FIRST DRAFT

A Poor Neighborhood is Not For You

Via Jeff on Facebook, sweet baby Jesus: 

Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard.

“Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?” she teased a couple from Paris.

As the bus idled across from historic St. Ann’s Episcopalian Church, Battaglia launched into a description of the crime, poverty and violence that plagued the South Bronx during the 1970s recession.

As she spoke, a line of two dozen poor people — including one man visibly agitated by the onlookers — waited for handouts from the church pantry.

“I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it,” Battaglia told the tourists. “We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.”

The bus stopped in front of St. Mary’s Park, where she credited Mayor Rudy Giuliani for curbing crime.

“If it were 1980 and you said to me, ‘Lynn, I want to die.’ My answer would be, ‘You’re in the right neighborhood,’ ” she said.

Chicago does some of these types of things too, true-crime tours and mob-themed tours and things, and it's always gross, but not quite as gross as making people's poverty your fucking theme park. Do all your proceeds, and not profits, I mean proceeds, go to helping this neighborhood? No? Then how dare you use it as your set piece? Even then, how dare you? THEY LIVE THERE. This is their HOME. If it seems so horrible to you, if it seems so unsafe and scandalous and you're being so very daring, think about how it must be to be there, all the time. 

("They should move then." I can hear it now from Smuggy McPublican. Bitchass, not everybody sees problems where you do, and also, abandoning your parents' and grandparents' homes is hard, even if you do have the means. All things being equal, moving is fucking expensive. Even if you and a few friends and a case of Bud Light do it, moving is expensive. Do YOU have the equivalent of first and last month's market-rate yuppie-ville rent plus security deposit on you at all times, and a job from which you can take time off to look for a new place without losing more money? If not, STFU.)  

This goes back to the whole "I can't go there without a sidearm" kind of thing I was talking about before, where you assume people who don't live in your neighborhood aren't real. They don't, say, get up and go to work or come home and sit on their porch reading or listening to the game. They don't love their children or drive through the hamburger place or check books out of the library or get their hair cut or drink coffee. They think violence is normal and gang affiliation is awesome and everybody be slingin' tonight. Their ways are strange to us all. I mean, God Almighty: 

“I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it,” Battaglia told the tourists. “We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.”

GO ASK JESUS HOW HARD IS THIS SHIT. Go over to the strange "natives" and ask what's up. Nine times out of 10, someone will tell you, gladly. This is America, almost everybody speaks enough English to satisfy your curiosity about almost anything at all, and even those that don't will find you somebody who does or get by with hand gestures, because 90 percent of people are basically decent and want to help your clueless ass so long as it doesn't unduly interfere with their days. 

I am all for visiting everywhere in a place when you visit it. And I know that sometimes that can be a knife-edge of difference between looking and gawking, and I'm absolutely sure I've come down on the wrong side of it in my life. But there are about a hundred miles between going to see a place you are curious about, and making a buck alienating human beings from one another. This company is gross. 

A. 

NOLA Notes: Stupid and senseless

Every time I'm offline for a day, all hell breaks loose somewhere. Today it was in New Orleans. There was a second line parade in honor of Mother's Day. As you may have noticed, we love our parades. 

During the parade something very stupid and very senseless happened: shots were fired and 19 were wounded, one of whom is an acquaintance of mine, Deborah Cotton aka Big Red Cotton. Deb is a transplant from LA who has been a tireless booster of New Orleans brass band and street culture. In fact, she recently launched a web site, New Orleans Good, Good about all the things she loves about our city and its culture. Today something bad, bad, happened to her. She is apparently in stable condition and is expected to pull through, but all I can say is this: sheee-it.

Lots of people are mounting their soap boxes about this incident, some are ranting while others are trying to make sense of it. Ranting may be in order, but there's no way to make sense of something this random, stupid and senseless. It will not surprise me one bit if our Mayor and Police Chief try to blame the second line itself for the violence. They've done it before and Deb Cotton has written about that in the past, so I'll let her have the last word:

In response to shootings that occurred at second lines in '06, Superintendent Riley raised social aid and pleasure club parade permits to six times their pre-storm amount of $1,200, a fee hike that was not applied to White Mardi Gras clubs even though similar incidences of shooting have occured during their parades such as the Muses parade in ’04, the Bacchus parade in ’07, and the Krewe of Crescent City parade in ’09. The ACLU fought and won several cases on behalf of the Social Aid and Pleasure Club Task Force and parade permits for the SAPCs were eventually reduced to $1,985.

The Fox news article is not an isolated incident of a bias reporter getting it wrong. The local mainstream media in New Orleans has a long history of racial bias against the Black community in general and second line culture in specific. One would think that weekly parades which tie up traffic in large swatches of the city for four hours at a time would at the very least merit local media announcements of parade routes and times. With the exception of this blog, which I published on Nola.com before migrating it here to Gambit online, the local media by and large ignores social aid and pleasure club culture - except in instances when it attempts to equate second line parades with lawlessness. In a city that has a majority Black population, it begs the question of motivation behind the press’ wholesale omission in coverage of a century old African American tradition that hosts annual half day parades every Sunday for nine months out of the year. The fact that these events rarely get positive coverage in the mainstream media is consistent with the attitude of neglect and ostracism that catalyzed these benevolent societies back in the 19th century with their mission of providing assistance and resources to the Black community during segregation.

You get six carrots, a bag of celery and a potato because we said so

For a party that has always said that they didn’t want the government sticking its nose into people’s lives, Republicans in this state have no problem sticking their noses in people’s refrigerators

But only if those people are on the government teat.

Rep. Dean Kaufert of Neenah has proposed a bill that would create a “tiered buying” system for food. In his bill, which passed out of committee earlier this week, only one-third of the money could be spent on what he deems to be “junk food.” The rest of the money should be spent on good, wholesome food like milk and bread.

Kaufert’s rationale behind the bill is as follows:

Kaufert told members of the State Affairs Committee he often heard complaints that food stamp users were buying large volumes of chips and soda. He said he simply wants people to use their benefits to eat healthier.

“I don’t want to ban Nachos or Doritos from anyone’s grandson because my grandson eats it,” Kaufert said. “But the fact is, reasonable limitation is not asking for too much.” 

 

In other words, “I didn’t bother to check with anyone at the WIC office, any state agency that monitors this, any health officials who assess the health quality of these allegedly unhealthy foods or anything else. However, I have ‘often heard complaints,’ which means at least one and it probably was someone was also anecdotally pissing and moaning about this person owning a cell phone while being on WIC as well.”

