The Good, the Bad & the Weird

In the vicious political circus south of the border, where they’re apparently having one of those “Presidential Elections” later this year, evidence of the retrograde brain damage afflicting the Republican Party continues to mount relentlessly. It’s been showcased all this week in the Republican National Convention, and last night it spiraled into madness.

Clint Eastwood showed up — more or less — and made the teabaggers’ day with an odd, sometimes incoherent routine that had him debating an empty chair and getting his ass kicked by it.  It was a strange and terrifying schtick, particularly for those of us at seniorhood’s doorstep.  And apparently not great PR, because after it painfully concluded actor Chris Rock was prompted to tweet:

And no wonder:

WHY, CLINT? WHY??

In other RNC News Of The Weird, Karl Rove apparently wants to whack Todd Akin:

We should sink Todd Akin. If he’s found mysteriously murdered, don’t look for my whereabouts!

Only a high-profile Republican windbag could get away with openly musing about assassinating someone.  But why not?  Akin might well be responsible for the GOP losing its chance to gain control of the Senate with his own bizarre comments about “Legitimate Rape“.  Not that he expressed an opinion most Republicans don’t share: his mistake was going public with it and getting caught, and then refusing to step down.

Meanwhile in Akinworld, the recalcitrant senatorial candidate begs for donations on Twitter, cursing the GOP’s upper echelons as the “liberal elite”.

 I’d be watching my back if I were him.

It’s all over now, leaving nothing in its wake but a riot of “MITT!” signs, a few random dried-out piles of elephant poop and some strange, strange memories. But as weird as the RNC was, stranger still is the fact that after electing a candidate the base despises, but who happens to be the only thing they can come up with that stands a chance in a general election, it still hasn’t occurred to the GOP that maybe what they really need a new base.

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UPDATE:  And right on schedule, the inevitable half-hearted apology.  From Rove, anyway.   Clint Eastwood has yet to apologize for his abysmally weird performance,  unless he apologized to an empty chair.

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UPDATER:  With typical deftness, balb points out that Eastwood’s speech may in fact have been Performance Art.  It makes sense when you think about it: the Empty Chair represents the Obama that only conservatives of the teabagging persuasion can see — the America-hater, the Socialist, the Kenyan Usurper, the Bloodthirsty Babykiller, the Far-Left Extremist and Presider Over Death Panels.

“Legitimate Rape”

If the Republican Party can survive this kind of vicious idiocy:

Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri who is running against Sen. Claire McCaskill, justified his opposition to abortion rights even in case of rape with a claim that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological defenses that prevent pregnancy.

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview postedSunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

…then I have to admit I’m rapidly losing all hope for our southern neighbours and will begin lobbying Ottawa for a Zombie Wall along the 49th Parallel ASAP.

“LEGITIMATE RAPE”???

Then what would be “Illegitimate Rape”?  And what is this magic spermicidal hormone we apparently secrete during “Legitimate Rape”?

I can’t wait to see the AMA‘s response to this.

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“I MISSPOKE” UPDATE:  Yep, that’s his excuse.  No, really.

Sorry dude, you’re now the Legitimate Rape Guy.  Hopefully your body will excrete some kind of reputation-cleansing hormone and all will be well.

(h/t the Rev on Twitter)

Canada’s Docs Rock

The doctors are IN:

Canada’s doctors have sternly rejected what they see as a stealth attempt to recriminalize abortion.

At the general council meeting of the Canadian Medical Association on Wednesday, delegates called on the federal government to reject attempts by a Conservative backbench MP to amend the Criminal Code so that a fetus is defined as a human being.

“This constitutes the criminalization of abortion or any form of contraception,” said Dr. Geneviève Desbiens, a urologist from Valleyfield, Que. […]

The CMA, which represents the country’s 76,000 physicians, interns, residents and medical students, has a policy saying that abortion is an ethically acceptable medical practice as long as the fetus is not viable.

In other words, regulation of the abortion procedure is their job, and they don’t need some government bureaucrat, driven by brainless religious fanatics, telling them how to do it.

Now that everyone seems to be picking their side, at some point I’d love to do a graphic chart showing who’s for and against Motion 312.  It would be very telling to see the line-up of lab-coated scientists on one side and the gaggle of jabbering bible school haircuts on the other.

