Huckabee's 'Uncle Sugar' Comment? Translation: 'Uncle Inquisitor'

According to Mike Huckabee: Women 'Cannot Control Their Libido' Without The Government.




Here is a shamelessly hypocritical exercise in projection: Mike Huckabee has opposed equal pay protection for women, opposed a woman’s right to chose, supports state-sanctioned vaginal probes to shame and humiliate women, supports an employers' right to veto contraception and healthcare benefits for women, and has made insulting remarks about rape and birth control. Time for Mike to SHUT THE HUCK UP!

Today, Louis Gohmert pyled on with this comment: Government Lures Single Moms into Servitude with Welfare. His comment appears to be part of a larger Republican offensive to reverse their flagging fortunes. Except for this: His and the Huckster's counter offensive is patently offensive to women and more noxious than unfettered flatulence.

Since yesterday, another pale male from the Gee-Ohh-Pee has dribbled onto the public toilet seat: Rick Santorum Defends Huckabee. A devout Catholic, Frothy is no expert on Catholic women.  Why?  An estimated 98% of Catholic women of childbearing age use contraception. What Huckabee, Santorum, and other social conservatives are trying to accomplish is to turn government into an enforcer of religious doctrine. Has any spokesperson for the Gee-Ohh-Pee read the anti-establishment clause lately!  Uncle Sugar or Uncle Inquisitor? Funny how you can always re-frame an argument.

Glenn Beck haz a sad.

My blog, Progressive Eruptions, has written about conservative, self-identified "recovering dirt bag" , Glenn Beck, and his crazy rants that were featured every night on FAUX NOOZ.

Now, in a cynical attempt to sound penitent (for gawd only knows what financial advantage) he admits that his harangues and histrionics were divisive and that they tore the country apart.

Beck is a phony.  

Always was and always will be.  I remember listening to his corrosive screeds on AM radio when I lived in Florida. I never thought a blathering nincompoop like him would ever attract a national audience.

But, FAUX NOOZ. 

That cable station gave him a platform to spread his idiotic conspiracy tirades to galaxies of unthinking zombies.

Now he's sorry.

Cry me a "you-know-what-kind-of-" river, Glenn.  Now go away. And stay there.

"Conservative talk show host Glenn Beck, now an older and wiser and richer man, told Fox News' Megyn Kelly on Tuesday that he regrets having "played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart" during his tenure with the network. Beck was with Fox from shortly before the 2008 election until 2011, during which time he became notorious for his encouragement of the Tea Party and his far-reaching conspiracy theories about Socialist infiltration of the Obama administration. Or, as Kelly put it in introducing Beck for her interview, Glenn "had a very successful run here at Fox News, but also became a bit of a lightning rod."

A bit! It was indeed a successful run for the parent company — until Beck's assertion that President Obama was racist and had "a deep-seated hatred for white people" prompted advertisers to pull spots from his program. 

(Later, religious groups objected to Beck's claims that social justice work was associated with Nazism.) 

 But now Beck sees the errors of his ways, understands that these excoriations weren't helpful (like when a guy who'd heard Beck's repeated attacks on the non-profit Tides Foundation was arrested on his way to shooting the place up)."

About Drone Attacks, Politics, and Joshua Black

Maybe it's something in the water down in Florida. On Monday, while most of us were celebrating the Dr. King holiday, Joshua Black, a candidate for a seat in the Florida House (District 68) tweeted that President Obama should be hanged for treason, "I'm past impeachment. It's time to arrest and hang him high."

Black subsequently tweeted denials that he called for hanging the President, insisting that he merely agreed with a tweet posted by someone else. Of course the tweet with which he agreed advocated arresting and hanging the President. He also addressed how he has been misunderstood on his Facebook page.

Mr. Black is a 31-year-old African-American. On his Twitter account he has reacted with indignation to some suggestions that the tweet in controversy is racist. Upon giving it some thought, I am willing to concede that Mr. Black's attack on President Obama, his agreement with the tweet calling for the arrest and hanging of the President, may not be based on racial animosity. Mr. Black isn't a racist; he's just an idiot.

