I could play this game all day

Heheh.

Funny.  I’ll tell you what else is funny — it’s funny that whenever there’s something on the news about an abortion clinic being blown up or a doctor getting shot, chances are it involves some bible-whomping right-wing nutbar.

Come to think of it, whenever there’s news about attempts to cover up widespread, systemic child abuse, chances are it involves the Catholic church.

And one other point of interest, if you please:  whenever we hear about a politician who’s been caught slithering around a public washroom looking for sex or engaging in some kind of lurid act involving a diaper, a feather duster and a gerbil, chances are it involves a Republican.

And so it goes…

Tebow’s choice?

One of the reasons Sarah Palin is so beloved by the religious right is the compelling anti-abortion story of her baby with Down’s Syndrome.   (Never mind that it’s really a story of choice, since Palin considered abortion but *chose* to carry the pregnancy to term.)  Conservatives are enthralled, and Palin’s done well by it.  She’s probably the most in-demand keynote speaker on the social conservative/anti-abortion circuit — at upwards of $100,000 a speech, she’s her own  industry.  Who wouldn’t be encouraged to try getting some of that action for themselves?

Which brings us to Pam Tebow and her son Tim the quarterback.  Tebow’s become something of an anti-choice celebrity with the story of her difficult pregnancy with Tim.  She’s a regular speaker on the anti-abortion circuit, and will be featured in a Focus on the Family commercial to run during the Superbowl.

In the commercial, Ms.Tebow reportedly shares the story of how she was ill during her pregnancy, doctors advised her to abort and she refused (or “made the brave and virtuous choice“… huh.  There’s that word again, “choice”), and at immense personal risk and peril carried the pregnancy to term.  And the rest is history.  Another compelling anti-abortion story?   Maybe… if it’s true:

When pregnant with Tim, Pam Tebow was in the Philippines on a mission and became ill with amoebic dysentery.  Early reports indicated that she was faced with a choice of continuing the pregnancy at the risk to her life.

That appears not to be true.  Indeed the very facts of the situation are now in question.

During a bible study class, Pam Tebow related that “during that pregnancy, a Philippine doctor suggested that she abort the fetus because the strong medications she was being treated with for amoebic dysentery, which she had contacted early in the pregnancy, could cause serious disabilities to the fetus.”

Suggested that she abort the pregnancy?  Or laid out the various risks that were possible, leaving her to her own judgment and choices?  Made a definitive judgment that the fetus would unquestionably be harmed?  Or described the risks of the medication necessary to treat the dysentery, including possible risks to the fetus?  All of these are very different scenarios than the ones earlier suggested.

Exactly:  a doctor advising a pregnant patient of all the potential risks isn’t the same thing as a doctor telling a patient she absolutely will be in mortal danger unless she terminates the pregnancy, which is what Tebow suggests in her version of the story.  To top it off:

Abortion was criminalized in the Philippines in 1870 and has been illegal in the country ever since. There are no exceptions to the law. Abortion is even prohibited when a woman’s life or health is in danger. Women are punished with imprisonment between two to six years if they obtain one. Doctors and midwives who directly cause or assist a woman in an abortion face six years imprisonment and may have their licenses suspended or revoked.

So Tebow had no choice — she was just lucky.

Ironically, that little factoid almost makes her story a better pro-choice parable — “I didn’t have the choice, but I got lucky.  What about all the women who don’t?”

(h/t amptoons via Rob F in teh comments)

Compare & Contrast

Anti-abortion terrorist Randall Terry holds forth about the Scott Roeder trial at his usual fire-and-brimstone venue, the “Christian” Newswire:

“When the rule of law and the law of blood clash, such as in George Tiller’s death, we must not pretend that there is no connection between Mr. Tiller’s shedding of innocent blood and Scott Roeder’s act of violence against him. There is sowing; there is reaping.”

Now is the time at UOH when we juxtapose!:

“Obama has followed the footsteps of his predecessor in increasing animosity toward Muslims and increasing enemy fighters and establishing long-term wars,” the recording said. “So the American people should get ready to reap the fruits of what the leaders of the White House have planted throughout the coming years and decades.”

The magnitude might be greater, but the sentiments are exactly the same.

Ted Haggard is completely heterosexual… again

And Mrs.Ted says it’s for real this time (no, really for real!):

Ted Haggard’s wife is standing by her man, no matter how many times he may have had homosexual affairs.