(h/t Sharkdancing on Twitter)

Poll Smoking & Profiles In Cluelessness

There must be some reason that the Fascist religious crackpots at FetusFetishOnline are flogging this collection of abortion polls as a “Prolife Polling Resource”, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.  Painstakingly assembled by the Evangelical Fellowship and datamined from years of polls, it’s generally good news for prochoicers.  Good old news, since it only confirms what we already know: that Canada is a vehemently prochoice country.  It can’t be a relief to fetus fetishists to know that in this great country of ours the wearing of animal fur is considered more morally unacceptable than abortion.

Not that there isn’t the occasional ripe-sounding data to be cherrypicked, like the one indicating that about half the country would favour gestational limits on abortion.  Far be it from me to rain on their parade — oh, shit on that, who am I kidding?  I take great pleasure in noting that while this gestational limit thing might sound good for antichoicers at first blush, unpack it a little and what it really shows is support for abortion rights, just not as framed in the question.  Any respondent who answered “No” to “Should women be able to have abortions any time during pregnancy?” would go in the “favours gestational limits” column.  And — oh no, somebody stop me, I’m about to take the Mighty Pinprick of Truth to a few more of their party balloons — with so many fetus fetishists preferring the brain-damaged “All Or Nothing, Egg Personhood, Stop Embryo Oppression” approach, the idea that half of Canadians would accept gestational limits under 9 months must be cold comfort.

Then there’s the data we’ve already seen in poll after poll, but which I’m only too happy to see again: like the clear plurality of Canadians that think abortion is “morally acceptable” and do NOT want the so-called “abortion debate” re-opened, or don’t give a shit either way.  Can you say “MASSIVE ProChoice Majority”?

Why Lifesite would choose to publish this less-than-encouraging data at the height of the battle of words & wits over Motion 312 is a mystery.  But then again, why not: it’s in line with the haphazard and utterly clueless way the rest of the M312 campaign has been run, a confused and riotous crusade of Twitterspam, fetusmobiles, inconsistencies, transparent lies and general dumbness.  For an initiative thought by some to be the last kick at the anti-abortion can for a long, long time, the ineptitude of its handling has been breathtaking to behold.

And fun to watch.  Did I mention fun to watch?

(h/t fern hill on Twitter)

“Let’s stop the pretense”

“Let’s Stop The Pretense” indeed:

Yes, let’s stop the pretense that Motion 312 aka Woodworth’s Wank (aka the “Men Who Stare At Zygotes” Motion) is anything other than a sleazy, stupid and screamingly obvious attempt to pave the way for ludicrous “fetal rights” legislation that would ultimately curtail reproductive freedom in Canada.

The Motion’s intent couldn’t be any clearer than the way its own supporters interpret it: as a “personhood motion” meant to change a legal definition of personhood that’s “one of the reasons Canada has no abortion regulations”.  (It’s not, but that’s another post.)

I’ve never seen a campaign of lies conducted so ham-fistedly.  What do they think, we don’t know how to Google?

Masturdebates, the Criminal Code & Easy Answers to Goofy Questions

At the center of the shrieking maelstrom of madness known as “the Motion 312 Masturdebate” (because it’s really about one side not knowing when to quit) is the now-infamous Criminal Code Subsection 223(1), which among other things, defines when a “child” becomes a “human being”:

The use of the phrase “human being” is unfortunate because it has two distinct meanings, one legal, as in Subsection 223(1), and one biological. One correct, and one incorrect (in this context) and just waiting to be exploited. I can’t ask the Legal Eagles who crafted the statute, but I’m as certain as I’ll ever be about anything that what they meant by “human being” in the context of the Criminal Code was “legal person”, not “member of the species Homo Sapiens”. As old as Subsection 223(1) might be, it’s not so old that the legal minds of the time didn’t understand the biological reality that humans give birth to humans, not dogs or cats or hammerhead sharks.

But imagine Stephen Woodworth’s frenzied joy when he realized that the meaning of “human being” in 223(1), taken the wrong way, could be misrepresented as a Bad Law driven by Bad Science.  Bad Law that needed to be investigated by a Parliamentary Committee.  Bad Law that would eventually have to be changed to expand the legal meaning of “human being” to include even the lowly fertilized egg.

