Republicans

Breitbart calls for Tea Party to begin civil war: “Fire the first shot”

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 9 Comments

Andrew Breitbart calls for violence against liberals, claiming that the military will back Tea Partiers like himself if they manage to incite an honest-to-goodness shooting war, not just an information war:

“I’m under attack all the time. They call me gay, there are death threats… There are times where I’m not thinking as clearly as I should, and in those unclear moments, I always think to myself, ‘Fire the first shot.’ Bring it on. Because I know who’s on our side. They can only win a rhetorical and propaganda war. They cannot win. We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns… I’m not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with.

Then he claimed that some senior military officials have personally assured him that they’ll join the right wing in a civil war.

“And I have people who come up to me in the military, major named people in the military, who grab me and they go, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing, we’ve got your back.’

And yet, during the Bush era, disagreeing with the President was an act of treason. Calling for violence is, I expect, fine! Just fine!

Breitbart calls for Tea Party to begin civil war: “Fire the first shot”
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Which is a better political bludgeon: HPV vaccines, or cancer?

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , 4 Comments

Via Greg Laden elsewhere on FtB:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Michelle Bachmann has fired the footgun in a big way while attempting to take aim at Rick Perry in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, by claiming that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. Knowing full well that the Human Papiloma Virus vaccine is a controversial issue amongst evangelical conservatives and others who feel that protecting people from STDs will encourage promiscuity, Bachmann was evidently hoping to score rhetorical points against Perry for having made this order by recounting an anecdote wherein a mother approached her after a rally telling her this story. The attempt has backfired spectacularly.

A bioethicist has offered Bachmann $10000 if she can show a single person having developed mental retardation after receiving the vaccine. Personally, I’d just like some proof that the mother Bachmann mentioned actually exists and actually told her this story, or if Bachmann’s misremembering some Jenny McCarthy nonsense about autism and framing it as though it happened first-hand.

Meanwhile cervical cancer, caused in almost every case by HPV, is the twelfth most common type of cancer, and fifth most deadly in women. It affects 16 per 100,000 women per year, and kills 9 per 100,000 per year. The HPV vaccine is effective against two of the most prevalent strains of the virus, making up 70% of all cases. This would reduce mortality and morbidity to this disease significantly, and it costs almost nothing compared to treating women who have suffered from the disease.

That is not to mention the stunning talent this world loses every day to the disease. Talent like Stephanie Zvan, a co-blogger here at Freethought Blogs and close friend, without whose presence my life would be significantly poorer. She takes Bachmann to task for her emotional manipulation, providing herself as an example of a real person whose life might not have been in such jeopardy, who might not have had to endure such “helpful violence” as she was forced to endure, with the HPV vaccine.

To be quite frank, I hope this scuttles Mayor Crazy of Crazytown’s presidential bid.

Which is a better political bludgeon: HPV vaccines, or cancer?

Income disparity affects everyone — even the rich — detrimentally

Jason Thibeault, 3 Comments

The more unequal income levels are, the worse off everyone does in aggregate. While the rich have the levers of power and are busy installing new and more efficient money vacuums, to siphon money upward toward the top levels of income, the country as a whole suffers. Social systems break down, and the middle class erodes to the point where everyone who isn’t super-rich is working poor. Privilege accumulates at the top, by design.

The economy is driven not by the super-rich, whose wealth supposedly trickles down to the lower classes. The rich horde their money. What trickles down is not money. And when the rich have all the money, the economy stops. I mean, it STOPS. It grinds to a halt. Depressions happen. You know, like this one the US is still in now, reverberations being felt throughout the rest of the world — this crumbling economy whose recovery has been stymied by Republicans in the States at every turn.

Welcome to the new gilded age, ladies and gentlemen. If we don’t do something about it soon, we’ll be here for a very very long time.

Income disparity affects everyone — even the rich — detrimentally

Gay couple cage, beat adopted son to death in Chicago

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 20 Comments

Note to people coming from NJ.com: THIS POST CONTAINS HEAVY SARCASM. Read everything past the last blockquote. Jesus fuck, some people are dense.

Two incredible and incredibly synchronous events came across my feed reader today, events that may change my mind about a lot of things that I’ve blogged about in the past. This may be a relatively difficult post to get through, but bear with me.