He appears desperate to curry favor from the Republican party in the belief that he will be the Republican nominee for a seat in the Florida House for District 68. His efforts aren't working. Chris Latvala, a Republican candidate for House District 67, tweeted a response: "You aren't seriously calling for the killing of Obama are you? I know you are crazy but good heavens. U R an embarrassment." On his Facebook page, Black alleges that Florida's governor has contacted him and asked him to withdraw from the race. Black refused, "Having done nothing illegal, I will not be withdrawing from this race. If I lose, I lose, but I will not cower away." 

What elicited Black's agreement with the tweet that President Obama should be hanged? According to Black, the President is guilty of treason, a modern incarnation of Benedict Arnold (Contrary to Black's belief, Arnold was not executed; he died at the age of 60 in his own bed.) He is emphatic that the President should have a trial first, then we should hang him. Black points specifically at two drone attacks in which two American citizens, a father and son were killed, the son was 16-years-old. A sad and nasty affair, in which the father, Anwar al-Awlaki, had taken his son with him to Yemen where the father worked with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Two weeks after the father was killed in a targeted drone strike, his son was also a victim of a drone strike. The administration has stated that the son was not a target and was an unintended victim of the second attack. 

Black seems particularly concerned about what he views as Obama's criminal attacks on American citizens, and calls on Jesus as justification for killing Obama for the crime of treason. There would be a bit of dark humor in the rantings of a novice who has never before held a public office if it weren't for the Tea Party members who are gleefully celebrating Black's attack on the President, offering praise for the black man speaking out against the President and in doing so, somehow prohibiting any characterization of the rabid right's ongoing attack against the president as racist. 

I find it fascinating how there is so much outrage at the use of drones by this administration and how little outrage has been expressed in the past when the U.S. has engaged in creative methods of killing that have resulted in substantial deaths of men, women, and children. 

I don't like war, whether declared by Congress or entered into based on a lie at worst or at best, massive misinformation about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction or some other imagined threat.  People die in wars because everyone involved uses weapons to kill each other. War is about killing. Amazing how outraged people who had no problems with previous administrations killing people, including civilians, are willing to go so far as to call for the hanging of the president of the United States for alleged war crimes. Of course he is the first black president. But wait, I'm just imagining that his race has anything to do with it. 

After all, there has never been another U.S. president who ordered the military to take military action against our perceived enemy. Oops, I'm wrong. There was Truman and I'm certain that Obama's critics would also want Truman lynched. Under Truman's orders, on August 6, 1945, the United States used a massive, atomic weapon against Hiroshima, Japan. This atomic bomb, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT, flattened the city, killing tens of thousands of civilians. Three days later, the United States struck again, this time, on Nagasaki. This was the big bang but the U.S. had been bombing cities in Japan for some time wiping out cities of 100,000 with conventional bombs. Rumor has it that subsequent Presidents ordered military actions that killed civilians in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan. Then there were the wars prior to WWII.

War is a nasty, evil thing and by its very definition it results in deaths, hundreds of thousands of deaths. Obama didn't start this trend and he won't be the last president to order strikes that result in the deaths of civilians, the young and the old, and even American citizens who happen to be giving aid to countries that are waging terrorists attacks against the U.S.

I don't like the U.S. use of military might and I believe that we have failed to devote sufficient effort to using diplomatic channels to resolve differences among nations. I support a stronger UN with the authority to resolve disputes among disagreeing countries. 

I reiterate: I don't like war. But what I like even less are hypocrites who look for any excuse to declare that President Obama is evil personified, the anti-Christ president, all under the pretext of being appalled at his exercise of the same powers as every commander-in-chief that has preceded him. Such hypocrites aren't anti-war; they're anti-Obama. They are so shallow that they cannot bring themselves to confront their own animus toward his position as President of the United States. They get hyperactive about his use of military force as if he invented the concept. Frankly, I have more respect for the blatant racists who don't hide their beliefs. At least they're honest and I know not to waste my time on attempting to communicate with them.