Kaufert’s argument is the same argument we’ve been having for years. We had the whole “welfare queen” argument for years, in which people were appalled at how these damned poor people were using their government assistance to buy extravagant foods like steak and lobster. Now, we’re having the same outrage at them buying cheap shit.

The reason? You’re poor and I’m not. I’m paying for your fucking Doritos so I get some sort of say.

Notice that Kaufert made some lame attempt to throw himself into the whole processed foods argument by doing the, “Hey, I have a grandkid. He likes Doritos. We’re on the same page.” However, Kaufert didn’t say, “What I really need is a government agency making sure that he’s not subsisting on Doritos.”

The “reasonable limitations” are only there because a) we’re fucking paying for your Doritos and b) there’s an underlying assumption that if you’re poor enough to be on food stamps you’re too stupid to buy anything but Doritos. Kaufert, being gainfully employed by the state and able to wear a suit and tie to work, obviously doesn’t need oversight when it comes to the health of his children and grandchildren. (Hey, wait! My tax dollars are paying for you DEAN! I should get some say in what you eat!)

As for you poor bastards, you’re lucky he’s not assigning a special-needs aide to walk you to the store as well so you don’t hurt yourself on the way.

Before he gets all happy about this whole “I’m just like Michelle Obama because I want you to eat better,” Kaufert also might want to take a look at the food industry he’s touting. Pulitzer-prize winner Michael Moss took a peek at what really makes it on to our dinner table in his book “Salt, Sugar, Fat” and if Kaufert had read it, he’d know every “natural” food is not created equal:

“Take milk, for instance. Through the 1960s, sales of milk plunged as it bore the brunt of public concerns about fat, both in terms of its calories and its links to heart disease. At the same time, the dairy industry figured out a way to soften this blow to their business by putting the phrases “low-fat” and “2 percent” on milk… The popularity of this defatted milk grew so fast that it now outsells all other types of milk, including skim, which has no fat at all. But there is a marketing scheme at work in this: The “2 percent” labeling may lead you to believe that 98 percent of the fat is removed, but in truth, the fat content of whole milk is only a tad higher at 3 percent.”

In looking at bread, Moss wrote that it contains not-so-good levels of salt, sugar and fat in order to improve “mouthfeel” and taste. In various experiments, Moss was allowed to taste bread that lacked one or more of these key elements. At best, he reported that the bread tasted like tin and felt like it rotted away in his mouth. Meat? Don’t even get me started on the issues pertaining to “pink slime” and Moss’ look at the way in which meat will kill you.

So much for those great “food staples of healthy eating.”

Look, I understand that we should all eat better. I’m just as bad at this as anyone else. The difference is that the state trusts me to make my own stupid decisions as to how much Diet Coke I mainline or when I can or can’t buy a piece of veal. If the only reason I’m able to make these choices is because I’m lucky enough to not have to take government assistance, that says a lot as to how we view our fellow citizens.

I Have Personally Touched Gays So I Can Call Them Sinners

This Broussard guy:

I’m saying all that to say that if I can play basketball with a homosexual, just about anyone can.

I’ve played in several rec leagues with LZ Granderson, who is an openly gay writer at ESPN The Magazine.

I consider LZ a friend. I’ve gone out to lunch with him, talked music, sports, politics and lots of other things with him. I greet him with a handshake and a hug, just like I greet lots of other guys.

By the way, LZ can ball. In a league in New York City that features several former college players, we both made the All-Star team. He was kind of like our Shawn Marion minus the dunks (though he claims he can still slam!) and I was like our Gilbert Arenas (high game of 39, thank you).

Anyway, when we play in our rec league games, I give him high fives and hugs. Same with one of his friends who is on the team and also gay.

SEE! I touched them! The openly gays! I touched them with my hands! Hugged them! Our pecs touched. Our nipples engaged one another's. I felt his well-developed shoulders and the warmth of his skin on mine. This tactile experience did not magically make me not a tool and a douchebag, which proves that in America opinions are not transmitted by skin-to-skin contact, and that proves that it's okay that I think being gay is a sin. My friends dig it when I hug them, and am honest with them about how they're going to hell! It's all good. 

I'm asking: Has there ever been a column by The Gay Friends saying "I have bigot friends, and we agree to disagree because that's America, man?" Because I feel like until we start reading that all the time, even the most loving encounters get rendered into this thing where somebody is emotional scenery for My Journey To Enlightenment, Or Not, In This Specific Case. I mean, so long as The Gay Friends are good with their asshole pals, who am I to interfere, but we never hear from The Gays Some Bro Does Not Mind Touching, and I feel like that's on purpose. 

This whole thing is goddamn stupid. I can tell you all about Gay Fellows I Have Cuddled or Girls I Have Kissed While Watching Firefly Together or what have you, but if I get up in the morning and I talk about how I don't think they deserve the same rights as anyone else under the law, if I say that in my considered opinion they are not as glorious to God as any other human being, how does my once having held a lesbian's hand excuse those opinions? How does it affect them at all, come to think of it? I'm a bigot because I hold bigoted opinions, not because I have or lack proximity to homosexuals. 

I think a lot of the problem is that we, straight people we, have come to define homophobia, bigotry, as the Worst Case Scenario. As the Westboro Baptist Church, and as long as you don't rise to that level you're okay. As long as you don't stand outside your gay neighbor's house with a FAG SIN poster, you're not "homophobic," so you can't be doing or saying anything objectionable or wrong. As if this stuff isn't all about degrees, and about recognizing when something's not about you. 

As if all this is, all anything is, is a chance to show off your private stable of beliefs and then declare on behalf of those affected by them that everything is cool, because as you walked off the basketball court you said, "Good game," and you looked them right in their very gay eyeballs when you did it. 

A. 

Stop Having Asses, Girls, They are Distracting

Ugh, this again: 

You'll have to pardon me for thinking here (after all, I'm just a girl, what do I know?), but wouldn't it be a whole lot easier to sit the boys down for a talk and tell them to cool it? Not only would it save the parents of every girl in the district from having to revamp their kids' wardrobes, but it would prepare the boys for what will happen when they walk out into a dress code-free world where women walk around flaunting bare ankles and even, gulp, showing their knees!

I don't have a son; I have a daughter. In my house, she's being taught to wear clothing that makes her feel comfortable and is "classy," but that's as far as we will go. We aren't going to teach her that she needs to change herself to keep boys in line because, frankly, that's not her job.

Granted, I think skinny jeans are hell inventions, but that's just because I'm OLD AS FUCK, and cannot wear them. Are we done with this trend yet? I mean, can we please? This trend, and the 5-inch platforms, and the way every fucking dress lacks sleeves? IT'S COLD OUT EIGHT MONTHS OF THE YEAR I NEED SLEEVES.