It was recently discovered that thirteen-year-old Christian Choate was beaten to death in Chicago after years of physical and mental abuse by his (I presume adopted) parents, Riley Choate and Kimball Kubina. The gay couple removed Christian from school claiming to then home-school him, but instead kept him locked in the bathroom most of the time. They eventually upgraded his accomodations, locking him in a dog cage bought from a neighbor during the last year of Christian’s short life after Christian had made an escape attempt from the bathroom prison and was found and retrieved at the local drug store.

Even more disturbing than the simple fact of his incarceration were the home-schooling subjects Kubina gave to Christian to complete:

Kubina wrote topics on top of some of the pages including, “Why do you want to play with your peter? Why do you still want to see your mom? Why can’t you let the past go? What does it mean to be part of a family?” DCS records state.

Thankfully, this horrible mental abuse lasted only as long as it did before one of Riley’s blows mercifully ended Christian’s tortured existence. The family then buried Christian in a shallow grave, covered the grave with concrete, then moved to Kentucky where Christian’s disappearance would go unnoticed and his body undiscovered for two years. This is a brutal example of exactly how inhumane gay people can be, and it’s a sad testament to the state of families today if couples like this can get the license to adopt and destroy the lives of young children.

Meanwhile, in New York, gay marriage is now legal after a vote in a Republican state senate that can only be described as historic.

When New York’s state Senate passed the bill, 33-to-29, cheers of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” erupted in the chamber. The historic vote followed an 80-to-63 vote in the state Assembly last week (the fourth time the lower house had passed a marriage equality bill) — and more than a week of parliamentary maneuvers by conservatives and Republicans to keep the bill from coming to a vote. In the end, the Senate passed the bill into law despite a Republican majority and despite the G.O.P. making gains in the 2008 election. Although gay marriage has yet to win a single statewide referendum, its legislative success in New York on Friday shows that it is quickly advancing in nearly every other way, from legal victories in California courts and throughout the federal judiciary to an increasingly enthusiastic ally in the White House.

I can’t help but think of all the damaged lives that will result if these inherently chaotic and depraved gay people continue making inroads — first they get marriage, then they get discrimination-free adoption, then they can kill all the babies that us breeders couldn’t care for in a disturbing display of social Darwinism. This truly is a slippery slope.

Thankfully, there are organizations like the National Organization of Marriage to defend sanity in this upside-down world. They’re pledging to devote $2 million to overturn this legalization of child-murder gay marriage “to make sure Republicans get this message loud and clear: Voting for gay marriage has consequences.” NOM operates in defense of traditional Christian values like marriage being only for men and women, who are then free to breed as stipulated by the Bible: “Go forth and multiply.” Since there’s no prerequisite for heterosexuals to have children, there’s nothing stopping them from having healthy, happy Christian children in this crazy world — so long as organizations like NOM exist to defend marriage’s inherent heterosexuality.

At least there’s some small glimmer of hope in this ridiculously backward world. Riley and Kimball were both charged:

Riley Choate and Kimberly Kubina have been charged with murder, battery, neglect of a dependent, confinement, obstruction of justice, moving a body from a death scene and failure to notify authorities of a dead body. They have both pleaded not guilty.

…

Erm.

KimBERLY?

Now why did I read that as Kimball?

Carry on, those of you who came expecting Christians to stand up against the real villains in this world. Nothing to see here.

Gay couple cage, beat adopted son to death in Chicago

Why are Republicans and media pundits really trying to eviscerate Social Security?

Jason Thibeault, , , , 3 Comments

These accusations are interesting, plausible, and if true, potentially damaging to one of the greatest successes Democrats (and the beneficiaries of the program, of course) have had in the States. The few facts I know about Social Security are that a) it is not in danger of bankruptcy, the retirement age was raised from 62 when started in 1938 to 67 today (including deferment benefits for workers that keep working til 70), and that according to Milton Friedman, a demigod amongst conservatives, it actually disproportionately benefits the rich.

Friedman claims this is by virtue of the pay-in cap where you only have to pay a percentage of your wages into Social Security up to a certain salary, after which you no longer get “taxed”. You get the full benefit of payment regardless of how close to the pay-in you actually managed to make, so high-income folks get to withdraw much more than they made. Additionally, where mean life expectancy is determined by how much money you have to pay into hospitals, poor people live shorter, and may never collect from the social security fund while rich people who live longer will likely withdraw more than they paid in.

