Iowa caucus results

The Republican scores in Iowa are 25, 25, 21, 13, 10, 5, and 1. For an in-depth discussion of these remarkable numbers, we turn to our political analyst, Bob.

Thanks, Bob. These are very good numbers. 25 is clearly the winner, but the other 25 is very, very close. 21 is less than 25, but it’s still a good number, and I’m sure 21 is very pleased…although, of course, a bigger number would be even better. 13 and 10 are even smaller numbers.

5 and 1 are the littlest numbers. They are going to have to try much harder to get bigger if they want to stay in this race!

Excellent analysis, Bob. What does it mean that we have two 25s though?

It means that the election is very exciting so far, Bob, and that now more people will turn on our show to find out which one gets a bigger number. Compare it to the Democratic caucuses, where one person got 100. Boring, Bob, very boring.

So this means we get to keep our jobs, Bob?

Yes, Bob, and that is very good news indeed.

Now turning to our field reporter, Bob, we have an interview with one of the candidates.

“Sir, how do you feel about your number?”

“Well, Bob, it’s not a bad number, it could have been bigger, but it’s about where our polls predicted it would be. So we feel very good about our number.”

“Back to you, Bob.”

Thanks, Bob. And coming up after this commercial break, our chief political analyst Bob will explain these results to you with dazzling computer graphics.

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Here is Bob, who will make these results meaningful by making them very bright and shiny and dynamic.

Thanks, Bob. We have created an animated chart of these results. Big numbers are shown as this very large, erect penis, much like yours if you got an offer to do a nude interview with Katy Perry, and small numbers are shown as this tiny little nubbin, like you’d see in a cold locker room after losing the big game. What this shows…

Bob, wait a minute. Isn’t one of the candidates a woman?

Ha ha, yes, Bob, but no clitoris is ever going to get as big as this magnificent purple monster, so it hardly matters, right?

Ha ha, of course. Go on.

As I was saying, Bob, we’ve illustrated all the candidates here, as you can see, and, well, they’re all pretty flaccid so far. None of them are even at half-mast yet, but the top candidates have clearly gotten a little tickle from Iowa and are beginning to stir.

Our job here on the Political Show in the next few months is to flatter and cajole these dicks until one is so aroused that he intimidates all the others into slinking away. We’ll be here every day, reporting on their relative turgidity until one is the biggest.

The power of the press, Bob. By the way, do you have a chart of the Democratic results?

We do, Bob, but the office here is pretty white and we found it too frightening to contemplate. Don’t worry, though, we’re ready, once the Republicans have sorted out who has the biggest number, to do what the media does best, and in the run up to the election we’ll be right here, fairly and objectively reporting the two penis sizes right down to the millimeter, right up to election day.

Good work, Bob. And may the biggest number win.

And that’s all from the election desk. Stay tuned as we bring in a series of pundits to talk about these numbers all day long.

Slow news day, I guess

Good god, media, I DON’T CARE ABOUT IOWA ANY MORE. It’s a freakish little local contest dominated by hardcore fanatics, and the only reason the results will mean anything is that the media will do its best to pump up the outcome into a portent of things to come. So when I saw this headline in the Minneapolis Star Tribune at the coffee shop today, I just set it aside, disgusted, disinterested, and disenchanted.

Bachmann isn’t going to win. Even if she did, she’s one lunatic among a field of demented dwarfs.

What headline next, Strib? “SARAH PALIN: STILL IRRELEVANT”? How about “JOHN MCCAIN AIN’T DEAD YET” or “SASQUATCH PROBABLY WON’T WIN REPUBLICAN NOMINATION”?

I’m ready to call for a return of party bosses in smoke-filled rooms; this obsession with turning politics into a horse race, with every news source fussing over percentage points, is making a joke of democracy.

The only “points” we should be discussing are the substance of their policies.

#OccupyChristmas

Perhaps the Hitchens piece I just posted wasn’t curmudgeonly enough for you; seasoned Pharyngula veterans are already deeply cynical. If that’s the case, I have just the thing: Matt Taibbi has posted A Christmas Message From America's Rich, in which you can read about how corporate CEO’s are allowing you to have cake.

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It’s called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

What I’d like to give them for Christmas is a revolution, and a metaphorical row of pikes for their heads.

The fanatically irrational Ron Paul and his fanbase

Ashley Miller asks, “Why does anyone like Ron Paul?”, and then does a fabulous job listing all the reasons Paul is a disastrous nutcase. She pretty much answers her own question with a thoroughly documented and reasoned “YOU SHOULDN’T!”, but if you want even more of an explanation, read the comments. Apparently reddit linked to the article, and every Libertarian kook in the world funneled their way to this one article, where they left their outraged comments.

Rarely have I encountered such a vile stew of misogyny and stupidity, outside of youtube comments, as you’ll find on that thread. It reminds me why I detest Libertarians, and Ron Paul in particular. The man would be a total disaster for the economy, in addition to being a poisonous social regressive.

Who is the enemy here?

To think I had to learn about horror stories going on in the US military from the British press. It seems that our military shares some of the same attributes as the Catholic church — exclusivity, privilege, and a culture that rejects criticism — and has some of the same vices: sexual predators flourish within it.

Rape within the US military has become so widespread that it is estimated that a female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be attacked by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. So great is the issue that a group of veterans are suing the Pentagon to force reform. The lawsuit, which includes three men and 25 women (the suit initially involved 17 plaintiffs but grew to 28) who claim to have been subjected to sexual assaults while serving in the armed forces, blames former defence secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates for a culture of punishment against the women and men who report sex crimes and a failure to prosecute the offenders.

