Ruck Fush II: Black Clouds on the Horizon

There is a distinct possibility that I am spending entirely too much of any given day thinking about Rush Limbaugh. (As in "I need to scrub my brain with steel wool, because the words 'Limbaugh' and 'sex' have appeared in the same sentence.") But sadly for someone with an active imagination, he is in the news of late. And sex is involved.

So, question time. Rush has been married for roughly twenty of the sixty-one years he has infested this earth. He is known to have acquired Viagra (and a few other substances) through a number of sources. A few of them were even legal.

So, it's probably safe to assume that he had sex with one or more of his wives. (I started to have this mental image of him being lowered onto her with a crane, but then my gag reflex kicked in and I spent the rest of the night gripping the porcelain throne and dry-heaving...)

He doesn't have any kids. So I'm guessing that either birth control was involved, or those D-cup man-boobs have very little to do with him being morbidly obese.

Now, you take a man who hasn't seen his winkie without a full-length mirror in decades, a man with a documented willingness to lie about any subject in the world, a known drug addict with a fondness for cigars that smell like petrified turds: you take that man, and then you note that he is currently married to a reasonably hot woman half his age, and you know one thing as a universal truth.

That man is rich.

You know for a fact that she didn't marry him for his looks, or for his charming personality. He wouldn't have a chance in hell of landing this woman if he didn't have in excess of seven figures in the bank.

So, we have a woman who is willing to occasionally allow this bloated half-human slime to bounce his sweaty nethers against hers for a few seconds, before a thin dribble of lifeless sperm oozes out and he rolls over, exhausted, and falls into a bourbon-induced coma.

(And the next day, while he's railing against whatever liberal plot he claims is destroying America this time, she dashes off for a morning of passion with Reynaldo, the Dominican pool boy.)

So, in essence, the former Kathryn Rogers is having sex for money. Which would apparently mean that, by Limbaugh's definition, she's a prostitute.

I'm just saying...

But that is neither here nor there. More importantly, before anybody loses control of their gag reflex, let's turn away from this sordid scene of the human Hindenburg and his harlot, and consider one fact.

What does it say about America that Rush Limbaugh has been sending up racist dogwhistles for over twenty years, but it's his sexism that finally causes him to start hemorrhaging advertisers at an alarming rate? Why is it sex and not race that brings him down?

This fat bastard has been sexist for years: I mean, admittedly, there are more white women than black people in America, but bigotry is bigotry, isn't it? From the beginning of his program, before he was even syndicated, he was using the term "feminazi" to refer to... well, to any woman who said anything that wasn't strict Judeo-Christian submission to a man. And it isn't like he's ever pulled back from that position.

I have long told you, for example, Undeniable Truth of Life No. 24, written back in 1987: Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.

See, I recently made fun of an idiot who titled a blog post "In Defense of Pat Buchanan and the First Amendment," where I finally had to explain to him, in tiny little words, why Pat Buchanan qualified as racist. And Limbaugh uses exactly the same tactics as Buchanan: he dog-whistles his way through life.

It all boils down to the "Southern Strategy" of the GOP, as explained by Lee Atwater, advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and later Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'

And there you have one of the core strategies of Rush Hudson Limbaugh III.

There are dozens of articles out there listing the various racist things he's said, going back to his earliest days in the radio. His empty-eyed zombie supporters will then find one that isn't properly sourced, and claim that the whole list is therefore invalidated. So the best way to play this little game is to find the ones that still exist in recorded form.

Unfortunately for Rush, this is not a difficult thing to do. Watchdog groups like Media Matters have literally hours of the stuff.

His favorite tactic (and that of much of the White Right Wing) is to paint Obama as a usurper, an outsider. He's different from "you and me," and so he's scary! He's the "Halfrican-American," the "angry black guy" from Kenya who's taking over the country: Limbaugh draws on the stereotype that all black men are gang members and thugs, and therefore, that Obama is dangerous.

Rush then reinforces this with continual references to Kenya, to Obama being "more African in his roots than he is American" and "behaving like an African colonial despot." Why specifically an African colonial despot? Well, see, Africa is full of black people! And it's in chaos! Which is what Obama is going to do to us!