As for Joshua Black, he's seeking his 15 minutes of fame. Let's hope that his moment in the spotlight is over.

Wisconsin hates workers

Thanks to Sheria for calling my attention to this one.  I've long been amused at conservatives who insist we should all get our health insurance from employers so that we lose it when we need it most, but the laugh is that these folks are the descendants of the head bashers who fought the labor movement of the last century to protect employers from having to provide any benefits at all, such as paid vacations, sick days and of course a 5 or 6 day work week.  The reason they'd prefer employer based insurance only is that it's the gateway to no insurance at all.

Of course I use the word "amusement" cynically. It seems that not only should employees not be allowed to ask "please sir may I have some more" without being thrown out in the snow, Wisconsin Republicans, Bibles in hand, think there should be no rest on the seventh day, except for Congressmen, of course.

You see, Wisconsin workers really want to work more days to make more money say Sen. Glenn Grothman of West Bend and Mark Born of Beaver Dam.  I mean, this is the land of opportunity, right?   And what's more productive of opportunity than to reduce the men, women and children of  the Dairy State to abject serfdom so these useless parasitic slugs may receive knighthoods from the lords of industry?  I mean when you're at the bottom, any direction is up. We're putting Americans on an upward path!

Are we at the point where Republican Freedom is indistinguishable from Feudalism, where Freedom is indistinguishable from Slavery?  Are we listening to people who don't believe in human rights, decency or civic responsibility -- to people who think do as you're told should be the law?

Why is America so clueless?

Bloody revenge

"Oh, my God," said Amber McGuire as she watched her father die, strapped to a table like a sacrificial victim snorting and  gasping for air for almost 25 minutes. Dennis McGuire was guilty of  the rape and murder of a pregnant woman, there's no doubt about it.  The only doubts, and there are quite a few, is whether killing him was so urgent a matter to the State of Ohio that they had to use a new method, yet untried and without any particular regard to the chances of yet another, screwed up execution or should I say, state murder.

No pig or other animal was harmed in this experiment, only a human. Since the manufacturer of the three-drug killing machine drugs refuses to sell to executioners and Doctors refuse to administer far more humane injections, it's left to the kind of loathsome creeps that manage executions to choose how to kill people and besides, as Assistant Ohio Attorney General Thomas Madden said over the objection of McGuire's lawyers that while the U.S. Constitution bans cruel and unusual punishment, "you're not entitled to a pain-free execution." Not any more than you're entitled to humane imprisonment, entitled to be protected against unwarranted search and seizure or due process these days. And apparently we like it that way. We won't give it up. We won't stop finding lame excuses for doing it.  Unusual?  Sad to say, no. Cruel?  Well not if you're angry enough 

I have no idea whether the electric chair produces severe pain.  I suspect that in some cases it does and of course it's so gruesome to observers that the very first time it was tried, the witnesses fled the scene sobbing and vomiting, but that was then. This is now.  We are a far more hard hearted country, or at least the negative pole of our polarized country is. Read any news report that allows public commentary, watch Anderson Cooper with the viewer comments crawl and you skin may begin to crawl at the bloodthirsty rage of Americans.  It's as though we were still the land of barbaric public executions cheered on by the drooling bloodthirsty multitudes.  America treasures it's rage.  I'm sick at listening to people so in love with killing that any chance for doing it legally is a necrodesiac. They want death, they want it NOW and they want it as gruesome as those effeminate, whining, WWJD bleeding heart liberals will let it be.   Mad dogs are treated with far more compassion that mad humans in Ohio. A simple injection and the dog drifts painlessly away. 

So when the family of McGuire's victim says they have forgiven them but he still has to pay, I once again have to give up on Homo Americanus. Payment after all is not punishment. the offended party is not reimbursed nor made whole and the dead remain dead no matter what you do to the man, strapped helplessly to a cross, arms spread wide for the nasty accomplices to pump him full of agony.  While America smiles at the divine bookkeeping entry.  One family feels better, another has to live with having sat by and watched the state of Ohio kill her father. Surely that makes God smile in approval, seeing his books balanced.