And so began the sordid tale of Motion 312, built on a disingenuous and self-serving misinterpretation of legal jargon, with its full intention the ushering in of the Beginning of the End of Abortion Rights in Canada.

Supporters of Motion 312, and Woodworth himself, bend over backwards with assurances that it’s nothing of the kind, but I know better.  Not just because fetus fetishists let the cat out of the bag ages ago, and not just because they use Twitter to barf out scads of abortion-related tweets all over the Motion 312 timeline, and not just because they hashtag those tweets with “#FetalRights”, and not even just because Woodworth is committed to pushing anti-abortion legislation.  All that stuff is meaningful, but the slam-dunk is a lot simpler.

If the only problem is a few words in Subsection 223(1), surely there’s an easier fix than launching Parliamentary investigations and expanding the legal meaning of “human being” to include zygotes, setting womens’ rights back about 50 years in the process.  If the only problem is the phrase “human being”… then why not just change it? Amend the statute to say “person” or “legal person” instead of “human being”?  Seems reasonable.

Reasonable to anyone whose “To Do” list doesn’t prominently feature the abolishment of reproductive rights.

Amirite?

Lies, Damn Lies & Damn Tweeted Lies

As mentioned in my elegant little Public Service Announcement, though I haven’t been around blogs much lately (including this one), I’ve been slogging around in my hip waders on Twitter’s Motion 312 timeline, known in the Twitterverse as “#M312“. (Hip waders? you ask… Yes, the bullshit’s that high.)

As we begin the feverish countdown to the Motion 312 debate and the vote that will put the whole ridiculous farce to sleep for good (September 18 & 19 respectively), Twitter has been an interesting read.  Motion 312 was conceived on Twitter with MP Stephen Woodworth’s insipid ejerkulations about a “respectful debate on when life begins”, so it’s not surprising to find much of the battle over it being waged there.  With “tweets” limited to 140 characters, it’s also the medium of a jabbering fetus fetishist’s dreams: a venue ideally suited to spitting out rapidfire gobs of propaganda at breakneck pace.  Even sweeter, anyone who asks a question or makes a dissenting point can simply be “blocked”, the Twitter version of “disappeared”.

And so it’s gone with the antichoice Twitter campaign in support of the nefarious Motion 312: long on lies but extremely short on feedback when lies are called out.  No surprise there since lying is like an uncontrollable, violent verbal tic with these people. It’s how they roll in any venue: Twitter just makes it easier.  Every day #M312 is inundated with the same boring talking points, the same lame videos, the same spamload of gawdawful embarrassing pleas imploring MPs to vote “YES! Because I love Motion 312!”.  But after awhile some disturbing inconsistencies were noticed…

Antichoicers in general and Woodworth in particular have always gone to great pains to emphasize that Motion 312 was NOT about abortion, or personhood, or so-called “fetal rights”.  Yet the fetushists’ tweets in M312 are routinely tagged “fetal rights” and their content is often abortion-related:

…both of these being things they continually insist are unrelated to M312. Questions about this incongruity are ignored, questioners blocked.

Remember now, these are the people who were shrieking and panting for a “debate”.

Despite their bellowing (“We want the debate!“), it’s clear they want anything but a debate, or at least, a “debate” with only one side.  I came up with a Twitter hashtag for it — #Masturdebate — but humour aside, it seemed to me that we were missing something.  The flip side of never blaming on Malice what can be explained by Stupidity, you know?  All these little inconsistencies might be part of an overall Plan…

…if “debate” isn’t what they want at all, and never has been. What they really want is a venue, an opportunity to mainstream their goofy language about “fetal rights”, by getting prochoicers to engage with them.  We are, after all, the mainstream.  Remember the Team Fetus Rolling Roadshow earlier this summer?  How much media attention did they get before pro-choicers started pushing back with counter-protests?  I rest my case.

Look, antichoicers have always had trouble getting any mainstream traction, or even attention, especially here in sane, pro-choice Canada, where they’re largely ignored and considered nutbars and flaming religious fascists.  To the broader Canadian public, a fetus is a lower life form than a pregnant woman and abortion is a private reality best kept between patient and doctor.