Why would any woman want to serve in the military, given the statistics? Of course, that might be part of the reason rape culture thrives: there are plenty of military men who detest and diminish the contributions of women.

Last year 3,158 sexual crimes were reported within the US military. Of those cases, only 529 reached a court room, and only 104 convictions were made, according to a 2010 report from SAPRO (sexual assault prevention and response office, a division of the department of defence). But these figures are only a fraction of the reality. Sexual assaults are notoriously under-reported. The same report estimated that there were a further 19,000 unreported cases of sexual assault last year. The department of veterans affairs, meanwhile, released an independent study estimating that one in three women had experience of military sexual trauma while on active service. That is double the rate for civilians, which is one in six, according to the US department of justice.

Beyond the statistics, there are the stories. I’m sure the rapists in the military are the minority, but they are taking advantage of a culture that refuses to acknowledge their existence — that is more willing to punish and silence the victims than the perpetrators.

Stories such as Weber’s are commonplace. On mydutytospeak.com, where victims of military rape can share their experiences, there are breathtaking tales of brutality and mistreatment. Only 21 years old, and weeks into her military training, Maricella Guzman says she ran to tell her supervisor in the hours after her rape at a military boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. “I burst into his office and said, ‘I need to speak to you,’ ” explains Guzman, now 34, and a student at a college in Los Angeles studying psychology, who talks about many lost years when she couldn’t function as a result. “One of the procedures if you want to speak to someone in the navy is you have to knock three times on the door and request permission to speak. But I didn’t do that. I was too upset. So my supervisor said ‘Drop’, which means push-ups. So I did the push-ups. But I was still in tears. I said, ‘I need to talk to you.’ He said ‘Drop’ again. Every time I tried to say anything, he made me do push-ups. By the time I was composed in the way he wanted me to be, I couldn’t say anything any more. I just couldn’t.” After that, Guzman didn’t try to tell anyone for another eight years.

Rape culture doesn’t hurt just women, either. The statistics on men being raped are also horrific.

But military rape is not only a women’s issue. According to the Veterans Affairs Office, 37% of the sexual trauma cases reported last year were men. “Men are even more isolated than women following rape,” Bhagwati says. “Because it has an even bigger social stigma.”

There is an interesting discussion of why rape is such a huge problem in the American military.

“We looked at the systems for reporting rape within the military of Israel, Australia, Britain and some Scandinavian countries, and found that, unlike the US, other countries take a rape investigation outside the purview of the military,” explains Greg Jacob, policy director at the Service Women’s Action Network. “In Britain, for example, the investigation is handed over to the civilian police.

“Rape is a universal problem – it happens everywhere. But in other military systems it is regarded as a criminal offence, while in the US military, in many cases, it’s considered simply a breach of good conduct. Regularly, a sex offender in the US system goes unpunished, so it proliferates. In the US, the whole reporting procedure is handled – from the investigation to the trial, to the incarceration – in-house. That means the command has an overwhelming influence over what happens. If a commander decides a rape will not get prosecuted, it will not be. And in many respects, reporting a rape is to the commander’s disadvantage, because any prosecution will result in extra administration and him losing a serviceman from his unit.”

There’s the start of a solution. The Pentagon claims that the problem of sexual assault in the military is now a “command priority” — but will they take the necessary actions to correct it, or will they turtle up and make it even more of an in-house process? I’d bet on the latter, given their history.

I also wonder, given the brutality and neglect with which some American soldiers are allowed to treat their comrades-in-arms, is it a surprise that they treat the people in the countries we occupy with brutality? Even disregarding the inhumanity of the rape behavior that is tolerated, I think it is also counterproductive to the long-term aims of our military.

Once again, I am embarrassed to be an American

I have really been looking forward to seeing David Attenborough’s latest, Frozen Planet, here in the US. I’ve seen brief snippets of the show on youtube, and like all of these big BBC nature productions, I’m sure it’s stunning. And then I hear that the Discovery Channel has bought the rights! Hooray!

But wait, experience cautions us. Remember when American television replaced Attenborough’s narration with Sigourney Weaver? And <shudder> Oprah Winfrey? ANd when the Oprah version dropped the references to evolution? What kind of insane butchery would they perpetrate this time around?

Well, the word is out. The Discovery Channel only bought 6 of the 7 episodes. They dropped the seventh because…it talks about global climate change.

Goddamnit.

It’s not just our dimbulbs in government, it’s active collusion by the media to suppress scientific evidence because it might be unpopular with our undereducated booberati. Jerry Coyne suggests that you contact the Discovery Channel’s viewer relations page and express your displeasure. I will not be watching a neutered version of the program on Discovery; instead, I’ll wait until I can pick up the BBC DVDs.

You know what else is annoying about this? My wife and I are having a pleasantly quiet evening at home, and what she’s been doing is watching youtube videos…of David Attenborough. She’s been gushing over these spectacular videos all night long, and I swear, I’m beginning to feel pangs of manly jealousy. At least I get to tell her that the American media has decided that he’s seditious and dangerous.

And that will probably make him even more attractive. I can’t win.

Just to end on a more pleasant note, Mary almost orgasmed over this one. You’ll like it too. Too bad the Discovery Channel thinks you hate reality.

(Also on FtB)