Only a few countries execute people.  We're taught to see those countries as barbaric tyrannies.  Statistics don't show any preventative value, we do it because we can and because it's a chance to indulge our blood lust without guilt and so may of those who try to tell us this is a Christian Nation are firm supporters of killing people in cold blood.

I've never been closer to simply getting on a boat and sailing away

State-Sanctioned Child Abuse in the Rotten State of Florida

“The head of Florida's juvenile justice department defended her agency's oversight of private prison contractors before a state Senate panel on Wednesday amid allegations of violence and mistreatment inside the nation's third-largest juvenile corrections system.”

Having tracked this story for months, the self-serving statements, denials, and cover-ups of Wansley Walters, Secretary of Florida’s Division of Juvenile Justice, offends me to the core.  The story begins with one James F. Slattery, the CEO of Youth Services International, a private, profit-driven prison enterprise that has run afoul of authorities in Florida, New York, Maryland, Nevada and Texas.  Here are the facts in a nutshell, Private Prison Empire Rises Despite Record Of Juvenile Abuse and Lax Oversight Enables Systemic Abuse At Private Youth Prisons:

• Over 40,000 boys and girls in 16 states have been incarcerated in Slattery’s prisons, boot camps, and detention centers;
• An 18-year old inmate in one of Slattery’s boot camps came down with pneumonia and pleaded to see a doctor.  Accused of faking it, the teen was forced to do pushups in his own vomit until he died - after nine days of medical neglect.
• A boy was forced to give oral sex to a male guard on three different occasions.  First reported on March 2010, a Pembroke Pines police officer noted six months later: “This is the third time this victim has alleged sexual abuse.”
• Slattery’s company failed to disclose reports of beatings, broken noses and broken bones, extreme negligence, slapping and choking, unsanitary food (such as maggots in undercooked chicken served bloody and raw), and outright assaults against teen inmates;
• Slattery’s company had the highest rate of sexual assault in Florida and the highest rate in the nation;
• Slattery hires inexperienced and untrained personnel who are paid wages below the poverty level;
• Monitors from the state found that Slattery’s prisons were holding youth past their scheduled release dates in an effort to generate more revenue — a serious violation of Florida law and Slattery’s contract with the state;
• Slattery exploits lax oversight, pulls out of contracts BEFORE the state investigates alleged abuses, and leans on powerful allies within the government to keep contracts and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue flowing;
• Slattery has donated more than $276,000 to the Florida State Republican Party and paid more than $400,000 to state politicians, including Senate President Harry Haridopolos, an avid supporter of private prisons, who received $15,000.

A 2010 lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to one of Slattery’s prisons as a “frightening and violent place” where: “Children are choked and slammed head first into concrete walls, their arms and fingers bent back and twisted to inflict pain for infractions as minor as failing to follow an order to stand up,” the lawsuit states. Slattery settled the lawsuit in 2011; the terms remain confidential.

“It’s everything that’s wrong with politics rolled up in a package,” said Evan Jenne, a former Florida state representative who toured one of Slattery’s facilities after public defenders raised concerns. “You’re talking about society failing children. It’s politically motivated, and it’s money-motivated.”

Florida has an especially notorious record of incarcerating youth under hellish conditions dating back to the turn of the century.  In the early 1980s, lawyers with the ACLU investigated reports of horrendous conditions and mistreatment inside three “training schools” for juvenile delinquents. One institution on the Florida panhandle, The Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, had gained a reputation for extreme brutality: Forensic anthropologists from the University of South Florida have identified an estimated 50 unmarked graves on the grounds of the closed facility.