Gayle Haggard appeared on the “Today” show on Wednesday to talk about her new book, “Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made In My Darkest Hour,” and declared that her one-time Evangelical superstar husband was “cured” of his homosexual compulsions.

And you all know what comes next…

(Banksy’s) Osama taken out in Utah

At City Creek, outside Salt Lake City, Utah:

Closeup:

And bin Laden finally taken out by The Authorities:

(via AnimalNewYork)

From “pro-lifer” to lifer

Bye-bye, dickhead:

In a trial that never became the referendum on abortion that some abortion foes wanted, Scott Roeder, a 51-year-old airport shuttle driver, was convicted today of murdering George Tiller, one the nation’s few physicians who performed late-term abortions.

The jury of seven men and five women deliberated for only 37 minutes. Roeder faces life in prison after being convicted of first-degree murder.

37 minutes?  What took ya??

Teabuggergate: there’s more

Lots more.

The ugly little tale of Teabuggergate is starting to unravel, and ooh-la-la!  now it starts to get interesting.   The 4 little douchebags who got caught in the middle of what appears to be an attempt to tamper with a US Senator’s phone line have some connections to some very deep pockets:  the Leadership Institute, The Family Research Council and  Focus on the Family to name a few.  Take it away, Keith:

Those involved in abortion rights might be familiar with the Leadership Institute because that’s who bankrolls Lila Rose, the female James O’Keefe who targets Planned Parenthood.  Interestingly, one of the Leadership Institute’s past students is James Guckert aka “Jeff Gannon”, the fake White House “reporter” who moonlighted as a $200 an hour male escort and operator of gay porn sites. (Still another former student is Congressman Joe “You Lie!” Wilson.)  Whatever else it might claim to be, the Leadership Institute is ass-deep in slime, specializing in the training and financing of right-wingnuts in dirty trick campaigns and the thwarting of democracy.

Can’t wait til the pigeons start chirping!

One of them had to do it

Congressman Joe “You lie!” Wilson was sworn to be on his best behaviour at last night’s State of the Union address, so Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito picked up the slack after a sweet little towel-snap over last week’s “Citizens United” decision:

Alito will henceforth be known as Justice Sam “Not true!” Alito.

(h/t – JAB in teh comments)

For whom the ban tolls

Some bloggers swing the ban hammer with regularity and great gusto, but I am not one of them.  Even when a commenter continually makes it clear that their only objective is to irritate everyone with asinine arguments and insults, I can usually just ignore them.  If that doesn’t give them the incentive to move on and defecate in greener pastures, on rare occasions I might give them a “time-out”.  But that only goes so far.  When someone uses my comments section to lob accusations and even threats at other people, it departs the realm of merely obnoxious free speech and becomes something more odious.

Patrick Ross, of the aptly-named “Nexus of Assholery“, has a history of  getting time-outs from this place (and others), so about 2 weeks ago it came as no surprise to be contemplating it yet again.   While it wasn’t the only reason, his disturbing and obsessive anti-CC jihad, which seems to be spiraling into some kind of psychotic episode, was one of the last straws.

Nobody needs their comments section deceptively used as a venue for someone’s escalating imaginary crusade against a third party, and I don’t feel obliged to allow it here in the interest of “free speech”.   It’s not free speech, it’s free bullshit, and I’m not the only one who’s had enough of it.

Times are hard

…and even the world’s biggest tool is no guarantee of steady work.  Maybe he should consider leaving his organ size off the list of qualifications on his resume.

On a somewhat related note, the latest men’s fashion trend — ta da! — models with boners:

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really see how that sells the suit.  Not that priapic isn’t a good great outstanding look, but when a guy in the market for a suit sees this model, “comfort” might not be the first word that comes to mind.

And while we’re on the topic of big dicks… what a sleaze.   He times this announcement to come out on the ultimate news-dump day, with everyone’s attention on the State of the Union address and the iPad release.  Well played.

Apple unveils iPad tablet

Apple’s new shiny cool thing full of awesomeness is here.  Take it away Steve:

No joy in Freeperville

Freepers are trying hard to keep the faith in their ACORN-smashing hero who now stands accused of a federal crime, and who could blame them?  Not only does this recent event put them on the side of a sleazy criminal douchebag, it also undermines the douchebag’s previous “work” on the celebrated “ACORN sting“, already compromised by a pending lawsuit.

But clearly the grieving process has begun:

DENIAL:

ANGER:

It’s Obama’s fault.

