, regardless of the circumstances.

“Just for a fleeting moment” — though one couldn’t be blamed for wondering what kind of speedometer measures as “fleeting” a time period long enough to include considering amniocentesis, having the test, and waiting for results. (By those standards my truck breaks the sound barrier in 2nd gear.)

Amnio is typically done on older pregnant women, and it’s done for one reason: to determine if there are fetal abnormalities so the pregnancy can be terminated if the woman so chooses. It also carries some risk to the fetus, whether it’s normal or not. It’s definitely not the kind of test someone would get if they were determined to carry a pregnancy to term regardless of fetal disposition, the prevailing attitude of anti-choice absolutists like Sarah Palin.

So it doesn’t look like Palin greeted this pregnancy with the unequivocal, unrestrained joy that she thinks should be the only choice for other women.

Some call this “hypocrisy” and I can’t say I disagree. We know all about this “choice for me but not for thee” routine.

It’s irrelevant that Palin ultimately chose to carry the pregnancy to term — the operative word is “chose“. Sarah weighed her options and made a choice, in a situation where, according to her, there should be no choice other than delivering a baby.

And that’s hypocrisy, with a capital “H” and a capital “YPOCRISY“.

Images of madness and depravity

Well, there was definitely some of that, but mostly it was just ignorance and stupidity. I’ve been surfing around looking at pictures and videos from today’s Fox News/media event, and I gotta tell you, the vacuous stupidity and blind spittle-flecked hate is painful to behold. Regardless of the last-minute “bipartisanship” spin (someone at Teabagger HQ must have belatedly realized that getting a lot of really stupid people all torqued up might not end well), these things were basically Obama hate-fests.  Without further ado, some images of “The Teabaggers”:

Just your basic racist:

The ever-popular Barack Hussein Osama bin Obama bin Hitler:

More racism:

The perpetually persecution-complexed (but what’s this have to do with taxes?):

The omnipresent fetus fetishist contingent (I guess representing all those fetal taxpayers):

A “Get A Brain, Morans” moment (probably just one of many):

And finally, someone from the reality-based community, asking the question that every dumbass teabagger should have been asked:

There are some figures on the turnout at five thirty eight — not all locations are in, but so far it’s about 111,000 with the estimated total at possibly 250,000 nationwide.  To add context, it helps to consider that Barack Obama’s rallies routinely drew 70,000 people.  Given the months of almost 24/7 promotion from Fox and other right-wing media, I’d call it a DUD.  A tempest in a teabag.  Or maybe a barf bag, or, looking at some of these fine folks, a colostomy bag.

More pics where these ones came from at Huffington Post, (if you can bear it).

Splitting Teabags — Paulies are mad

Ohoh! Sounds like there’s already a bit of a schism in the Teabagger Party situation (I hesitate to call it a “movement” — there but for the grace of a few inches…).

Yes yes, grow up. *Ahem*

So, apparently the whole teabagging idea is nothing new: it originated with Ron Paul supporters way back in 2007, and they’re mightily pissed off that their brainchild has been so viciously co-opted, corporatized and turned into a nationwide laughingstock by big-spending Republicans and corporate fatasses (who don’t know how to use urbandictionary.com). Mmmm, Astroturf:

A number of people I have spoken with are planning to attend a “tea party” tomorrow, so I thought it might be a good idea to write about this. They are not what they claim to be. They are not “spontaneous” or “grassroots.” They are another corporate-funded campaign to trick people into supporting more cut taxes for the rich. [...]

The events have been widely promoted by corporate-funded conservative PR professionals who specialize in “astroturf.” This is a term for the use of money to create an appearance of widespread “grassroots” support. Currently the corporate-funded conservative lobbying groups Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity, are organizing the events and conservative media including talk radio and FOX News are widely promoting them. Support appears to be coming from Koch Industries, the largest privately-owned company in the country.

It’s true that Teabagging has been feverishly promoted by Fox News. The addlepated Glenn Beck in particular seems to have gone right off the deep, lapsing into some kind of perverse Howard Beale routine and exhorting the President to shoot him or set him on fire and his audience to rhetorically throw their windows open and scream “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”. Would it surprise anyone to see him push the act to the limit and ride it right off the edge in a blaze of brain-damaged glory? Not me. It’s how the GOP and their corporate overlords like to do things, but they should know by now that it’s not a winning formula and it’s really turned this whole teabagging business into a circus of clowns. And that’s got libertarians, who were there, man, when the teabagging deal first went down back in ’07, pissed off.

Here Rachel Maddow talks to one of them:

About that DHS report

Glenn Greenwald on the DHS report on right-wing extremists that crazed wingnuts are pissing their pants over:

All of the enabling legislation underlying this Surveillance State — from the Patriot Act to the Military Commissions Act, from the various FISA ”reforms” to massive increases in domestic “counter-Terrorism” programs — are the spawns of the very right-wing movement that today is petrified that this is all being directed at them.

When you cheer on a Surveillance State, you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you. If you create a massive and wildly empowered domestic surveillance apparatus, it’s going to monitor and investigate domestic political activity.  That’s its nature.

Quid pro quo, Clarice.

But don’t expect the wingnuts to get it.  As one of Greenwald’s commenters said of  them:  “When they have a club in their hands, no one is more sadistic.  When the club is removed, no one is more whiney.”

It’s Teabagging Day!!!1!