Garry Trudeau is (IMO) the finest political cartoonist of the 20th and 21st centuries. Here is today another fine example:
(The title line made me laugh out loud the first time I read it.)
“Ya know, boah, somtahms reality jist grabs yuh ‘n shakes th’ livin’ daylights outtaya.”
Take a moment. Sit back and relax. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Consciously relax and take a long moment to recenter yourself.
Done? Good.
Now look at this article:
Click to enbiggen
Do you feel your blood pressure rising? Can you feel that catch in your breath as you see the headline and its accompanying photo of women in a long line in a beautiful, sun-lit mall, going to get their abortions?
Before you snuff your own life with a cerebral aneurysm, look just above that picture at this:
It’s satire, folks. It’s a joke.
Planned Parenthood does not run a big-box mall storefront for women who are getting abortions. Never have. Never will. Really.
What Planned Parenthood does offer are breast cancer screenings (the Komen Foundation’s pathetic attempts at stopping them notwithstanding), reduced-price and free contraceptives distribution (mostly condoms and birth control pills), sex education and anti-STD education programs, and well-women gynecology examinations. Less than 3% of PP’s budget is used for abortion referrals.
Remember, though, that anti-choice zealots often have no sense of humor or reality:
Could someone tell Congresscritter Fleming that Reality is on line 2 and Humor is on line 3 for him? They’re both pissed off.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Interesting (and compelling) argument:
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If “sanctity of marriage” is what’s keeping you from agreeing with gay marriage, you should pay more attention to your First Amendment. (It wouldn’t hurt a bit to pay more attention to the “due process” clause of the 14th Amendment as well.)
(Thanks to Tony for the tip.)
“I love it when a plan comes together”
Komen blinked first:
“We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not. Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.”
We’ll just all wink eye and ignore the pegging that our bullshit detectors get when this statement is read. Of course it done for political reasons. There are strong anti-choice forces within the Komen Foundation, and they were given control of the foundation by Karen Handel, Komen’s new VP for Public Policy. Handel has a long anti-choice history, and she turned the Komen Foundation into a tool for wingnuts to further their political agenda.
Handel and her lackeys were playing politics with breast cancer. That’s despicable.
And of course you all know who’s to blame for shaming Komen into doing the morally correct thing.
You are.
You who organized yourselves online.
You who contacted Komen corporate sponsors and voiced your outrage.
You who donated money for breast cancer screenings directly to Planned Parenthood. (I take back half of all the bad things I’ve ever thought about Michael Bloomberg.)
You who called and wrote Komen and raised hell with them about their political blunderings.
You made that plan come together. Take a bow.
Someecards hits the X-ring!
To tell the truth, it’s small surprise. The Komen Foundation, much like United Way, is infamous for wasting large percentages of donated moneys to staff salaries, administration, and overhead. Less than 15% of your donations go to cancer research, and now none of your donations go to fund breast cancer screenings for poor women — at least as far as Planned Parenthood is concerned.
Shame, shame on the Komen people, especially the chair of its board Alexine Clement Jackson, and its CEO Nancy Brinker.
The Komen Foundation corporate office number is 877-465-6636. Give them a call (be firm but polite, please.) Tell them exactly how you feel the next time you go to a women’s health event in which Komen has the nerve to raise its head. Let’s see if the anti-choice haters make up the difference from the millions in lost donations that will be needed to keep Jackson and Brinker in their phoney-baloney jobs (at $400K+/year, thanks for asking). [It seems Jackson took no salary for the position of board chair -- my bad.]
Side note: The Denver and Connecticut chapters of the Komen Foundation have broken with their national organization and told the board to go fuck itself. Those two groups didn’t break faith with those who need their services most.
Thanks to Joe for the Someecards barb, and thanks to The Spouse for this tip on Mr. Colbert’s take on the Komen litigations:
“Anybody who knows me knows I am a huge supporter of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, which raises millions of dollars a year in the fight against breast cancer . . . So I’m giving a big Tip of my Hat to the Komen foundation for spending almost a million dollars a year in donor funds to sue these other groups. If they don’t own the phrase “for the Cure,” then people might donate money thinking it’s going to an organization dedicated to curing cancer, when instead it’s wasted on organizations dedicated to curing cancer.”
“America has too many…Republican candidates!”
Garry Trudeau, who is looking at a half-century of political commentary straight in the face, still gets it right:
“Be true to yourself, and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth.”