And Limbaugh is fairly open about it. Not like Newt Gingrich, who calls Obama "the food stamp president" (see, all black people are on food stamps), but then gets to talk about "more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history" (a lie, by the way - that record is still held by George W. Bush). Rush doesn't hide behind code words like "food stamps" and "entitlement society" - he comes right out and tells you that Obama is going to confiscate your house.

This guy's -- this guy obviously has got a new role model, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. The next thing to look out for is for Obama to take the farms. Well, that's what Zimbabwe, that's what Mugabe did, he took the white people's farms.

That little clip actually covers many of Limbaugh's little tricks, all tn two minutes and forty-four seconds of your life that you'll never get back. It's got Obama looking up to African dictators, it's got America spiraling into chaos, Obama taking your house - hell, early on, he even get's the subconscious "violence" reference in, saying "Bernanke and Obama are out of bullets, that they've got nothing left in the quiver." See? The angry black guy is dangerous! He has guns! (And bows and arrows, because Africans use arrows, right?)

Well, with his sponsors running away from Rush Limbaugh so fast that he has to play dead air and PSA's, maybe we're finally hearing the death rattle of the Rush Limbaugh show. But let's not remember him just as some bile-spewing, misgynist asshole: there were so many other reasons to hate him.

I'm betting on Mitt Romney and Halliburton

Seeing as how I won't be able to get Social Security till my late 60's, and the retirement plans through my employer will be gutted as well, I've become an active investor.

I go through all the charts and examine the trends and fundamentals and other stuff investors are supposed to do. For the most part that's all nonsense. The real deal is investing in whoever has the power to do whatever it wants. Nobody has more power than Halliburton.

I use the word "nobody" to describe Halliburton since the republican elite chosen one, Mitt Romney, and the Supreme Court have declared corporations individuals.

Grand old bag of the republican party, Barbara Bush, just endorsed Mitt Romney. I guess this means the Bush clan is saving Jeb for 2012. It also means Halliburton will get more juicy government, no bid contracts. This is whether or not President Obama wins in November. Just as information was manipulated to get us into Iraq and made Halliburton a fortune, information will be manipulated to get us into something with Iran making Halliburton another fortune. Everyone, and that includes our representatives in Congress want to be seen as "tough."

I'll put my creds as a lefty against anyone. When I was a freshman I took the pro Jimmy Carter position and debated it in front of most of the high school student body. But I'm also a realist and greedy pig.

Today I bought shares of Halliburton stock. I feel dirty. But it's a good, naughty, like I saw dirty pictures when I was an adolescent and got away with it kind of feeling. This must be how Dick Cheney felt when he and his energy company pals thought up an energy policy that made them loads of money and knew there was nothing anyone could do about it.

It's not bad being Dick Cheney.

Ruck Fush

Winston Churchill is occasionally said to have made the statement "Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains." This is, of course, a lie. As Paul Addison of Edinburgh University put it:

Surely Churchill can't have used the words attributed to him. He'd been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35! And would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie (Clementine, the Baroness Spencer-Churchill, his wife), who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?

And I like to think that I'm proof of the exact inverse of that theory, regardless of which idiot said it.

As a young man, I entered the military as a relatively moderate conservative. I listened to Rush Limbaugh, I had few interests in helping anyone but myself, I was known to make sexist and (yes, I'm afraid) racist jokes once in a while.

But then I met people. I learned things. I discovered that a "society" made up of devoted followers of Ayn Rand would simply fall into chaos: with every member dedicated to their own selfish pursuits, the fabric of that society would eventually fall to shreds. Why would a Randian want to join the police, or the enlisted ranks of the military, where nobody gets rich? A philosophy of selfish materialism can only work if it is allowed to grow, like a wart or a tumor, out of an otherwise healthy society.

Look up the history of the "robber barons" in industrial America to see how well that worked out.

So, I slowly overcame my shameful past - and I have to admit, much of the cause of this has to do with trying to live up to the example of the Trophy Wife, one of the few truly good people I have ever met.

In a way, I suppose that means that I'm worse than the "ordinary" liberal (if such a thing exists) - I'm a Born-Again Liberal. I came from the darkness of selfish ego, into the white light of humanity.