(I'm not saying girls should cover up, I'm saying I want to cover up, and find it difficult because we are in a short, tight, slutty place in fashion right now and when you're poking 40 with as short a stick as I am it's either boobs OR legs, not both.)

But it is not in any way my job to wear anything so as to make men behave a certain way. Men are going to behave the way they're going to behave. My wearing a burkha isn't going to make somebody who's about to be a creep stop creeping. Instead of putting your daughters in convents maybe teach your sons that girls are people. 

A. 

'Stop Hitting Them, Maybe'

These people aren't ideological right-wingers so much as they're ideological bullies, and their only real loyalty is to whoever is kicking the kid who's already down: 

"He's very intense," Hannity said in a segment with conservative commentator Michelle Malkin. "And I'm watching this, and I'm thinking, alright, I don't like it. He kicked one player there. But on the other hand, you now what, I kind of like old-fashioned discipline, on the other hand. I mean, have we become that politically incorrect? These are adults. They don't want to play for that team, they can leave."

Malkin seemed to agree, saying that "sports is a rough world."

Hannity added that Rice was trying to discipline the players and draw out the team's best performance. 

"But I can understand, stop hitting them, maybe," Hannity said. "But I like the intensity, I like the drive. I like that he's pushing those kids and that he runs a tight ship. Maybe, maybe we need a little more discipline in society, and maybe we don't have to be a bunch of wimps for the rest of our lives. My father hit me with a belt, I turned out okay. Except for the minds of liberals."

Actually, you didn't turn out okay. You turned out somebody who needs to belittle the abuse of others in order to feel better about your own experience. You turned out somebody who worships power and authority and brutality, and who has spent the past decade enthusiastically leg-humping war criminals because standing next to them made you feel a little less like the kid who got whipped with a belt. 

A. 

For What It's Worth

TPM ran a swell piece about the cover art of the NRA's house organ (LaPierre is their swinging dick) America's 1st Freedom. They were all pretty inflammatory from a lefty-commie-pinko-hippie-peacenik perspective but this one is my favorite:

The New Black Panthers are coming to mau-mau your ass everyone. Btw, this qualifies as subtle from the NRA's perspective. That black gloved fist is gonna grab your gun and we all know who's wearing it, the Kenyan Marxist dude.

This cover was published right before the election, and before Obama came out of the closet on gun control. He hadn't done much gun grabbing up until then but truth and the NRA aren't on speaking terms. However, paranoia and the gun lobby are old pals. I believe they hang out together at shooting ranges, throw back some brewskis (Coors probably) and fire at pictures of Rachel Maddow, Dianne Feinstein and Eric Holder.

The culture and political wars of the Sixties may be diminishing but they're still being waged as long as LaPierre and his henchmen have any say in it. They haven't noticed that they've lost on cultural issues since they have a stranglehold on Congress gun control-wise or is that a gun pointed at its head? You decide.

The post title is, of course, pinched from the classic Stephen Stills song. It's one of those Sixties songs that has aged very well indeed, and it still applies to our current situation in a way that most hippie dippy anthems do not. Paranoia still strikes deep:

  

'Facts Derived from Several Studies'

Apparently gay people have been on a citywide killing spree: 

Republican national committeeman Dave Agema's post Wednesday, during U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments on same-sex marriage, was based on an online article titled, "Everyone Should Know These Statistics on Homosexuals," which appeared under the byline Frank Joseph, M.D.

The post depicts gay people as sexually promiscuous, rife with sexually transmitted diseases and responsible for "half the murders in large cities." It cites 30-year-old studies for some of its statistics and sources such as the Congressional Record and special-interest groups for others.

[snip]

Agema of Grandville, a former state lawmaker who was elected to the Republican National Committee in May, responded Wednesday to criticism of the post by saying: "It's not hate. It's facts derived from several studies. The trouble is many don't like facts."

Yes. The gay serial killer menace, that's just a fact we don't like to face. Gangs of marauding gay people, doing things like setting up house together so they can share the freezer space for their human heads. 

And let's grant the ridiculous premise that gay people are full of diseases that are sexually transmitted. So long as you are not sleeping with them, it would then follow that you're not going to catch those diseases, right? I mean, unless you're concerned that your anonymous airport glory hole action is going to have actual consequences, in which case, try praying the gay away one more time. I'm sure it'll work one of these days. 

What else is in this pile of crap?

Homosexuals aren't discriminated against in employment, so why should they be a protected class?

• The average yearly income of a homosexual is $55,430.00 (most of which is disposable because no children to take care of!). The average of the general population is $32,144.00. The average of blacks is $12,166.00

Some gay people are relatively rich, so there is no employment discrimination! Whoo! Bam bam, next case. 

Everything else is just as fact-free, most of the "studies" dating back to 1980 or before or attributed to such upstanding organizations as the Family Research Center. I think this is my favorite bit, though: 

Any of you, who have children in public schools, it would behoove you to print out the following and mail it to the principal of your child's school, with a little note stating: 

I don't know if the students at (name of school) are being indoctrinated that homosexuality is just another normal alternative lifestyle. If you have been, then you should print out the following and have it passed out to your students, as the truth must be told in order to preserve their health and avoid cutting off about 15-20 years of their life span. 

If the authorities give you a hard time, I would take my child out of that school and put him/her in a private school, and if you cannot afford it, I would homeschool him/her. And you can tell that to the principal. 

Or, you can wait until one day, your child comes home and says, "Mom, I think I'm homosexual." 

A. 

Traditional Procreative Concept

Start breeding or get divorced, ladies: 

Attorney Charles Cooper, the former Reagan administration official arguing in support of Proposition 8, stressed that recognizing same-sex marriages would “sever (marriage’s) abiding connection with its traditional procreative context.”

In turn, Justice Elena Kagan countered with the example of elderly couples and others who marry, despite being past child-rearing age.

“There are lots of people that get married that can’t have children,” Breyer added.

Yeah, but they're not REAL families. They're not families with 2.5 kids and a dog and a white picket fence. They're not families with soccer practices and PTA meetings. They're not really married, not really really. Not like real married couples are, browsing the baby aisle at Target, dreaming of the nursery. Those are the real families. These people are just second-class. 

I can't tell you how many times I was asked, early in my marriage, when Mr. A and I were going to "start a family." I can't tell you how many times it's been implied, usually by relatves or co-workers with kids, that they had a life that somehow carried more weight because they "had families." I can't tell you how often we were treated like we had no responsibilities at all, like we had nobody we cared about or were obligated to, because we didn't have children. Because the implication was that we two, we were not a family. Our friends, our pets, our house, our jobs, that wasn't a family. 