Harriett got tired of standing by passively and watching the U.S. government give away peoples’ rights in pursuit of the illusion of safety. She watched the Patriot Act become law. She watched as habeas corpus was suspended indefinitely. She watched as the NDAA was passed, allowing possible incarceration of American citizens without benefit of counsel and to be held incommunicado for as long as the government wishes.
As a result, she helped some friends break into government computer networks in an attempt to find damning evidence that could be made public.
Soon afterward a SWAT team breaks into her apartment at 0300, takes her into custody, hoodwinks her, and transports her to an undisclosed location. There she is informed that, under the provisions of the NDAA, she is being held as “an enemy combatant”, and she will not be able to call upon the rights and privileges of a U.S. citizen. That is because, by Justice Department dictate, she is no longer a U.S. citizen.
Click to enbiggen, and see Representative Charles Dent's comments below
Couldn’t happen, you say? Not possible? Harriett performed no act heinous enough to invoke USC §1481, the provision that allows the government to strip her of her citizenship. Right?
Think again.
The Enemy Expatriation Act (H.R. 3166 and S. 1698) is a bill currently before Congress that makes one small change in USC §1481. 1481 defines what offenses could cause U.S. citizens to have their citizenship revoked. Those conditions include conviction for treason, joining the armed forces of a foreign country, or becoming a naturalized citizen of another country.
The change invoked by H.R. 3166 and S. 1698 involves one small addition to USC §1481 to those existing conditions. The addition, per the proposed bills, is simply:
(8) engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States
There is also an addition that defines”hostilities” as:
(c) For purposes of this section, the term ‘hostilities’ means any conflict subject to the laws of war
The “official” reason for this modification of existing U.S. legal code is cover the military’s ass in the case where an American citizen openly foments war against the United States; in such cases, U.S. citizenship can be revoked and the military can treat the subjects of that revocation as if they were enemy combatants — i.e., they can killed without the legal ramifications of ensuring the human rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens by the Constitution.
However, there is a darker side to this. Define “engaging in, or purposely and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States”. Is it firing a Stinger missile at a Army chopper? Is it exhorting militants to engage in jihad against the U.S.? Is it shutting down the Department of Justice computers, as was (allegedly) done recently by members of Anonymous?
Might it be tearing down the NYPD barracades blocking off Zuccotti Park?
Before you exclaim that Occupy activities could never be construed as “hostilities” against the United States, take a good look at the history of the Espionage Act of 1917 and ask the ghosts of E. E. Cummings, Eugene Debs, and the other 200 detainees about it.
See what Anonymous, a probable target of the EEA, has to say.
Here are the comments of Representative Charles Dent, H.R. 3166′s sponsor:
“We all live in the social web. Get used to it.”
From the excellent blog What Would Jack Do? — the top 101 things that conservatives who hate taxes should do:
- Do not use Medicare.
- Do not use Social Security
- Do not become a member of the US military, who are paid with tax dollars.
- Do not ask the National Guard to help you after a disaster.
- Do not call 911 when you get hurt.
- Do not call the police to stop intruders in your home.
- Do not summon the fire department to save your burning home.
- Do not drive on any paved road, highway, and interstate or drive on any bridge.
- Do not use public restrooms.
- Do not send your kids to public schools.
Go to the page to read the rest.
IQ vs. Religiosity
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So, it seems that religiosity and average IQ are inversely proportional. This should not come as a complete surprise to most of us:
(As usual, a great job of digging this up goes to Mr. Stanfill, and as always an encouraging shout-out to Calamities of Nature for making a complex concept easy to perceive.)
“Let’s party like it’s 1399!”
Frothy Mix Santorum wants to become president and outlaw all non-procreational sex.
“The state has a right to do that [rescind access to contraception], I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statutes they have…”
President Frothy would allow no access to contraception at all. No condoms, pills, diaphragms, caps, foams, jellies, IUDs, Plan Bs, and certainly no abortions.
No way for women to prevent paying the price of pregnancy for the “sin” of sex. (Someone call H. L. Mencken.)
No help for mothers whose health or lives are threatened by unwanted pregnancies.
No sex at all unless procreation is a potential outcome.
No freedom of choice for heterosexual expression at all. (And no homosexuality at all, per Frothy’s perorations. He is so far back in the closet he can’t even see the damned door.)
In other words, the uterus would be owned by the state.
Anyone care to guess how much of Frothy Mix’s campaign chest comes from Catholic sources?
Stupid poll of the week
Fox News (Latin America) was working on a media campaign for an upcoming National Geographic specials. Part of that campaign was an online poll.
Wanna guess what the question was?
Who Do You Think Is Responsible For The Death of Christ?