But, yes, I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh. I thought he was funny. I haven't thought so in years.

And now, he's going on his national soapbox, and calling a private citizen a slut. Because he's an bloated, lying bag of ass. He is the herpes sore on the face of society.

This is what Rush Limbaugh is saying.

What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her?

It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We're the pimps... the johns, that's right. We would be the johns... no! We're not the johns. Well... yeah, that's right. Pimp's not the right word.

OK, so, she's not a slut. She's round-heeled. I take it back.

Her name, you oozing pile of rotting feces, is "Sandra." And those ellipses are there, not because I cut anything out, but because the drugs are finally taking their toll and his ability to spew bile and lies occasionally goes off-track. Hopefully, the memory lapses will get worse, and he'll shut up altogether.

(Actually, if there was any justice in the universe, he would get Parkinson's and be completely unable to communicate. That isn't happening, and therefore, there is no god. Q.E.motherfuckingD.)

See, that's what Rush said. It is, of course, unrelated to reality, but it's what right-wingers want to hear. Because the last thing they want is for people to know what Ms Fluke actually said.

A friend of mine, for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome, and she has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by Georgetown's insurance because it's not intended to prevent pregnancy.

Unfortunately, under many religious institutions and insurance plans, it wouldn't be. There would be no exception for other medical needs. And under Sen. Blunt's amendment, Sen. Rubio's bill or Rep. Fortenberry's bill there's no requirement that such an exception be made for these medical needs...

In 65% of the cases at our school, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed prescription and whether they were lying about their symptoms.

For my friend and 20% of the women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription. Despite verifications of her illness from her doctor, her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted birth control to prevent pregnancy. She's gay. So clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy for her.

After months paying over $100 out-of-pocket, she just couldn’t afford her medication anymore, and she had to stop taking it.

I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that in the middle of the night in her final exam period she'd been in the emergency room. She'd been there all night in just terrible, excruciating pain. She wrote to me, "It was so painful I'd woke up thinking I’ve been shot."

Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary as a result.

On the morning I was originally scheduled to give this testimony, she was sitting in a doctor's office, trying to cope with the consequences of this medical catastrophe.

(Those ellipses are because I did cut some stuff out. Go read the whole thing. And yes, Mr Santorum. This woman had to be medically sterilized because you are opposing birth control. It would be ironic if it weren't so goddamned sad.)

That's Rush Limbaugh for you. More than happy to lie on any subject, at any time.

Now, Rep. Jackie Speier is calling for a boycott of his sponsors. And I think that's a pretty damned good idea: the right wing will whine that he's having his free speech suppressed, but he's welcome to say whatever he wants to; he just also gets to take responsibility for his lies.

Now, because Rush is a turd, Quicken Loans, Sleep Train, LegalZoom.com and Sleep Number have all pulled ads over this. (If you want to say thanks, they all have contact us or feedback somewhere on those links I gave - but you should know you'll probably end up on a mailing list.) However, there are others.

Clear Channel Communications
200 East Basse Road
San Antonio, TX 78209

Public Relations: (210) 822-2828
publicrelations@clearchannel.com

John Hogan
President and CEO, Clear Channel Media and Entertainment
JohnHogan@ClearChannel.com (that's a guess)

Tony Alwin, Senior VP - Creative, Marketing and Public Relations
(602) 381-5700
TonyAlwin@ClearChannel.com (that's on the website)

Carbonite, Inc.

177 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
Main Office: 617-587-1100
Toll Free: 877-665-4466

David Friend, Co-founder and CEO

Tom Murray – VP, Marketing
617-587-1100

Century 21 Real Estate
International Headquarters
1 Campus Drive
Parsippany, NJ 07054

Web comment form

Richard W. Davidson, President and CEO

Bev Thorne, Chief Marketing Officer
and owner of the Evergreen Farm

4 Bass Lane
Lebanon, NJ 08833
(908) 236-9550
info@theevergreenfarm.com

Michael Callaghan, VP, Strategic Marketing
mike.callaghan@century21.com
(from a site called Lead411.com, who's going to spam me forever)
973-407-5238

ProFlowers

Web contact (or try "site feedback")
wecare@customercare.ProFlowers.com
800.580.2913

William Strauss, CEO
Proflowers.com
5005 Wateridge Vista Dr
San Diego CA 92121-5780

And that's just the easily available public information.