And that’s the way we’d like to keep it.

There’s little chance of “fetal rights” becoming an expression that will get you much other than a look of fear and loathing or at least puzzlement and a quick end to the conversation, before Motion 312 bites the dust. But it’s something to keep in mind for the next time they screech for a “debate”: that what they’re really doing is trying to fast-track their language into popular lexicon.

Change the language, change the attitude.

It’s pretty slick: in the states antichoicers buy a lot of this kind of advice from expensive, high-pressure marketing consultants. I was in the business and I recognize certain strategies when i see them.

Whoops (a PSA)

My apologies: I’ve been a Bad Blogger lately, sucked into the shrieking vortex of virulent madness and fetus fetishizing insanity that is the #M312 time line on Twitter (and taken down by various ugly meatspace ailments — flu, sleep disturbances and other unwelcome and unacceptable interruptions).  (But none of it has affected my status as Sovereign of the Run-On Sentence.)

Blogging will resume shortly — as in “today” —  just thought I’d warn anyone who’s still around.  Hahahaha!

On Gutlessness and Epic Meetings of Pots and Kettles

Apparently the newest nugget of antichoice wingnut wisdom is that prochoice bloggers are — wait for it — “gutless cowards” because some of us use pseudonyms.

Before you start yelling “Amanda Marcotte! Jessica Valenti! Jill Filipovic!” or point out that plenty of antichoice bloggers do the same, or protest that there’s a king-hell shitload of good reasons for not using your real name online that have nothing to do with the sick obsessiveness and twitchy trigger fingers of the antichoice lunatic fringe, let’s ask ourselves what this woebegone little whine might really be about. Because it can’t really be about anonymity/pseudonyms, since these practices cut across both sides of the abortion rights blogosphere.

From where I sit it looks more like one or two particular pseudonymous prochoice bloggers somehow annoyed some antichoice bloggers who “blog naked” so to speak. And this was the best they could do: a peevish gripe about prochoice bloggers blogging “anonymously”.

But why not?  Baiting a hook and reeling in some predictably goofy comments about “gutlessness” and “hiding behind pseudonyms” to “spew libelous smears”… that kind of post puts a little Fun into a boring mid-week afternoon.  And after all, no matter what the bible-banging doomer goons tell you, Fun is what it’s all about.

Unfortunately, over at BIG BLUE WAVE (copy-paste for obvious reasons: http://www.bigbluewave.ca/2012/07/prolifeprowoman-asks-why-are-so-many.html), SUZANNE spiraled into paroxysms of stupid rage and beclowned herself with this brainless commentary:

Oh, SUZANNE.  “Libel”?  You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

It only got worse in the comments, when a few people with their heads screwed on explained that there are a lot of good reasons for blogging pseudonymously. When I saw real-world stories of threats, harassment and stalking brushed off as “cowardly” and “BOGUS”, along with accusations of “Libelous Smears”, I could stand it no longer.  I left a comment, and that was where the Pot and Kettle didn’t just meet but careened into each other at top speed and burst into flames in an epic head-on collision.  My comment, not surprisingly, was

…not published.

 And just because I had the nerve to ask for examples of the “Libelous Smears” and the steel-belted, gold-plated brass BALLS to suggest that said smears might exist only in SUZANNE’s frenzied imagination.  Oh well…

Anyone who makes false accusations of “gutlessness” and especially “libel” should be prepared to back them up.  Making an accusation and then deleting comments that call you on it takes gutlessness to a whole new level.

But so what? Her house, her rules.  She’s a Propagandist and that’s how Propaganda is done. But let the record stand that SUZANNE’s brainless blather about “Libelous Smears” is manufactured from whole rotten maggot-infested cloth, with nothing to back it up but the summer breeze.

And after all, they all do it: longtime readers might recall when false accusations were made against The General at Stanek’s Psych Ward & Fetus Fetishizing Cafe, and when he called her on it in her comments section, she responded by deleting his comment.  These people are nothing if not predictable.