(Could have fooled me, come birthdays. Wasn't the second cousins who showed up for those, thanks.) 

I can't imagine the extra level of horror attached if people then went on to imply we weren't even a COUPLE. Assholes. 

 A. 

North Dakota’s Anti-Woman Dystopian Horror Show

Yo, North Dakota. You’ve got a problem. A big one.

You’re a state full of bohunk, testosterone-fueled oil workers desperate for some female companionship. And your state legislature is treating women like slaves. Like objects. So, how's that working for you, North Dakota? Let's discuss.

First of all, two bills banning abortion await the Governor of North Dakota’s signature today [UPDATE: they were signed into law by the governor today]. One bans abortion for all fetal abnormalities....

.... such as anencephaly in which parts of the brain and skull don’t form, or Tay-Sachs disease, a degenerative condition that paralyzes babies and typically prevents them from reaching their third birthday ....

Oh, “torture the mother” legislation! Awesome.

Can you imagine being in this situation? Of learning you’re pregnant, maybe you’re really excited about it, maybe you and your husband are picking out the crib, and then you get the devastating news that there’s something horribly, terribly wrong? That the fetus has a neural tube defect that guarantees it will die within hours of its birth -- if it comes to term in the first place? And the state is forcing you to live with this horror for nine months and go through childbirth and all? Because this is the government's business? Not your family's private business?

I would not want to be a woman in North Dakota facing that situation. What a heart-breaker. By the way, this isn’t some hypothetical. The Centers for Disease Control estimates anencephaly affects one out of every 4,859 births a year in the U.S.  

The other bill facing the governor’s desk bans abortion after six weeks, which is well before many women even know they’re pregnant in the first place. So I guess that means all women who don’t want to be mothers need to make an abortion appointment at Planned Parenthood every single time they have sex because, you never know!

Alternately, women in North Dakota could just not have sex. How’d that work for you guys? Apparently not too well: North Dakota is in the midst of an oil boom, which has brought thousands of job-hungry men to do manly things like toting that barge and lifting that bale, and the guys are verrrry lonely:  

At work, at housing camps and in bars and restaurants, men have been left to mingle with their own. High heels and skirts are as rare around here as veggie burgers. Some men liken the environment to the military or prison.

“It’s bad, dude,” said Jon Kenworthy, 22, who moved to Williston from Indiana in early December. “I was talking to my buddy here. I told him I was going to import from Indiana because there’s nothing here.”

This would be cute if it weren't so dangerous. Women literally cannot leave the house without being harassed, hounded, and threatened. I'd say if anyone wants to know what it's like for women under the Taliban, take a little trip to North Dakota:

Many said they felt unsafe. Several said they could not even shop at the local Walmart without men following them through the store. Girls’ night out usually becomes an exercise in fending off obnoxious, overzealous suitors who often flaunt their newfound wealth.

“So many people look at you like you’re a piece of meat,” said Megan Dye, 28, a nearly lifelong Williston resident. “It’s disgusting. It’s gross.”

Prosecutors and the police note an increase in crimes against women, including domestic and sexual assaults.

[...]

Some men have forced themselves on women. Jessica Brightbill, a single 24-year-old who moved here from Grand Rapids, Mich., a year and a half ago, said she was walking to work at 3:30 in the afternoon when a car with two men suddenly pulled up behind her. One hopped out and grabbed her by her arms and began dragging her. She let her body go limp so she would be harder to drag. Eventually, a man in a truck pulled up and began yelling at the men and she got away, she said. The episode left her rattled.

Going out alone is now out of the question, and the friend she moved here with no longer has much time to spend with her because she has since found a boyfriend and had a baby. Ms. Brightbill said she has difficulty finding other young single women with the freedom to hang out. And, she said, finding good men does not come easy.

“It’s just people trying to have sex,” she said.

Is anyone surprised? I’m not. This is utterly, completely predictable, actually. You have a state where the residents treat women like meat, like objects, and -- shocker! -- you have state legislation that does likewise. If you don't think these two things aren't connected then you aren't paying attention to how the world works.

Look, it is completely, utterly predictable that the legislative dehumanization of women in North Dakota matches the actual dehumanization women there experience on a daily basis. One would think that when women are highly prized and rare, men would go out of their way to make them feel welcome. But that's not how it works. That's never been how it works. Back in the cave-man days it was a bonk on the head and drag her by the hair into the bushes. Sorta like Steubenville without the roofie.

Some things never change, amiright ladies?

I'd tell women to stay out of North Dakota but of course that isn't an option for everyone. And I'm really scared for women there. This is not a good situation. This stuff only changes when women demand it.

Make some damn noise, ladies. You're going to have to. Because a trip to Walmart shouldn't be seen as an invitation for harassment. Demand that you be treated with respect: legislatively and every other way, too. That's the only way anything changes.

Your Intent Does Not Matter

So fuck this jerk and his "intentions:"  

 Richmond walked over to the victim and personally addressed her.

"I would truly like to apologize to [girl's name], her family, and the community ... No pictures should have been sent around, let alone taken," Mays told the courtroom. Richmond stood up and walked across the courtroom to where the victim was sitting. "I would like to apologize to you [girl's name]. I had no intention to do anything like that," he said, before breaking down crying.

You had no INTENTION? How did she end up raped then? By accident? You slipped, tripped and WHOOPS RAPE? You think it happens by magic? It happens just the way it happened when you did it: A bunch of guys decide their bro status means they can do whatever the hell they want, and somebody with less power than them deserves whatever she gets. 

What you didn't intend to be was the guy on trial for this. You didn't intend to be America's Next Top Asshole, the bogeyman all the parents tell their daughters about, the reason we have these glasses that turn colors when people put drugs in them, and everything. You didn't intend to be going to jail. You didn't intend to get caught, probably, or called to account when you were. 

But GUESS WHAT? You act like this, and this is what happens to you. You are that guy. And it's worth you going to jail so that everybody else understands: Your intentions don't matter. You rape somebody, and your intention may be to not be a rapist, but that's exactly what you are. 

A. 

Tricky Dick's Treason

The most interesting political story of the week takes us back some 45 years and involves the most evil man ever elected President, Richard Milhous Nixon:

It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign. He therefore set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser. At a July meeting in Nixon's New York apartment, the South Vietnamese ambassador was told Chennault represented Nixon and spoke for the campaign. If any message needed to be passed to the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, it would come via Chennault. In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris - concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared. The Paris peace talks may have ended years earlier, if it had not been for Nixon's subterfuge.

Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal. So on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, Johnson learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out. He was also told why. The FBI had bugged the ambassador's phone and a transcripts of Anna Chennault's calls were sent to the White House. In one conversation she tells the ambassador to "just hang on through election". Johnson was told by Defence Secretary Clifford that the interference was illegal and threatened the chance for peace.

This story essentially *confirms* what has been known for 45 years, that the Nixon forces knowingly messed with the peace process and that LBJ and J Edgar Heehaw caught them in the act. I first read about the Chennault intervention in Teddy White's The Making Of The President, 1968. White, however, dismissed the idea that Nixon knew about this as being preposterous instead of what it really was: in character. White was so taken in by the so-called New Nixon that his 1972 book-the last in the series-was a paean to how much the Trickster had grown in office. White's reputation as a campaign chronicler and historian never recovered from Watergate, which is a pity: the first book in the series about 1960 is a bona fide classic.

What this story is *not* is either surprising or a revelation, which was how Rachel Maddow treated it on her teevee show this evening. I rarely find much to criticize in her reporting or analysis but history is not her strong suit. Plus, it's a better cable news story if you can be outraged or shocked by something that for Tricky Dick was just another day at the office.

We've had other Presidents who have lied and done terrible things but he's the one *purely* evil person to serve as the Oval One. In short, nothing that Richard Nixon did should ever shock anyone. When he had the power to destroy people, he enjoyed wielding it. The only one close to the Trickster as an evil doer was Dick Cheney. His putative boss was a dunce who was a mere naïf in contrast to Nixon even though he did every bit as much damage to the country during his misrule.

Back to the BBC story. It confirms what LBJ hinted at to many people before his death in 1972: he knew what Nixon was up to but he couldn't call him on it publicly. Why? The feebs had an illegal wiretap on the Vietnamese embassy. Moreover, LBJ was discredited in 1968 after having told too many whoppers about Vietnam to retain any credibility on that subject. Live by the lie, die by the lie. BUT unlike Nixon, Johnson was an incredibly complex man of great virtues along with great defects. At the risk of sounding like Howlin' Wolf, Nixon was just "evil. Evil is goin' on wrong."

It was significant that the man LBJ was speaking to on the recently released Tricky Dick treason tape was his mentor, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. There have been other Johnson-Russell tapes whereon they discussed their belief that Vietnam was unwinnable as early as 1964, before the big escalation. That was Johnson's original sin but he did try to stop the war on the Thursday before the 1968 election. This was another bit that good old Doc Maddow didn't get quite right. Johnson didn't announce "peace was at hand" in a speech that evening, he announced a bombing halt and that, "promising negotiations" with the North Vietnamese were about to resume. That's what Anna Chennault helped torpedo that night: a chance, not a certainty. I do, however, think it would have led to a deal: they were same terms that won Kissinger and Le Duc Tho the Nobel Peace Prize. The latter at least had the decency not to accept the prize. Kissinger, like his master, was shameless.

The one delicious piece of irony to this sordid tale is that the South Vietnamese pulled the same crap on Tricky that they had on Johnson. His reaction was to bomb the living shit out of Hanoi, then betray the South Vietnamese, and exit under a sulphurous cloud of lies and smoke. That was our boy Tricky Dick, bitter and evil to the bitter end.

I'll let the aforementioned Howlin' Wolf have the last word:

  

 

Malaka Of The Week: Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier

Wilfrid Fox Napier sounds like he should be a Tory MP, a rural Anglican vicar or a nob tormented by Hyacinth Bucket. Instead, he's the Archbishop of Durban in South African. He's also a slam dunk choice as an early malaka of the week "winner." The Cardinal put his slippered foot in his mouth and told the world that "pedophilia is not a criminal condition, it's an illness." The most depressing part of this malakatude is that the Cardinal is typical of the Catholic hiearchy's views on this matter.

Cardinal WFN (or do y'all prefer WiFoNap?) has already issued a series of non-apology apology tweets that are laced with weasel words:

"It's the supreme irony. Because I raised the issue of the abused abuser, I stand accused of insensitivity to the sufferings of the abused.

"My concern: How can society deal justly, fairly & equitably with the abused, who has suffered incalculable damage, then goes on to abuse?

"Do the Church & society not have to consider the damage he suffered when deciding what to do? Or does the abused abuser lose all his rights?

"My response: Such abuser should receive treatment to make good the damage done to him? In prison or out of it, that's for experts to decide.

"I believe as every dictionary consulted confirms Paedophilia is a medical condition. What is a crime is the sexual abuse of children.

"Therefore Paedophilia must be treated. What must be punished is the Crime of Sexual Abuse of Children.

If the Church had not spent decades hiding pedo priests from public view and denying the problem, the Cardinal's position could be *theoretically* defensible. But after all the Lowes and Mahonys, the cult of the red beanie is totally discredited on this issue. Cardinal WiFoNap should bite his ecclesiastical tongue and STFU. He sounds like just another cleric who thinks that Priests are superior to the rest of us mere mortals albeit one who's all modern and shit because he's on the tweeter tube.

I realize that Cardinals are in the forgiveness business BUT equating priest "abused/abusers" with their victims is arrogant rubbish. I thought humility was in vogue with the ascension of Francis to the papacy? I guess Cardinal WiFoNap didn't get the talking points or something. Check your in-box next time, dude.

The Ryan Plan, Now With Electrolytes

Paul Ryan released his new budget which, from all I’ve read thus far, is remarkably similar to the one Americans resoundly rejected last year as being mathematically impossible and morally depraved.

The “new” plan includes VoucherCare, screws people under age 54 out of Medicare (as a 51-year-old, let me repeat: FUCK YOU, PAUL RYAN), cuts taxes on the wealthiest and corporations, increases defense spending by $500 billion over the next 10 years, and magically cuts the deficit by such amazing feats as repealing Obamacare. In other words, this isn’t anything close to a serious attempt to deal with "fiscal issues." So remember, kiddos: when Beale tells you nobody gives a fuck about the budget deficit, this is what I mean.

Says Ryan:

"The election didn’t go our way, believe me I know what that feels like," Ryan said Tuesday at a press conference to unveil his proposal. "Does that mean we surrender our principles?" 

Yep, that’s right. The Republican Party will make its last stand on budget ideas already rejected by voters, because even though they’re based on completely fantastical “principles,” by God it’s their principles. And when reality trumps conservative principles, it’s always the reality which must be wrong.