WILL WE EVER GET ALONG AGAIN?

Politics has devolved into a mud slinging, drunken brawl
with participants screaming insults and spreading wild rumors taken up as
gospel truth and then spread throughout the land via the internet.

Many people are lazy; upon hearing or reading some
extremely incendiary information, the more outrageous the better, they simply
reproduce the misleading propaganda and pass it on over the ‘net to hundreds,
even thousands of people.

Today I was “de-friended” on facebook by someone who was
apparently upset that I found the article they had posted was false on
snopes.com and I commented on it. That tells me this person and most likely
many of the readers have no interest in whether they are providing accurate
information but simple want something to hang their noose on.

In this case it was the bastardly, dastardly Obamacare.
The article insinuates that the bill that was passed has language that calls
for mandatory implantation of tracking devices into citizens.
According to snopes, where I quickly found the
information about this article, the bill that was passed no longer has the
particular language that referenced implanted devices but even it if did, the
actual intent of the passage was to be able to track information from
electronic devices including implanted devices LIKE PACEMAKERS…

There is a veritable thick gooey soup of lies, tricks and
hateful messages seeping and oozing into every nook and cranny of our cyber
world. Abortions cause cancer, gay marriage threatens heterosexual marriage,
people don’t have jobs because they are lazy, people don’t have healthcare
because they are stupid, our country is a Christian nation and all other beliefs
are here only to dupe the citizenry and pry them away from those solid
Christian values that only they have.

I’ve been around long enough to have seen the best and
the worst of local and national politics but never have I lived through a time
when this country was so deeply divided. It probably hasn’t been this bad since
the War Between the States.

No matter what happened in the political arena in
elections past, ordinary citizens would pack up their tents, go home, visit
with their neighbors and get on with the business of living. Not so today – the
level of animosity and disrespect for governance has not abated in four years.

So, I can’t help but wonder if this country is so broken,
if the people are so bereft of moral standards and common sense that we may
never be able to get along again.

And,if that’s the case, how will it be resolved? Another civil war? Two new
countries?

What a depressing state of affairs….

Let them get pregnant, like God intended.

What's worse than a bunch of creepy old man religious perverts conspiring against the health and well being of women? Well, perhaps a creepy young woman trying to make sure -- using copious amounts of taxpayer money -- to fight a requirement that health insurers cover the modest cost of birth control. Worse still, she's fighting something that in some cases is a medical necessity and in very many cases will prevent women from becoming unable to work and winding up in poverty and their children on public assistance.

Such things don't seem to matter to GOP apparatchiks like Pam Bondi, Florida Attorney General who is suing the Federal Government over the Affordable Care Act, a law that is starting to provide health care to Florida's 4.5 million uninsured and access to contraception. As the ACA will come before the US Supreme Court this month, the redundancy of this suit is as obvious as the smug unconcern Bondi has for truth, justice and freedom from the tyranny of religious nuts.

Sold as another attempt at "smaller" government, it's really nothing but a power play by the Religious Rich to make their perverted, obsessive, inhumane and antique dogmas into public policy no matter the cost. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi may not be one of these foul, disgusting old men, but she sure as hell works for them while collecting a salary paid by the people she'd like to keep barefoot and pregnant and poor and in thrall to the superstition salesmen with the effrontery to use our freedom of religion and our tax revenues against us.

Oh please

Marvelous Mitt must be desperate to have something scary to say to distract Republicans from the religious wedge issues the public is getting tired of. He'd rather not talk about religion anyway and he needs of course, to distract from the dumb things he keeps saying. So he's had to come up with something dumber, if not quite original.

Remember when Darth Cheney told us in solemn tones that "Obama will be tested" and that there would be an onslaught of terrorist attacks should we be so foolish as to elect him; that candy-ass, ultra-liberal crypto-pacifist, watermelon stealing coward? Well Republicans may not remember, but we all know the result - more terrorists killed than ever and that includes Osama bin Laden. I think he's passed the test.

