Bad charities

There’s always someone ready to take advantage of another’s misfortune, often while wearing a pious expression on their faces. Here are two bad charities:

Maybe it will loosen them up a bit

Meanwhile, the rest of us will laugh. The Republicans have been indulging in a little hanky-panky.

The Republican chairman, Michael Steele, promised on taking office that he would bring the party to corners of America it had not reached before. It is a fair bet that most Republicans did not expect these corners to include the Voyeur West Hollywood, a bondage and S&M club in Los Angeles.

It emerged today that the Republicans spent almost $2,000 last month on a visit to the club where topless women hang from nets on the ceiling and simulate sex in a glass case.

Apparently, Steele himself was not at the club—his cupidity is reserved for his desire to purchase a private jet. It’s still got to hurt.

Steele inherited a surplus of $22m when he took over chairmanship of the national committee in January last year, but that dropped to $13m, well short of the kind of money needed to fight an election. With the congressional midterm elections due in November, Steele has been appealing for donations.

I think it would be great if the Republicans blew their warchest on strip clubs. I just hope they tipped the women well.

These guys are dangerous nuts

Mike Vanderboegh is one of those teabagger patriots — he’s very upset about illegal immigrants, he’s one of those paramilitary fanatics, he hates Democrats, and lately he’s gotten completely unhinged about the passage of our watered down health care bill. He’s so irate that now he’s publicly inciting violence (which is nothing new, he’s been advocating civil war for years):

So, if you wish to send a message that Pelosi and her party cannot fail to hear, break their windows.

Break them NOW. Break them and run to break again. Break them under cover of night. Break them in broad daylight. Break them and await arrest in willful, principled civil disobedience. Break them with rocks. Break them with slingshots. Break them with baseball bats.

But BREAK THEM.

The time has come to take your life, your liberty and that of your children and grandchildren into your own two hands and ACT.

It is, after all, more humane than shooting them in self defense.

And if we do a proper job, if we break the windows of hundreds, thousands, of Democrat party headquarters across this country, we might just wake up enough of them to make defending ourselves at the muzzle of a rifle unnecessary.

Great. Another homegrown fascist who has never heard of Kristallnacht.

Vanderboegh is a pretentious thug, but here’s the surprise. The gun-totin’ proud “Son of Liberty” who rails against big government and hates socialism is unemployed and living off his government disability checks.

Hannity and Carlson dislike science

As yet another examples of the derangement of conservative thought, Sean Hannity has been pushing a list of 102 examples of ‘wasteful’ stimulus spending. I don’t quite get it; this is money the government is disbursing to encourage jobs for the sake of jobs, and if they were hiring people to dig holes and fill them in again, it would accomplish their task. However, the money is being spent sensibly on projects that also improve the nation’s infrastructure in small ways and increase knowledge.

One of the targets of their scorn are science projects, including this one, improving the facilities at an insect collection in Michigan. You might not want to watch this if Hannity and Tucker Carlson make you gag, but the scientist in charge, Anthony Cognato, does a good job of making his case.

The bad guys are really reaching here. Carlson tries to imply that they didn’t need the money, that all they had to do was stick the ‘bugs’ in a refrigerator, but that doesn’t work — this is a working collection, you can’t just archive them away in a deep freeze, and storing a million-specimen collection in a bank of -80° freezers would be rather substantially more expensive than putting in more effective shelving. Cognato addressed this (that link is behind a paywall, sorry):

The interview began and Carlson transformed into an effective pundit for the Right; the questioning was quick, the topics a little disconnected, and at times he seemed to fish for a particular sound bite that would support the opinion that funding the collection was a waste of money. For example, he asked me a couple times if I could have controlled collection pests by just continually freezing the drawers that contain the specimens, thus making our purchase of new storage cabinets unnecessary. I answered repeatedly that freezing our thousands of drawers was not optimal for long-term preservation, that it drained time and resources, and kept researchers from using the collection for scientific studies.

Then they try to suggest that all the $200,000 did was to hire a few students at $8/hour, which is not true: those students weren’t in charge of building shelves. That was a professional job from a company called BioQuip. One of the workers at that company wrote in:

My job is one of the many that were affected by this grant. I work for BioQuip, the California company that manufactures the drawers that MSU bought. Our company employs 27 people whose jobs were all affected by this grant as well as the lumber company, glass company & trucking companies we use along the way. This grant has benefited the US economy, created & maintained US jobs on a level far greater than 4 jobs at a single university. Hannity & Carlson need to do their homework.

Of course, the Right doesn’t see this. Read the comments on Hannity’s site about this subject: it’s insane. Most of the people are ranting about Pelosi and Obama with no connection at all to the topic of the video…except for the weird Cyrillic comments (Russian spam of some sort?).

We’ve got to keep these nuts out of power.

Greece leads the way

Greece is rapidly heading towards economic collapse, and this has finally motivated tho do something that should have been done long ago:

The Greek government has announced it will start taxing churches as part of its efforts to get out of its financial crisis. A new draft bill to be tabled in parliament next week imposes a 20 per cent tax on the Orthodox church’s real estate income, reportedly worth over 10 million Euros (US $14.8 million) a year, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The Greek Orthodox church is squealing like a stuck pig, of course.

However, the Greek government has a debt of €216 billion; belatedly taxing €10 million isn’t going to make much of a dent. Let’s hope Greece isn’t leading the way into catastrophic economic failure.

My apologies to Canada

We have further information from the University of Ottawa about Coulter’s non-appearance last night.

Last night, the organizers themselves decided at 7:50 p.m. to cancel the event and so informed the University’s Protection Services staff on site. At that time, a crowd of about one thousand people had peacefully gathered at Marion Hall.

So…no word of violence at all, just a peaceful protest. Ann Coulter simply chickened out, and the decision was entirely hers and the organizations that invited her.

Never mind, there was no infringement of open discussion here, just another example of right wing cowardice.

Oh, wait — it gets worse. Here’s Ann Coulter’s description of the event.

The police called off my speech when the auditorium was surrounded by thousands of rioting liberals — screaming, blocking the entrance, throwing tables, demanding that my books be burned, and finally setting off the fire alarm.

I don’t know. Setting off a fire alarm after that chaos of rioting, screaming liberals sounds a bit anticlimactic, you know. As that link also reveals, most of the people in that mob were her fans, politely lined up to attend her lecture.

We also know it wasn’t the police who shut down the talk — it was the organizers. Her people.

Grand news from Ireland!

Citing a “sophisticated campaign” on the internet (congratulations, Michael Nugent and all the gang at Atheist Ireland), the Irish government is going to reconsider their blasphemy law.

Dermot Ahern, the justice minister, is proposing that a vote to remove the criminal offence of blasphemy be held as part of a planned series of referendums this autumn, writes Stephen O’Brien.

Well, frob me sideways with a sniny dirk…maybe there is a god.