Since this is one of those memes best combatted by information, I’m happy to spread this message, though I’m skeptical without the real numbers. If there’s a risk of insolvency, why couldn’t they just lift the cap since even Lord Friedman suggests it’s configured unfairly? Why must the program be gutted and old people be put even more at risk of dying poor, underfed and without medical care?

Why are Republicans and media pundits really trying to eviscerate Social Security?

RCimT: Climate roundup

Jason Thibeault, , 4 Comments

When it comes to climate science, it’s best to get your information from climate scientists.

On the one-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster famously not-foretold by Jamie Darkstar of Darkstar Astrology, the US House Republicans have decided to mark the occasion with a new drill-baby-drill campaign. Meanwhile, this past year has all but sealed the deal on the verity of anthropogenic global warming. It’s happening, it’s been happening for decades, we’ve been screaming about it for decades, and nobody fucking cares that we’re driving right off this cliff.

Well, there are some minor victories in the fight, such as Obama’s move to refund the weather satellites that the GOP defunded as an “unnecessary expense”. And Senator Brown’s move to end the taxpayer subsidy of oil companies, who even without these subsidies would have made over a trillion dollars in profits in the last decade, mostly owing to the extreme gouging consumers see at the pumps. We already pretty much know they’re setting their prices to exactly what the market will allow, and if they jack the price up because they lose their taxpayer subsidies then you’ll see the same sort of ratcheting-back of gas consumption that started happening a few years ago. They’ll then lower the price again to keep everyone hooked, to keep everyone from weening themselves off their gas guzzlers.

And as usual, the enemies in this fight are easy to spot. Just look for the people who call necessary spending “wasteful”, and unnecessary corporate socialism handouts sacrosanct. While the Republicans rail on and on about the debt, demanding that “everyone feel the pain” of certain cutbacks, they’re simultaneously the ones giving big tax breaks to the robber barons and taking away the social programs that keep the poor from going bankrupt. The rich do not become rich in a vacuum. Economies thrive when the money is continuously cycled. It’s not about welfare or hand-outs, it’s about preventing the pyramid from being so top-heavy that it collapses. But these same folks are the ones who disbelieve all the science that shows we’re heading off that global warming cliff, so it’s no surprise they don’t care for the reality of economy, preferring instead to worship their “invisible hand” deity.

Oh how I wish I ruled this world. Maybe then some common sense would seep into humankind’s governance for once.

RCimT: Climate roundup

Orange-faced lies from Boehner about #netneutrality

Jason Thibeault2 Comments

I don’t know where this man comes up with this stuff, but his priorities thus far — despite his protestation that his first priority is to create jobs — have been to reduce government to only small enough to control every vagina in the land, and now to remove all impediments to the ability of internet providers to turn the internet into a toll highway. The concept of net neutrality — the state the internet has been in since its inception, whereupon ISPs are not allowed to charge extra for use of certain routes, and that all traffic must be routed equally — is one that should be held sacrosanct to anyone who wishes to benefit from the democracy-enabling powers the internet provides. Speaker John Boehner, representing the Republicans in the freshly-flipped House, has made the following statement.

“Right now, freedom and free expression are under attack by a power structure in Washington populated with regulators who have never set foot inside a radio station or a television studio,” Rep. Boehner said during a speech at the annual National Religious Broadcasters convention.

“We see this threat in how the FCC is creeping further into the free market by trying to regulate the Internet,” the congressman continued. “Network neutrality, they call it. It’s a series of regulations that empower the federal bureaucracy to regulate Internet content and viewpoint discrimination. The rules are written vaguely, of course, to allow the FCC free reign.”

[…]

“There is no compromise or middle ground when it comes to protecting our most basic freedoms,” Rep. Boehner said, adding that the Republican majority in the House was committed to fighting the new regulations.

“We’re also going to do what we can to see that no taxpayer dollars are used to fund these net neutrality rules,” he said.

In December, the FCC passed regulations that prevent service providers from choking certain routes until you pay more to use them. These rules do not go far enough — they open the door for ISPs to apply for rights to create priority routes for pay — but claim that most, if not all, such applications would not pass muster. It is this legislation that Boehner lies bald-facedly about. It is this legislation that keeps the robber barons from your throats. It is imperfect legislation, to be sure, but it is worthwhile legislation nonetheless.