No, he didn't take our guns, he didn't make capitalism or Christianity illegal, he didn't appoint Jesse Jackson as Secretary of State and he didn't give us a huge middle class tax increase or a confiscatory corporate tax rate. He didn't institute Sharia law. In fact he's usually done the opposite of what the Chicken Littles have been squawking about for 4 years now.

So a return to objective reality not being possible when your entire platform and your strongest base are pickled in delusion and ignorance, what option does he have but to go nuclear? That's right, if we re-elect the president, the world will be blown up in a nuclear holocaust says Mr. Bluster of the plastic face.

" If I’m president, that will not happen. If we re-elect Barack Obama it will.”

I couldn't make this shit up, but then, I couldn't make this Mitt up. I couldn't vote for him either.

“Ahmadinejad having fissile material that he can give to Hezbollah, Hamas, and that they can bring into Latin America, and that they can potentially bring across the border into the United States to let off dirty bombs here — or more sophisticated bombs here.”

Sure Mitt, Just like Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons were potentially going to be smuggled into Peoria in a briefcase even though he had none, nor the means to make them, and we had to blow a few trillion and kill nearly a million to wipe him out -- and why is Obama going to get us into a nuclear war? Why, says make it up as you go along Mitt, because he hasn't been threatening to blow Iran off the surface of the planet for even thinking about it and possibly because according to the Secretary of Defense, Iran hasn't been doing much more than thinking and blustering about building one.

"Potentially." It's such a great word to weave a plot around. Potentially I'm an NBA linebacker who writes music like Mozart and travels the world in his magic submarine fighting for justice. Is Romney potentially a President? Oh please.

Plan B From Outer Space

It's hard to observe the growing and comical chaos in the GOP without thinking of B movie icon Ed Wood and his Plan 9 From Outer Space, wherein space aliens resurrect dead humans as zombies and vampires to stop evil men from creating the 'Solaranite' bomb. With the Republican circus trying to breathe life into mouldering, uncouth candidates reciting ancient and eldritch formulae to fight the evil Bill of Rights, secularism and the Obama Bomb, it's harder and harder to avoid the suspicion that this is only a movie.

With the economy showing signs of recovery and the ability to substantiate the hysterical portraits of Obama as a Kenyan Communist, Indonesian Socialist ally of big banks, Wall Street and the World Caliphate fading, the GOP must feel like Ed Wood trying to piece together a movie with $273.50 left in the checking account and an unwritten plot. The rising star candidate and the great white hope is making such a fuss about the need for a gospel-based theocracy with sex by permission only that any platform they can cobble together at this point would be so far beyond city limits and so rickety it can't support itself much less a coherent and discernable political position.

Whispers are being heard, CNN.com writes today, about coming up with a new candidate for the GOP ticket and ditching the Chameleon, the Worm and the cut-rate Rasputin. Finding any brand new candidate with any potential of being passed of as sane or decent (if not quite qualified) is remote, as the Tea Party element and the Holy Rollers simply won't accept him any more than they did Huntsman. The rest of the black-hearted Plutocrats aren't going to support Ron Paul and even if they could bring back Reagan from the dead, he wouldn't pass muster as a Conservative in today's party. Who ya gonna call?

The prospect of an open convention with desperate delegates acting like football hooligans in Tampa this August must have Republican strategists doubled over with cramps trying to come up with a plan B before the Grand Old Barrel goes over the falls in November.

With an inability to field a credible candidate so late in the game, the voters are going to have to reconsider a blind allegiance to a party that can't run itself much less a complex 21st century superpower.

The show ain't over until the pregnant lady sings

Well, it's been a week or two, and the American public, with their beagle-puppy attention span, can no longer remember the little tiff between Planned Parenthood and the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

(For those of you slipping into a CNN-induced haze, Karen Handel resigned as Senior Vice President for Public Policy of the Susan G Komen Foundation; she was widely accepted as being responsible for Komen deciding to defund Planned Parenthood.)

Being a Republican, Handel is, of course, wandering around trying to play the victim card, because martyrdom is the default strategy of the Right. Fortunately, the previously-mentioned attention span problem has pushed her deep into the sidelines where she belongs.