LOST FETUSMOBILES

The Tour de Fetus is over, the pinnacle of fetus fetishism on wheels having been reached in the form of a Big Bang-Up presentation of GORY GORE at an Ottawa church on Monday night.  As usual, pro-choice demonstrators were on hand, in apparently larger numbers than the fetushists cowering inside the church.

Strangely though, the Fetusmobiles were missing in action, and still remain  nowhere to be found, and no word on Twitter or anywhere else about where they might be.

I wondered if maybe they’d broken down:

…but sadly, that elicited no response.  I wondered what might have happened:

Or maybe the Fetusmobiles were secretly stripped of the ugly before the long ride home took them back through many of the towns they’d already pissed off so savagely on the way out.  Broken down?  Cleaned off?  Stolen by some ferocious feminazi man-hating pants-dropping baby-killer?  Only the Shadow knows…

In any event, I’m doing my part to help find them:

Lies, lies & damn stupid lies

Supporters of MP Stephen Woodworth’s Motion 312, aka “Woodworth’s Wank” but could also be known as “Operation Reproductive Enslavement”, have been making feverish claims that M312 is not in fact a “Personhood” initiative designed to give a fetus the same legal rights as an already-born person.  They know what a loser “Personhood” is: it was an epic fail even in Mississippi, and if it ever had a chance, it was in that screaming fire-engine-reddest of red states.  Other states seem to be equally thrilled with the idea.  So to say “Personhood” would be doomed in Canada is a massive understatement.  Fetus fetishists are stupid, but they’re also sneaky:

But what’s this?

…and the more I searched “M312 Personhood” on the Googles, the more damning the evidence:

Alas & Alack
Screenshots At 11 is back!

The Truth is Out There, and it shall be screenshat. 

From the “Pot Meet Kettle” files

…which can be accessed in the directory labeled “Heh“…

I guess Immigration Minister and Complete Buffoon Jason Kenney must have missed the Windows For Dummies class where they explained the cataclysmic difference between “reply” and “reply to all”.  Last week Kenney received an email invitation to meet with the deputy premier of Alberta:

“Honourable Thomas Lukaszuk, deputy premier of Alberta will be in Ottawa on Thursday, June 21st, 2012 and is requesting a lunch or dinner with caucus,” says the email written by Calkins’ legislative assistant at 4:57 p.m. “Mr. Calkins will not be able to host this event as he has prior commitments, but would like to see if there is any caucus member who would be willing to host this event for the deputy premier.”

…and as luck would have it, someone turned him loose on a computer and it wasn’t long before the shit hit the fan:

Kenney shot back a response just five minutes later, but instead of sending it only to Calkins’ office, he inadvertently sent it to everyone in the 26-member federal Alberta caucus, plus assistants: “I say a definite ‘no’ to Lukaszyk. I don’t think it makes sense to create a precedent to do a special caucus meeting for every visiting minister from the provincial government. Plus he is a complete and utter asshole.”

When you think about it, it’s actually a pretty efficient move on Kenney’s part.  Certainly no more time will be wasted discussing meetings with Lukaszuk, now and forever.

Words

This is something I post every couple of years because I just enjoy it so damn much that I welcome any excuse to watch it again: a 1986 video of Frank Zappa debating government censorship of rock music on the old politics talk show “Crossfire“.  And who would be more up to the task than the delightfully obscene Zappa?

Readers of a Certain Age will recall the idea of state censorship of rock music was a popular item among the shrill and shrieking crackpots of the religious right which was in its ascendancy back then (thanks, Ronnie), but interestingly, something they seem to have since gotten over, or gotten past, or aged out of.  Or maybe lascivious rock lyrics matter less to them as they busy themselves with feverish preparations for the Rapture.

HAHAHAHAHA!

Or as wingnutty World Net Daily likes to call it…

BIG SODOMY

There’s something Poe-ish about this, no?

It’s quite likely that when @shawnmicallef tweeted the above photo and accompanying commentary, he had no idea that BIG GAY was actually a legitimate concept in the World Net Daily school of Fundamentalist Christian thought.  (Or “thought”, whatever the case may be.)

(h/t fern hill on Twitter)

Toronto:

Tell your city councillors to update their web security.

You’re welcome.

(h/t – chet on twitter)