And those libtardhomoislamofascistcommies at the FBI

And the Liberal Media

BARGAINING:

There’s no way of linking O’Keefe to the GOP:

ACCEPTANCE:

There’s a strange and ominous juxtaposition in all of this.  How is it that the same people who go into paroxysms of unforgiving outrage when a gullible ACORN worker gets scammed into saying things that look bad (but not illegal) on heavily-edited video, are so eager to forgive and forget when one of their own is caught willfully committing a felony?    Conventional wisdom suggests it would take either mental illness or heavy drugs to live with such contradictions.

INACIYAR

“It’s not a crime if you’re a Republican!”

Remember the two little conservatards who took their “pimp and ho” act on the road for a covertly taped interview that snagged entrapped a dimwitted ACORN worker? This little creep…… was arrested with 3 other pinheads yesterday in the midst of trying to bug the phone system in a Democratic Senator’s office:

A conservative activist who posed as a pimp to target the community-organizing group ACORN and the son of a federal prosecutor were among four people arrested by the FBI and accused of trying to interfere with phones at Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office.

Activist James O’Keefe, 25, was already in Landrieu’s New Orleans office Monday when Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel, both 24, showed up claiming to be telephone repairmen, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten’s office said Tuesday. Letten says O’Keefe recorded the two with his cell phone.

It should come as no surprise that in the past O’Keefe has teamed up with another low-rent authoritarian swine who gets off on invading privacy to make “undercover” movies, fetus fetishizing extremist “Lila Rose”.  That’s right, the degenerate punishment freak who goes into ecstatic spasms when visualizing women being forced by the state to have abortions “in the public square“.

O’Keefe became a conservative celebrity of sorts after his ACORN movies went viral (and I mean that in the worst possible way) on Youtube, but I guess he let it go to his head.  He apparently saw nothing illegal, immoral or just wrong about bugging a politician’s phone.  Or maybe he figured he had the connections to keep him out of trouble:

In the reception area, Flanagan, the son of acting U.S. Attorney Bill Flanagan in Shreveport, and Basel asked for access to the main phone at the reception desk.

After handling the phone, Letten’s office said, they asked for access to a phone closet so they could work on the main phone system. The men were directed to another office in the building, where they are accused of again misrepresenting themselves as telephone repairmen.

Hoho!  I guess we’ll see how much drag US Attorney Bill Flanagan has, because what these little dickheads were doing is a federal offense that would mean a world of hurt for most people.  Stay tuned…

UPDATE:

“It was poor judgment,” Robert Flanagan’s lawyer, Garrison Jordan, said in a brief interview outside the courthouse. “I don’t think there was any intent or motive to commit a crime.”

Is he kidding?   “Poor judgment” is getting shitfaced at the office Christmas party and pissing in the wassail.  Secretly wiretapping a Senator’s office seems a little more serious.

iState of the Union

Slate imagines Steve Jobs giving the State of the Union Address… not a bad iDea, actually.

(Apple will be introducing a new shiny cool and awesome thing on the same day as the SOTU address.  Wheeee!)

I’ll see your “useless kids at CAPP rallies”

… and raise you a “Catholic school field trip to the March for Life”.

Those naysayers who would denigrate the weekend anti-prorogation rallies due to the number of young people in attendance (because who cares what kids think?) are slammed into the boards by Team Snark’s top power forward:

From what I’ve read, many of this weekend’s CAPP rallies can be dismissed since they were full of all those useless kids, and who gives a crap what kids think, right?

Huh … how odd (emphasis tail-waggingly added):

“More than half of those in attendance were youth – high school and university students – many who were proud to display their school banners or pro-life signs reports Campaign Life Coalition. Many wore pro-life t-shirts, signaling their deep commitment to the cause. Jim Hughes, the National President of CLC, said that “the growing number of young people” is a “tremendous blessing” to both the March and to the movement. “This is going to make a difference.”"

Ice that cake with the fact that the “March for Life” is always held on a weekday so organizers can bring in busloads of Catholic school kids on the pretext of some kind of field trip.   Their “deep committment to the cause” obviously isn’t so deep that they can be trusted to give up a Saturday and attend this little shindig of their own volition… unlike the kids at the CAPP rallies on Saturday.

And that’s Game Over!

Won’t someone think of the toy soldiers??

We all know fetus fetishists have a marked tendency towards over-the-top anthropormorphism which manifests in such odd concepts as…

<———-this      =      this———>

…but this is getting silly.