Her resignation letter included the following fascinating viewpoint.

We can all agree that this is a challenging and deeply unsettling situation for all involved in the fight against breast cancer. However, Komen’s decision to change its granting strategy and exit the controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood and its grants was fully vetted by every appropriate level within the organization. At the November Board meeting, the Board received a detailed review of the new model and related criteria. As you will recall, the Board specifically discussed various issues, including the need to protect our mission by ensuring we were not distracted or negatively affected by any other organization’s real or perceived challenges. No objections were made to moving forward.

I am deeply disappointed by the gross mischaracterizations of the strategy, its rationale, and my involvement in it. I openly acknowledge my role in the matter and continue to believe our decision was the best one for Komen’s future and the women we serve. However, the decision to update our granting model was made before I joined Komen, and the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization. Neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology.

Just so you know, there are a bunch of huge lies in those two little paragraphs. Let's consider two of them.

"the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization"

Really? Has it, now?

Komen founder Nancy Brinker published Promise Me in 2010, a memoir about starting the Susan G. Komen Foundation because of a deathbed promise to her eponymous sister.

Consider this excerpt (from, remember, just two years ago):

In the book, she discusses how the Curves workout chain withdrew their support to Komen in 2004 due to Komen's grants to Planned Parenthood centers. Brinker is clear about why they refused to buckle to Curves' pressure:

"The grants in question supplied breast health counseling, screening, and treatment to rural women, poor women, Native American women, many women of color who were underserved--if served at all--in areas where Planned Parenthood facilities were often the only infrastructure available. Though it meant losing corporate money from Curves, we were not about to turn our backs on these women."

And despite Handel trying to claim that it was Foundation policy and she was just trying to enforce it, the people she worked with don't agree: it was entirely her doing, she came up with the excuse needed to defund, and she was the primary motivator pushing it through.

Now, despite her attempts to claim that she resigned in the face of a hostile "liberal media" (and, holy crap, do I wish that there was such a thing as a "liberal media"), considering the big picture, I'm personally willing to say that she didn't really resign, so much as she was forced out; at the very least, she put in her resignation before she would have been fired.

Why do I suggest this? (And let's be honest - I'm not "suggesting" it, I'm coming right out and saying it.) Because she wasn't very good at her job. She, in fact, failed badly, just a few months after being hired.

Remember, the job she was hired for was Senior Vice President for Public Policy.

Put aside your politics. Your personal feelings on "freedom of choice" vs. "abortion" don't make a bit of difference to the following argument. If anything, they get in the way. Suppress them for just a minute.

The evidence shows that she was the person pushing the policy to immediately stop funding Planned Parenthood. And that, by itself, is a blatantly stupid policy: when dealing with a group who hires as many lawyers as Planned Parenthood does, one truth should hold sway over every other consideration: if you publicly promise to give them money, you damned well follow through on that promise!

Lawyers love stuff like that. They can't even stand straight from the law-boner it gives them.

So, bad policy. From the Senior Vice President for Public Policy.

Second, and more important, "Senior Vice President for Public Policy" is an extremely fancy, extremely well-paid PR position. She's managing the public face of this charitable empire: the policies she sets up and advocates define how people see the Susan G. Komen Foundation. And when they end up looking like political hacks instead of public health advocates, somebody isn't doing their job.

Like, maybe, somebody in charge of Public Policy.

So, in the end, Ms Handel will probably get a book deal out of it, and a paying gig at Fox "News" whenever the subject of abortion comes up.

More importantly, what we have to do is keep an eye on the Susan G. Komen Foundation during the next round of grants. Because if they try to quietly stop giving grants to Planned Parenthood in the shadow of all this, that will tell us something about them, won't it?

Sex. Lies and Santorum

"He is imposing his values on the Christian church. He can categorize those values anyway he wants. I’m not going to,”

lied Republican candidate Rick Santorum to an assemblage of Tea Bag idiots immediately after having categorized President Obama's "values" and his "agenda"as being

“not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology,”

Yes, some phony ideal is on the agenda. A phony ideal involving liberty, Democracy and a constitution that never mentions God or gods or scriptures of any religion and declares that there shall be no religion in government. Science is a phony ideal to sanctimonious Santorum too because we all know that Senators Jesus, Mary and Joseph agree with the oil companies and that the president's job, as 'Rick' told the 'baggers, is to keep gas prices down (and the subsidies up, no doubt.)