Studios and stations get mentioned, but not the people who would be screwed. Funny, that. The ISPs in the States are trying to meter the internet in such a way that only the rich can use it effectively, and meanwhile, Koreans get unlimited transfer gigabit connections to their doors for ~$27 USD a month. The rationale is that being forced to build infrastructure costs money, and companies like Netflix and Youtube are jeopardizing the very old infrastructure that’s already been built, eating into ISPs’ profits. Cry me a river. If the Koreans can do internet right, and cheap, then you’re doing something wrong.

Meanwhile, what was that nonsense about your priority as speaker being jobs, Boehner? So far you’ve done nothing but push for money grabs for companies, and rights revocation for the people you claim to serve.

Orange-faced lies from Boehner about #netneutrality

There is no larger trend of women being forced to be baby-makers

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 10 Comments

I don’t really have much more to say about the whole forcing-women-back-into-the-alley tactics of the Republican party, supported by people whose ideation of their religion includes prohibitions of abortion that are wholly unmentioned in their foundational texts. But I’m certain they’re the only parties in this world that think women exist solely for the purposes of procreation. Other instances are totally isolated.

Take, for instance, the twisted logic by which Republicans defund Planned Parenthood, ostensibly to prevent abortions, inevitably leading to more underage pregnancy when these kids cannot access contraceptives.

Take, for instance, the baby factory recently broken up in Bangkok. The Vietnamese women who were coerced or kidnapped and pressganged into having children were freed, thankfully.

Take, for instance, the vile attacks on a female reporter whose public rape in Egypt was evidently not punishment enough for practicing a man’s job while in possession of a vagina.

Take, for instance, this chaplain saying a female soldier’s rape was God’s will for the sin of not coming to church often enough. (Never mind that she’s also doing “a man’s job”.)

Take, for instance, the misogyny suffered by a woman who happens to own a pair of breasts, as though this should come as a great shock to a man of the intellectual caliber necessary to have produced the Death Wish films.

Take, for instance, the defunding of a Liverpool rape center when the numbers of people being helped are rising steadily and being carried over year after year.

Take, for instance, the demonstrable lies necessary to sustain the anti-sex lobby’s political agenda to reduce sex back to its (religiously) “rightful” role in society as a shameful act done only for the purposes of making babies.

Take, for instance, the Canadian judge’s decision to let a rapist walk because the victim “wore makeup” and “wanted to party”.

Take, for instance, Nebraska attempting to make legal the murder of abortion service providers, in a move that was recently stopped in South Dakota.

Take, for instance, the proposed Georgia law that all miscarriages should be investigated in case some of them turn out to be resultant from “back alley” abortion attempts.

These are, of course, all isolated incidents and should not be taken in aggregate to determine that any particular group of people — vagina-owners or otherwise — are under assault by society at large. Just, you know, make sure you have that baby if you happen to accidentally conceive. If you know what’s good for you. Even if you were raped, even if doctors say neither of you will survive, and even if you die from the attempt.

There is no larger trend of women being forced to be baby-makers

RCimT: Stuff to be mad about

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

As I implied yesterday, there’s far too much going on in this world right now that deserves my ire. I have to mete it out carefully or I won’t have enough to go around, because the meds for my Stretch Armstrong leg are seriously putting a damper on my ability to draw from my bile reservoir. For you though, my faithful readers, I’ll do my best. (I love you both!)

Egypt did a grand thing in ousting Mubarak. The military made many overtures of solidarity with the protesters over the last month, and they installed a “transitional leader” in Vice President Omar Suleiman. Suleiman however has absolutely no intention of transitioning Egypt to a democracy. The military is now singing a totally different tune than during the initial protests — claiming that they will start to move against strikers if they don’t get back to work soon. So Egypt traded one tin-pot dictator for another. Hooray.

Meanwhile, a CBS reporter was violently molested while covering the Egypt protests, and because she happened to be a woman, people are throwing their careers away to snipe at her for daring to try to do something in a dangerous place. Because, you know, being raped and beaten in public and having to be rescued by a group of women and Egyptian soldiers just isn’t enough damage. Lara Logan knew exactly what kind of danger she was in by daring to do her job while in possession of a vagina, thank you very fucking much.