In December 2011, the state closed Dozier, citing budget cuts.  On January 4, 2012, Florida Governor Rick Scott issued this reply to the United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, stating:

“We respectfully, but firmly disagree with the unsupported suggestion that the issues identified … are systemic throughout the DJJ.  The issues investigated by your office were confined to the closed facility, and do not constitute a sufficient, sound or fair basis for concluding that an entire state agency and its employees are failing to properly administer the juvenile justice system in Florida.

This officious denial from the felonious Governor Rick Scott mirrors the bogus claim of Wansley Walters, who states:  "We are looking at every level of our system to make it a system that will be healthy for the children that we serve," she said.

If these abuses and self-serving denials - past, present, and ongoing - offend you, wait for Part Two of this post:  State-Sanctioned Slave Labor in the Rotten State of Florida.

Holy, Holy, Holy

I just knew that bearded duck-calling dipshit would come out of this a hero.  You can still smell the stink of the phoney outrage about his getting suspended for review for a few days, but as of yesterday there was a big new display of Duck Dynasty crap at the Winn-Dixie and today Fat Matt Barber of the Far Right radio station Liberty Counsel is scheduled to air his encomium to the hero who stood up to the bullies. Bullies, of course being the "gaystapo" and his employers who pay him to jape and mug and act like the stereotypical redneck with money.

Funny though, isn't it, that when any other employee stands up to an employer who doesn't pay enough or provide safe working conditions and decent benefits -- that's Communism. Hypocrisy?  Hell no, it's the national disease. It's the national sickness.  It's the death of freedom, Democracy and human decency: it's Christian fundamentalism and it's being preached all over the land every day of the week.

But no, says the pious patriot. Ol' Phil stood there on "principle" and spoke with "love" against the "tyranny of the minority" and after all what's more tyrannical than asking for dignity and  equal protection under the law?  What's more loving than slander, insult and condemnation?  No, submitting to common decency and the law of the United States would be like "negotiating with Terrorists"  Like submitting to "Homofascism."

“This tyranny of the minority has been taking place for too long now and Americans, when they stand up, when the double down and say ‘no, I’m not going to waiver from biblical truth on matters of human sexuality, it’s like okay, what are you going to do now? Nothing. They go away and lick their wounds.”

Or so he wishes.  If he's right, America has no future.  The rest of the world will have to destroy us for their own good and safety.  If he's wrong there will be a long line waiting to piss on his grave.

I see it as a opportunity - or should I say another opportunity for decent people to shout him down from every pulpit in the land, an opportunity I'm dead certain will be missed, passed over in favor of defensive mumbling, disclaimers and smug piety.  It's not enough to say we had nothing to do with this.  It's barely enough to go out in the street next Sunday -- by the thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. It's barely enough to take responsibility for centuries of looking the other way at best and participating at worst. It's your original sin. Stand up and tell these subversives, tyrants and Biblical blowhards they're wrong, they're enemies of freedom and not patriots. Stand up and deal with it before it deals with you.

Mischief and Punishment

We hear of cases like this too often and the only thing that distinguishes this one from most in my mind is that it's from Canada, a country that I somehow am inclined to see as more rational, less hysterical than the United States. Perhaps I'm wrong, but if  a 16 year old girl sends 'explicit' JPEGs of her 17 year old boyfriend's ex-girlfriend to a few of her acquaintances via cell phone it isn't the kind of "child pornography" we pass draconian laws to suppress. It's perhaps more of an example of adolescent lack of control and the kind of hurt that young people are likely to feel at rejection. 

Canadian courts have none the less found her guilty of distributing child pornography and she is awaiting sentencing.  Somehow I agree with her attorney that although the deed was inappropriate and perhaps actionable in some way, the kid isn't a "child pornographer" and that the laws in Canada and the US weren't designed to punish such childish acts with huge prison sentences.

Is there really a "law" of unintended consequences?  I have no idea, but there's a strong tendency to write bad law in proportion to the ire of the zealots and activists that draft them.  There's a strong connection between "zero tolerance" for misdeeds and zero forethought.  There's a strong tendency to force events into the scenarios provided by our own fears and loathings and anger and it applies not only to failing to discriminate between people who prey on children and children doing childish things. The six year old who plants a kiss on another six year old isn't a rapist and doesn't deserve to be branded as one.  The 12 year old who takes a picture of  herself, of another kid isn't a pornographer and deserving of our pious rage and punishment.