Yesterday Son of Breitbart and the dude with the *sirens* told everyone that Nobel Prize winning economist and anti-austerity crusader Paul Krugman had declared bankruptcy. Har har, what a fail, see what happens when liberals try to do economics! Except, of course, he didn't, it was all a hoax which is precisely what happens when right-wingers try to do journalism. I bring it up because it seems to me that conservatives haven't learned one lesson from the last election. The whole "information bubble" problem still seems in full force, and they seem to be sticking by their unpopular "shred the social safety net" thing.

With Republicans permanently divorced from reality, now would be a good time for Democrats (as usual, gawd I'm so sick of this shit) to be the grown-ups on the budget issue. Is the budget deficit really a "crisis"? Not according to un-bankrupt Krugman, who has talked about this a-plenty (here's a good column for starters). It would be really nice if he weren't the lone voice crying in the wilderness. 

I mean, really. If Republicans can put forward a fairy tale budget which is the plutocrats' wet dream -- tax cuts! Increase defense spending! Kill Obamacare! Privatize Medicare! -- then I say it's long past time Democrats found their spine and called bullshit on the whole pretense. 

You Don't Get To Talk In Church

Pray the non-gay-hating politicians away: 

Among those to decry the state's pending marriage equality legislation, which is currently awaiting a House vote, was Bishop Lance Davis, senior pastor at a church in Dolton.

“We want to make sure that we a send a message to our elected officials that as a collective community and a collaborative, we will not allow you to speak in our churches, you will not be invited to our church when you’re running for office because we as a community are incensed," he is quoted by the radio station as saying.

Wow, how awful for them. They won't get to come stand next to a bigot and beg for votes from anybody who isn't turned off by your bigotry. Sad day for them. 

After this, I wouldn't vote for anyone who DID speak at your church. There are other votes out there to be had, from people who care about trivial silly things like feeding poor people and making sure schools don't have holes in the roofs. You know, CHRISTIANS. 

A. 

I Have An Active Heterosexual Lifestyle, Right?

For God's sake, if you mean "fucking," just say "fucking:" 

University of Portland is a Catholic institution that allowed students to form an official Gay-Straight Partnership in 2008, but not everyone was happy with the decision. As conservative site LifeNews wrote at the time:

Although the Gay Straight Partnership has made pains to state that it will be adhering to Catholic teaching on sexuality, experience has shown pro-family advocates that such alliances typically result in the push to normalize and to affirm as morally acceptable an active homosexual lifestyle amongst university students.

That’s exactly what the students campaigning today want: A campus where all students feel safe and supported, regardless of their sexuality. 

Which, naturally, is interpreted as "everyone must have gay sex all the time." An "active homosexual lifestyle?" I guess that means anything other than pretending to be aggro-straight while secretly spanking it to nude photos of Lorne Greene? I don't know what it means.  

Being actively heterosexual seems to mean arguing with Mr. A about whose turn it is to clean the litterbox and do the laundry. Is that what Catholic universities are so scared of? Homosexuals taking turns cooking dinner for each other?  

This idiocy comes amid a great story about how the kids are all right, even if the administrators at Catholic universities have their heads firmly up their asses: 

University of Portland President Bill Beauchamp told the student newspaper that the school had already made a gesture toward LGBT students and faculty by adopting a “statement of inclusion” in 2011 which committed the school to not discriminate based on sexual orientation. But, he said, if the school adds sexual orientation to its official non-discrimination policy, it could mean the university condones sexual practices not accepted by the Catholic Church.

Yes. You are either in favor of discrimination, or boy-on-boy rimjobs on the altar during Easter Mass. There is NO MIDDLE GROUND. If you de-legalize harrassment and bullying, make it grounds for firing someone, it will be nothing but same-sex handies from here to the football field. Because gay kids were waiting for this before they got it on. God, I hope not. Life is short, kids. Be safe, but Jesus, life is short. You could get hit by a bus tomorrow. 

What Catholic universities are really afraid of is putting anything in writing that could allow the Holy See to bring the hammer down on their asses for being insufficiently theologically obtuse. Which, if they'd just say that, instead of this mealy-mouthed nonsense about approving of something called an active lifestyle, I think we could all get on the same page and direct our attention where it needs to be, on the collection of fusty old fossils in Rome who want a leave-it-to-Beaver trip back to the 1550s while Kids Today would just as soon get on with their lives. 

I'm sorry, their "lifestyles." 

A. 

Dirty Deeds

Tucker Carlson's Internet Kavalcade of Krayzeee seems poised to take over Breitbart’s Propaganda & Donut Den for this year’s Crimes Against Journalism Award. But really, there are so many nominees this year, how can one choose?

The conservative media’s latest liberal-smearing scoop that ended up being an exploding cigar was the Daily Caller’s career-killing revelation -- with video! -- that Sen. Robert Menendez had sex with prostitutes in the Dominican Republic. Sadly for Tucker Carlson, it all appears to be a big, fat lie:

An escort who appeared on a video claiming Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) paid her for sex has told Dominican Republic police that she was instead paid to make up the claims in a tape recording and has never met or seen the senator before, according to court documents and two people briefed on her claim.

The woman identified a lawyer who approached her and a friend to make the videotape, according to affidavits obtained by the Post. That man has in turn identified another lawyer who gave him a script for the tape and paid him to find women to fabricate the claims, the affidavits say.

The escort was one of two women who taped videos that seems to support a tipster’s allegations that Menendez had patronized prostitutes while vacationing in the Dominican Republic.

This is some serious ratfucking here, like, criminal ratfucking. Slander and libel-lawsuit-generating ratfucking. Now who would do such a thing? Why Bob Menendez? Is it the Latino surname? Is this some kind of New Jersey politics thing? WTF? Who are the anonymous "Republican operatives" ABC names? As they say, more shall be revealed.

I must say, conservatives appear to have that touch of merde these days; all of their attempts to smear figures on the left seem to be backfiring worse than a 1970s gas guzzler. 

There was the Tennessee Republican Party's attempt to smear Memphis-area Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen over his Tweets to his daughter, followed by the infamous Chuck Hagel "Friends Of Hamas" smear, and Bob Woodward's "the White House threatened me" lie. 

What a difference a few failed hot scoops make. The right-wing is notorious for fabricating scandals (let's not forget Breitbart's Shirley Sherrod/ACORN/Muslim NPR crap). Seems like not too long ago the mainstream media would have jumped all over stuff like Menendez's prostie-gate. At least this time when the WaPo was finally pulled into covering the story they didn't parrot the conservative talking point but did their own investigative work.

Looks like some lessons have been learned.

Clown Stirrups

These failmooks actually believe that the disposition of a lady is what leads to a pregnancy. Women who do not want to get pregnant will not get pregnant, and so there are no pregnancies from rape. Women who really, truly, in their pledged-to-Jesus hearts want babies will have them, regardless of whether the dirty sluts are kidding themselves about not wanting kids. 