A. Pontius Pilate
B. Jewish People
C. High Priests
For an organization so concerned with “the war on Christmas” and other non-existent “persecutions” of Christians, Fox News’ airheaded choice of questions, and the semi-sincere “apology”, this has a particularly pernicious ring to it.
As an interesting historical side note: anyone ever heard of the Gospel of Judas?
The reproduction blues; or, Who let the schizos out of the asylum?
Part One:
On Thursday, December 22 (events timed to coincide with the holidays are often missed by the media), Looney Tunes Paul signed the Personhood USA Pledge.
For those of you unfamiliar with the PUP, one of its clauses states
“…every human being at every stage of development must be recognized as a person possessing the right to life in federal and state laws without exception and without compromise”
This pledge would convert fertile American women into walking incubators for the state. Neither rape nor incest, nor imminent threat of the mother’s health (or her possible death) would be considered sufficient reasons to abort a fetus, if this sentiment is codified. And rest assured the Koch brothers’ meat puppets on the Supreme Court would dance right along with this waltz.
Part Two:
Good Hair Perry recently viewed The Gift of Life, produced by Citizens United, and declared afterward that he had changed his mind and that even rape and incest are not valid reasons for abortion. See the video.
Perry has also signed the Personhood USA Pledge, along with Looney Tunes, Crazy Eyes, Newton, and Frothy Mix.
Do these (reportedly intelligent) people really think that pandering to the murderous anti-abortion waterheads in America will gain them the White House? And if they’re naive enough to think no one notices, do you really want those people running the United States?
Ron Paul — homophobic, racist liar
And he’s not even clever enough to hide it:
Ron Paul -- BUS-ted
- Paul’s Iowa state campaign director serves as chairman of the board of an SPLC-designated hate group.
- Paul wrote and sponsored newsletters filled with racism, homophobia, and xenophobia in the 1990s. Then he defended those statements. Now he denies he ever knew anything about anything. (If you’d like to read some of his fear-choked ravings, look here.) Lew Rockwell, the person who likely co-wrote the worst of those statements, is the founder and chairman of the Mises Foundation, a group that supposedly supports free markets and capitalism.
- Paul opposes the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
- And Social Security. And Medicare.
- And paper money.
2011: the year of wackjob Republican politics and naive administrations
I’ve been up to my eyeballs in Yule stuff, but here’s a double shot of This Modern World for your (grimly) amused pleasure:
Click to enbiggen
One more hypocrite going down
Never let it be said that Minnesotans have no sense of humor.
Minnesota Senate majority leader Amy Koch is a co-sponsor of a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as one man/one woman only. She and her self-righteous homophobes want to dictate “traditional marriage” to fellow Minnesotans.
Kock recently resigned her leadership position after it was disclosed that she was having an affair with one of her staffers. She has publicly apologized for her actions.
Not to miss an opportunity to underline the hypocrisy of government drones pushing for legal discrimination while violating the very concepts they push into the public’s face, John Medeiros of Minneapolis penned this missive for public consumption:
An Open Apology to Amy Koch on Behalf of All Gay and Lesbian Minnesotans
Dear Ms. Koch,
On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage. We are ashamed of ourselves for causing you to have what the media refers to as an “illicit affair” with your staffer, and we also extend our deepest apologies to him and to his wife. These recent events have made it quite clear that our gay and lesbian tactics have gone too far, affecting even the most respectful of our society.
We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry. And we are doubly remorseful in knowing that many will see this as a form of sexual harassment of a subordinate.
It is now clear to us that if we were not so self-focused and myopic, we would have been able to see that the time you wasted diligently writing legislation that would forever seal the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman, could have been more usefully spent reshaping the legal definition of “adultery”.
Forgive us. As you know, we are not church-going people, so we are unable to fully appreciate that “gay marriage” is incompatible with Christian values, despite the fact that those values carry a biblical tradition of adultery such as yours. We applaud you for keeping that tradition going.
And finally, shame on us for thinking that marriage is a private affair, and that our marriage would have little impact on anyone’s family. We now see that marriage is more than that. It is an agreement with society. We should listen to the Minnesota Family Council when it tells us that marriage is about being public, which explains why marriages are public ceremonies. Never did we realize that it is exactly because of this societal agreement that the entire world is looking at you in shame and disappointment instead of minding its own business.
From the bottom of our hearts, we ask that you please accept our apology.
Thank you.
Now we have one more Republican hypocrite to laugh at. And in Minnesota in the wintertime, you seek all the humor you can find.