Perhaps sometimes our own best motivations make us blind, stupid, pompous and inhuman.

Talking to The Man

Every so often, I like to send little notes to the members of Congress in my state. (Sometimes I'll send them to Congresscritters in other states, too. But let's not talk about that.) Mostly, this just gets me on mailing lists and doesn't do much else. But I'm an optimist by nature, so I keep trying.

This time, I thought I'd wander over to the "contact Tom" button on Senator Tom Udall's (D-NM) site.

Tom,

(Can I call you Tom? As much as you've emailed me, I feel I should be allowed to.)

I couldn't help noticing that a number of Democrats are caving in to the Republican talking point that any extension of unemployment benefits should be "paid for."

Well, if that's the case, how are we paying for all of the corporate subsidies that my tax dollars are going to? Gas and oil companies get massive subsidies every year, and none of them are struggling. But families in your state are.

What about the $1.1 billion we pay out to distillers every ten years, to allow them to produce flavored vodka? (That one's covered in Section 5010 of the tax code, if you're wondering.) What about the $80 million worth of sugar we bought back from domestic sugar producers (a $3.3 billion dollar industry)?

See if you can "pay for" the unemployment by reducing the subsidy to any industry that's consistently turned a profit in the last decade. This wouldn't even be a hard sell. You could point out that the majority of unemployment insurance goes to families with children, and you personally don't see the benefits to the country that comes from forcing children to starve.

You could point out that long-term unemployment hurts the economy, and while there are people who would like to see the US economy destroyed, none of them should be in Congress.

You can even finish with "And if extending unemployment benefits is such a distasteful subject, I would like to ask why our Republican colleagues have been blocking every effort to create any type of jobs bill for the past six years?"

Give it a shot, Senator. See how far it could take you.

As always, I doubt it will accomplish anything, but let's see what happens.

Dark matters

I've always been uncomfortable with the term "Dark Matter."  Whatever the phenomenon behind unexplained gravitational forces might be, leakage from an alternate universe or MOND or TeVeS we're only guessing what it is from the observable world where mass has gravity.  Yes, it's presumptuous of me to talk about things so far over my head (pun partially intended) but when I heard  Neal DeGrasse Tyson explain to Bill Moyers that the existence of such invisible "stuff" was only suggested by habit I was impressed, as I usually am when someone otherwise impressive agrees with my muddy observations.  “What it truly is is dark gravity. Boom,”  Sounds right to me and right to the point. We see what we're primed by habit to see. Obviously a genius.

I have to like the guy and although some astrophysicists seem to have fled out into the cosmos  to escape the rest of us and others dislike scientists who make the effort to share their enthusiasm for science with the world, seeing that as an effort to sell ideas without peer review, I don't think his regard and his enthusiasm for public understanding of what's going on at the frontier of knowledge is a fault. I'm looking forward to the rest of his series  The New Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

I have to like the guy even more after reading this excerpt from his new autobiography: The Sky is not the Limit

"When combined with the dozens of times I have been stopped and questioned by the police for going to and from my office after hours, and the hundreds of times I am followed by security guards in department stores, and the countless times people cross the street upon seeing me approach them on the sidewalk, I can summarize my life’s path by noting the following: in the perception of society, my athletic talents are genetic; I am a likely mugger-rapist; my academic failures are expected; and my academic successes are attributed to others."

If that doesn't resonate with you somehow, perhaps only that alternate universe hypothesis can explain it.  Dr. Tyson is an exceptional man and not only for being able to do the math that stumps a brain such as most of us have, but for succeeding at doing what society has constantly told him he couldn't, shouldn't and wasn't suited to do.  An example for the young, certainly, but more deliciously a slap in the face for smug, condescending attitudes from those who think they know something important about you by referring to a stereotype.