A. 

Quit Blaming Your Kids

Fuck yes, this, on how we tolerate all kinds of horrors and then are horrified by love and courage because rapes and murders and assaults just confirm our view of the world as a dark and small one, while courage and love make us reconsider how tightly we've drawn the circle around the things we've chosen to give a shit about.

We have stories about child molesters, murders and all kinds of vicious, barbaric acts of evil committed by heinous criminals on our front page and yet we never receive a call from anyone saying 'I don't need my children reading this.' Never. Ever. However, a story about two women exchanging marriage vows and we get swamped with people worried about their children.

It's such a dishonest, lazy argument. There is no discernible way that any of the upset is about anybody's kids. In the first place, unless you're swanning around your kitchen all OH MY DEAR HEAVENS HERB THE PICTURE IN THE PAPER TODAY NO DON'T LOOK AT IT HONEY DON'T LOOK DIRECTLY AT IT, your kid probably wasn't looking at the front page all that closely OR READING THE PAPER AT ALL. Once you made a big hairy huffy fucking deal about it, sure, then the kids are going to be confused. Mostly by how they ended up in the womb of such a goddamn ASSHOLE.

And if you really don't want your kids upset? Here's a radical goddamn idea: Try not to be such a FUCKSTICK about this stuff. If you don't want your kids upset, try not being upset with other people breathing. That's all these women are doing, getting up in the morning and breathing in and out and doing jobs and coming home to one another. One of them has brain cancer. I think your kids' delicate fucking feelings are about the last thing on her mind. If your kids have questions about gay people, how about answering them along the lines of what my conservative religious so-not-down-with-the-sexual-revolution parents said when I came home from school asking what the word "faggot" meant: Some people are gay and that's their business.

I hear all day long about how having children is the best goddamn thing ever, about how it opens your eyes to the world in all these new and fantastic ways and whenever I hear shit like this the next thing I learn is that APPARENTLY ONE OF THOSE WAYS IS THAT IT MAKES YOU A RAGING BIGOT WITH A HARD-ON FOR THE 1860s AND NO ABILITY TO THINK CRITICALLY ANYMORE. God Almighty, have an opinion. Think about the stuff that comes out of your mouth on a daily basis. THINK about the life you're living. YOUR life, not the life somebody's living in a stupid sitcom. Don't fall back on this stupid fucking shorthand with this carping about the kids.

You wanna be a bigot with nothing better to do than call the paper and bitch? GO BE THAT THEN. Quit blaming your goddamn kids. Not only did THEY not do anything to you to deserve your shitty life, it's disrespectful to the many, many brave and decent parents out there who aren't raising itty bitty Klansmen on purpose. Plenty of parents manage to not make their kids banging jackholes, so to imply that giving birth loads you up with these ideas is just rude to those people who didn't somehow have their brains sucked out in the maternity ward.

Plus, you think those kids are disturbed NOW? Wait till they grow up, live in the world, and find out their parents are DICKS.

A.

Tort Reform

Jesus: 

Wahl has spina bifida, is brain damaged and paralyzed from the chest down. At age 32, he lived at a group home in Menomonie, where he loved coloring and going on picnics, said his mother, Karen Nichols-Palmerton.

One evening in October 2011, she visited the home and found her son’s room empty.

Wahl had been rushed to the hospital for treatment of a bedsore so severe that doctors feared he would be permanently bedridden.

A state health department investigation report laterfound he had the bedsore for four months before being hospitalized.

But the staff who cared for Wahl never sought medical attention for his wound, state investigation records show. And the facility never told the state or Nichols-Palmerton about it, as required by state law, according to state officials.

Instead, caregivers at Aurora Residential Alternativessprinkled the bedsore with baby powder and applied antibiotic cream, watching it grow larger and more serious until it was bone-deep, records show. Nichols-Palmerton is suing Aurora for alleged negligence, seeking punitive and compensatory damages.

Changes to Wisconsin law passed two years ago, however, mean her attorney can’t use those state investigation records as evidence in the lawsuit, which alleges a four-month pattern of neglect.

“It scares me for those who put their trust in a facility,” said Nichols-Palmerton, who lives in Menomonie, a small city in western Wisconsin. “It scares me to think of things that could be brushed aside. I don’t rest so easy anymore.”

Holly Hakes, Aurora’s executive director, declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

The law, which went into effect in February 2011, bars families from using state health investigation records in state civil suits filed against long-term providers, including nursing homes and hospices. It also makes such records inadmissible in criminal cases against health care providers accused of neglecting or abusing patients.

The changes were included in a tort reform measure, the first bill Gov. Scott Walker proposed after Republicans swept both houses and the governor’s office in the 2010 elections.

Yes, let's make sure this kind of thing is as hard to prosecute as possible. 

Shit is fucked up and bullshit. 

A. 

What's the Best Way to Prevent Domestic Violence, Republicans?

Have schools teach girls to shoot their attackers: 

Meanwhile, a bill under consideration in Maine — which has drawn support from Gov. Paul LePage (R) — would add an optional gun safety course, potentially paid for by the NRA’s “Eddie Eagle Gunsafe Program.” The Maine bill sponsor Rep. Paul Davis (R) claimed this course would manage to prevent domestic violence, by giving would-be victims firearms training. “In these situations, these victims [of domestic violence-related slayings] did everything the law provided,” Davis said. “I have to wonder if they knew anything about guns. I don’t think they did. However, if they did and they wanted to protect themselves, what would have happened?”

While I am all about powerful girls, and not anti-gun in the abstract, and think if you're teaching boys to shoot you should teach the girls as well, this is a big unsorted basket of socks that all have OH FUCK NO embroidered upon them. 

First, it's lousy time management. If you have a limited number of days on this planet, and the school day is even more limited, a much more expedient way to teach domestic violence prevention is to TEACH BOYS NOT TO HIT WOMEN. If all the focus is on how girls can defend themselves from male predators, all you're teaching the boys is that girls are prey. 

Teaching boys not to treat women like dogs, that grown-ups don't behave like that and that rape and other types of assault are not hilarious or excusable no matter who the perpetrator is would go a lot longer towards making victims safer than would a firearm, because if you want to ensure nobody gets attacked, the only way to do that 100 percent is to make sure there are no attackers. 

Second, making children paranoid about danger all around them is a pretty easy way to ensure they'll actually go off half-cocked, and while we do an admirable job of scaring the shit out of the young'uns already, adding firearms to the mix helps not in the slightest. 

A. 