“1/23″ rallies: well done, CAPPers

You know you’ve accomplished something when even some of the denizens of Free Dominion are impressed:

That second remark was from FD administrator Connie Fournier, who went to the Ottawa rally and was surprised to find it attended not by a roiling, incoherent mass of deranged Marxistislamolibtardfascists, but by “a bunch of normal looking Canadians”.  Who knew??

The opinions cited above aren’t typical of FD by any means –  they’re just the reactions of two people who actually attended rallies and know what they’re talking about.  Those who disagreed invariably hadn’t seen the rallies first-hand.

When you consider these rallies took place in something like 50 cities and towns coast-to-coast, well, nice work!

We are all teabaggers latte-lappers now.

A woman-educated physician

Physicians for Reproductive Choice has released two “never-before-seen” tapes from a candid interview given by Dr. George Tiller for their documentary, “Voices of Choice“.   Dr. Tiller discusses why he chose to be an abortion provider, and why he stuck with it through years of ongoing harassment, threats and assassination attempts, the last of which took his life.

The experiences of Dr.Tiller’s father, a physician who secretly provided illegal abortions in the desperate days before Roe v. Wade got the government out of American wombs, had a profound effect on him.   As he remarks in the first video,

The women in my father’s practice for whom he did abortions educated me and taught me that abortion is not about babies, it’s not about families. Abortion is about women’s hopes, dreams, potential, the rest of their lives. Abortion is a matter of survival for women.

A woman-educated physician, indeed.

(from salon)

Good advice

But will they heed it?  (Only the shadow knows.)

(via andrew sullivan)

Stewart riffs on Olbermann

Hahahaha, Jon Stewart did a routine on Olbermann last night that was pretty funny, particularly after all the, shall we say, “excitement”? of this week.  Unfortunately it seems to be unembeddable in WordPress and I’m sick of trying to figure out how to do it, so maybe someone can enlighten me about the process.   Until then you can watch the clip here.

Here comes the Corporate States of America

Today a US Supreme Court case rejected campaign finance limits in a decision known as Citizens United:

In what could prove to be the most consequential Supreme Court decision in decades, all five of the Court’s conservatives joined together today to invalidate a sixty-three year-old ban on corporate money in federal elections. In the process, the Court overruled a twenty year-old precedent permitting such bans on corporate electioneering; and it ignored the protests of the four more moderate justices in dissent.

I like free speech and I like robust businesses making money.   But.  This decision means corporations can now spend their money on political campaigns as if they were individual persons: as little, or more to the point, as much, as they want.  Roll that one around for a minute.

One can only imagine the implications, given the relentless voracity of corporations and the morally bankrupt, psychologically syphilitic assortment of pimps, thieves and con artists that litter the political landscape like so much dog shit.

Olbermann explains how the Citizens United decision, ostensibly made in the interest of free speech, could be its eventual undoing:

(h/t JAB)

No more Jesus rifles

You remember those rifle sights being supplied to the US military by a contractor who’s been  thoughtfully emblazoning them with biblical references in order to inspire… what exactly?   Besides a whole new generation of Jihadists more convinced than ever that the Western presence in the Middle East is part of some kind of 21st Century Crusade?   Apparently someone finally snapped that this might be kind of a bad idea, and the Biblical embellishments are a thing of the past:

A Michigan defense contractor will voluntarily stop stamping references to Bible verses on combat rifle sights made for the U.S. military, a major buyer of the company’s gear. In a statement released Thursday, Trijicon of Wixom, Mich., says it is also providing to the armed forces free of charge modification kits to remove the Scripture citations from the telescoping sights already in use. Through multimillion dollar contracts, the Marine Corps and Army have bought more than 300,000 Trijicon sights.

The references to Bible passages raised concerns that the citations break a government rule that bars proselytizing by American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are predominantly Muslim countries.

Gee, ya think!??

The supplier initially reacted to complaints about their stealth, low-level proselytizing by sniffing huffily that those complaining “must not be Christians”.   The concept that this description applies to most people in that part of the world where their Jesus-scopes are being used, and the potentially deadly repercussions, apparently took awhile to penetrate the full-metal jackets surrounding the soft core of their brains.

Proroguing was such a great idea

Ouch:

I’m sure the Liberals will do their best to drag that 30.9% back down to the low 20s once Parliament resumes.

Don’t piss Him off

He’ll lay an almighty storm on your heathen, gay-marrying, baby-killing asses:

I wonder if that’s the same pissed-off GOD who’s also busy right now flattening that other modern-day Sodom and Gommorah, east Texas?

Busted

… yet again:

(from Dependable Renegade)