I’m sad to have to report that being right about the “God question” (e.g., being an atheist) does not mean you’re right about other stuff, like gender politics. How a thread can go on so long where so many men think it appropriate to discuss amongst themselves “how to get women into science” while wholly and completely dismissing the women in the conversation, is beyond me. People in positions of privilege discussing how to get the unprivileged into the conversation should, obviously, not dismiss the same unprivileged. DUH. There are a few shining beacons of truth and level-headedness in the Pharyngula thread about the original talk, but they are a cool drink in a vast expansive desert of retardery.

Meanwhile, the Republicans who were swept into power recently with promises of rebuilding the American economy with jobs-a-plenty are enacting several laws on their real priority: shrinking government to only small enough to legislate every vagina in the country. While the House has failed at their attempt to redefine rape, they succeeded in passing an amended version of HR3 to ensure no federal funds are ever spent on abortions. They have also defunded Planned Parenthood, the last line of defense against teenage pregnancy, for daring to refer to abortion doctors the 2% of their visitors that need them — never mind that this means more teenagers will get pregnant and need abortions to begin with. And South Dakota is busy legalizing the murder of abortion doctors. These idiots are decidedly not “pro-life”. They’re “pro-fetus”. Once the fetus grows to the point where they might be born (whether they survive, or not; whether they kill the mother, or not), they obviously couldn’t give a shit about them. I’m sure there’s gotta be a Bible passage somewhere that justifies allowing both mother and baby to die just so a medically indicated procedure doesn’t happen that’s supposedly contrary to some vague interpretation of some arbitrarily chosen translation of some arbitrarily chosen “holy book” out of the thousands that one could choose from.

And there’s always more bullshit when you get religion involved, it seems. Why is it every one of the things I see today that is detrimental to the betterment of humankind as a whole, is inspired by religion? Seriously. It’s getting to be too big a trend to ignore. A new investigation shows that children are still in peril and clergy are still stonewalling investigators even ten years after the scandals in some Roman Catholic dioceses were uncovered and supposedly stopped. If they weren’t in the positions of power they find themselves, children wouldn’t be imperiled by this overriding demand, handed down from the top, to protect Catholicism from its own chief practitioners.

Or how about the religiously inspired Wedge-strategy-approved tactic of sowing disinformation about evolution by legislative fiat? Never mind that there’s no scientific controversy about the theory of evolution — only a controversy in that the theory of evolution apparently runs afoul of some very small-minded provincial interpretations of certain religionists’ ideation of their deity and how special humankind is in the grand scheme of things. No, scientists are well aware that all the evidence available shows evolution is a fact, and that the theory of evolution is merely an attempt at describing the mechanism behind that fact. Any controversy at the moment is in exactly how much influence natural selection, epigenetics, genetic drift, etc., have on the “big picture” of evolution. If this law were aimed at teaching THOSE controversies, I’d be fine with it and others of its ilk, but you’ll invariably find it espoused by people who unironically claim in court that the Earth is six thousand years old.

Canada’s got its own shitty little legal squabbles going on, too. For instance, the Tory-held senate rejection of this bill:

Bill C-389 would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to protect the rights of transgender or transsexual citizens. It would prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” or “gender expression” in the workplace or elsewhere, and would amend the Criminal Code so that crimes committed against people because they are transgender or transsexual would be treated as hate crime.

Their grounds? That people might try to go peeping-tom in opposite sex bathrooms and defend themselves by claiming they’re really transgendered.

And the CRTC’s raising people’s suspicions lately about the partisan nature of some of their decisions — like that pesky law they’re suggesting we eliminate that prevents broadcasters from presenting lies as truth in news media.

“It’s totally bizarre. Nobody in the industry has called for it,” Mr. Murdoch said. “Where is the motivation for change that would lower the standards of truth and fairness in broadcast journalism?”

NDP MP Charlie Angus noted that the proposed change precedes the start of Sun TV, a network that has been shepherded in large part by Kory Teneycke, the former director of communication to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

“We all know our Prime Minister well enough to say we don’t have to be in the realm of conspiracy theory here,” Mr. Angus said at a news conference on Monday. “We can draw our conclusions and they are pretty clear.”

It’s no conspiracy. It’s no coincidence. That law is preventing Sun TV from being everything that Fox News is to America: a trojan horse in the news media, intended to pull people’s understanding of reality, and the Overton Window, ever-further to the right. Truth be damned, we need our propaganda, sayeth Harper and his cronies.

That’s it. I’m spent for the moment. I’m sure I’ll find more to rage about soon though.

RCimT: Stuff to be mad about