No sir, all that Washington, Jefferson and Madison secular prattle is phony and if we're looking for full employment, a decent quality of life and personal liberty you must turn to The Christian Scriptures which forbid us to charge interest on a loan or obtain a divorce or marry whom we will or even to enjoy sex when it isn't only for making babies. Some churches I won't mention have interpreted it to demand a king chosen of God rather than an elected government, but don't bother Rick with that. It's already on his agenda.

So why is this sex-fearing, woman hating, half-witted fake theologian; this lame-brained Longinus and meretricious medievalist mewling about theology while pronouncing Ernulphian maledictions on what he pretends are President Obama's values, cursing them one by one? Because theological statements don't have to be true, you see; don't have to be supported by evidence and are easily and frequently used to do horrible things to people. Cognitively impaired, confused and historically ignorant "conservatives" seem pre-lubricated to receive ecclesiastical wisdom without discomfort and Faith invents facts as well as it rejects them to the despair of brother Ockham.

So Obama, who thinks a Harvard Law degree makes him as good as a white. Christian man, agrees with Justice Scalia that religious freedom does not legalize acts done in the name of religion and yet, conservatives still want to shove the notion that he's a radical, Liberal, Christian-hating Sodomite Commie up the national hoo-ha and true to form, the 'baggers assume the position and take it.

How can any curse suffice?

Virginia, the Rape Me State

Sic Semper Tyrannus is the motto of the State of Virginia, but as with any matters involving Republicans, a government is not a tyranny if it subjugates individual liberty to the prejudices and perverted morals of the Religious Right. I read over at The Impolitic that Virginia passed a law last week forcing any woman seeking a legal abortion to have an ultrasound examination. For those who don't know, this means that for a pregnancy in the first trimester, she must, by law, have a probe inserted into her vagina and maneuvered around by a technician until an ultrasound image satisfactory to the state is produced. As Libby points out, without that state mandate, this meets a general description of rape.

It doesn't take much to imagine the feelings, for example, of a 14 year old rape victim being violated a second time by the accursed state that murdered Lincoln and had no reservations about taking children from their mothers and selling them -- or raping those mothers for that matter. It's a state that talks a lot about Jesus and distrusts those who don't. It's a state wherein people tend to like Rick Santorum and others who have a lot to say about what consenting adults can do with what and with which and to whom -- and talk about Jesus and small government a lot.

Keep in mind, this is not an examination done for a medical reason. It's not done to protect the public from a disease or to protect the woman to whom it's being done. It's not something that one can opt out of. It's an act of intimidation and a deliberate act of humiliation. It was passed because of the religious objections of men who were elected to represent everyone, but instead represent preachers and priests -- and in a state that has just decided that a single cell has civil rights but a breathing female of child bearing age has not, can't we be excused for wondering whether these "conservatives" will either ban contraception soon or require some other humiliating procedure before allowing it?

Can't I be excused for seeing this insane drive to bring back the horrors of medieval Europe in high-tech form to a nation that was formed by repugnance for it as anything at all but Conservative?

Where is the outrage from actual conservatives? You know, those people who insist on a government too weak to do anything but leave us alone. I guess when those sentiments put them in a light that makes them seem too much like Liberals who designed a government that must leave us alone and respects the sanctity of our persons, our bodies, our homes and our rights, they scurry like roaches when the lights are switched on. They scurry because they're the same roaches who supported the horror of slavery, the obscenity of racism and are still at war with the rights of women and a government that protects them.

Conservatives, and this liberal, often decry the trend, falsely identified as Liberal, toward seeking safety by making the public helpless and dependent on authority, but it's in conservative strongholds like the secessionist states that we see just how much that obscene ecclesiastical tyranny has made the weakest and most vulnerable totally dependent upon the state in the most personal way. Small government my ass, it's the old Confederacy out of it's coffin like a putrefying zombie, its pockets filled with church money, corporate money, the money of tyrants staggering toward Washington to eat your freedom.