OBAMAPOCALYPSE NOW

What the fuck is wrong with this guy? 

It has always been sensible for good citizens to own and carry firearms for lawful protection against violent criminals who prey on decent people.

During the second Obama term, however, additional threats are growing. Latin American drug gangs have invaded every city of significant size in the United States. Phoenix is already one of the kidnapping capitals of the world, and though the states on the U.S./Mexico border may be the first places in the nation to suffer from cartel violence, by no means are they the last.

Obama came to power, and Colombian drug lords were like fuck yeah, let's head north, because El Homey is in the White House, and the streets of LA are ours now. 

This never would have happened if Ronald Reagan had been president. There were no Latin American drug gangs in the 80s. Nobody even did cocaine until Obama was inaugurated with one hand on a tabletop mirror and the other on a Bible used by Pablo Escobar. 

After Hurricane Sandy, we saw the hellish world that the gun prohibitionists see as their utopia. Looters ran wild in south Brooklyn. There was no food, water or electricity. And if you wanted to walk several miles to get supplies, you better get back before dark, or you might not get home at all.

Okay, there were like 12 cases of looting, which is just as many cases of looting as there were on any other given day in New York. It's a big city. Increase the number of people in a place, and you increase the percentage of them who will be scumbags when something shitty happens. Arming the ones who are just morons doesn't help that. 

Meanwhile, President Obama is leading this country to financial ruin, borrowing over a trillion dollars a year for phony “stimulus” spending and other payoffs for his political cronies. Nobody knows if or when the fiscal collapse will come, but if the country is broke, there likely won’t be enough money to pay for police protection. And the American people know it.

So Obama is deliberately starving the states of funds to ensure police protection, so that when the apocalypse comes, he can grab everyone's guns, without ... the police to stop him? Or something? 

And if nobody knows when the fiscal collapse will come, then why is it imminent? 

Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face—not just maybe. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun.

No, but it is paranoia to think a gun can protect you from a tornado. Or from a terrorist attack, for that matter. What were the office workers in the Twin Towers supposed to do that morning? Shoot down a 747 with a .22 or a deer shotgun? Just because it worked for John McClane ...

Fucknut name-checks some gun stores, all of which I'm sure are generous contributors to his cause, and then goes into full-on self-inflicted martyrdom: 

Inevitably, the anti-gun media and the gun-ban lobbies are demonizing the purchase of firearms. They call us “extremists” because we wonder whether we will be able to buy a semi-auto in three years or, even in some states, later this year. That’s despite the fact that President Obama long ago made clear that he wants to ban them all!

No, pet, they call you an idiot because you wonder if you'll be able to buy a semi-auto in three years, when Obama clearly can't get a bill praising LOLcats passed in Congress. You really think your guns are going anywhere? 

The media try to make rank-and-file Americans feel guilty about buying a gun. The enemies of freedom demonize gun buyers and portray us as social lepers. But we know the truth. We know that responsible gun ownership exemplifies what is good and right about America.

Responsible gun ownership exemplifies that you have purchased a gun and are not stupid with it. It does not say shit about "America." America does not care. You're the one humping a bald eagle on Liberty Island and trying to make it all about you. 

The NRA is launching a nationwide, full-court initiative to urge every gun owner, and every non-gun-owning lover of freedom, to join the NRA and fight this battle. I will personally be traveling all over America enlisting new members.

I can hear your PR firm firing itself from here.

We don’t want America to become like England, where some of that nation’s outstanding rifle competitors keep their hobby a dark secret from their neighbors for fear of social disapproval. 

A dark secret. A very well-kept one, too. 

We will not surrender. We will not appease. We will buy more guns than ever. We will use them for sport and lawful self-defense more than ever.

We will fight them on the beaches, and the check-out lines at Wal-Mart! We will buy shit, that's his rallying cry. We will buy some stuff. We will shop until we drop ... you, from 40 paces, at dawn. 

What a goddamn tool. 

A. 

Regarding the Goddamn Pope

 

I'll let Tim Minchin sum up what I think of the entire rotten institution and person:

I can't add anything to that.

You probably shouldn't watch this at work. 

Aaron Schock, Marriage Equality and Republican Re-Branding

"I can neither confirm nor deny my bigotry, as to confirm it would alienate every voter who isn't a tight-permed churchy scold in a cat sweatshirt, and to deny it would cost me those churchy scolds who I need to win primaries even in the state of Illinois. And have you seen this fucking place? It's becoming INSANELY GAY up in here, so I am caught between being a Republican and being a decent human being who does not give a damn who you or anyone else screws, and in that calculus decency will lose every time. And yet. I don't support marriage equality because I haven't supported it. So there." 

There was a lot of noise last week about Republican "re-branding." Full disclaimer, I am about as good a marketer as I am a pet therapist ("SHUT THE FUCK UP, FLUFFY!") but I wonder if it isn't a bad marketing decision to announce loudly that you are re-branding, as that implies that your previous brand was deficient. And using the term re-branding implies you're not really going to do anything different. You're just changing the colors of the brochure. 

Now, that might make sense, if the racism and sexism and fear and insularity and general dislike of one's fellow Americans was somehow an innacurate spectrum with which to portray the modern Republican party. As it is, though, I could re-brand this site as FIRST DRAFT: THE WORLD'S BEST SPORTS BLOG and people still wouldn't read us for baseball coverage. 

A. 

Does He See the RICO Case Coming?

I mean, it's basically Boardwalk Empire up in there anyway: 

The abuse scandals dominated his seven years as leader of the world's Catholics. Before his accession, there had been scandals in the United States and Ireland. But in 2010, evidence of clerical sex abuse was made public in a succession of countries in continental Europe, notably Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Benedict's native Germany.

The pope was himself affected by one of these scandals. It emerged that, while he was archbishop of Munich, a known molester was quietly re-assigned to duties that, in time, allowed him to return to pastoral duties and make contact with young people.

The flood of allegations represented a vast setback for the project at the heart of Benedict's papacy. The goal he had set for himself, and for which he was elected, was to launch the re-evangelisation of Europe,Catholicism's heartland: it was why he adopted as his papal name that of the continent's patron saint, Benedict of Nursia. But if the numbers of the faithful in Europe as Benedict leaves officeare fewer than when he was elected, then – surveys repeatedly indicated - it is in large part because of anger and despair in the Catholic laity over the sex abuse scandals.

When the abuse story broke in Boston -- and Boston was the first place to really connect it to the bishops' power rather than individual priests' horrifying crimes -- I said to someone at the time that this was the end of the Catholic Church in this country. 

I didn't think, even then, that it would be the end of the Catholic Church everywhere. But they managed to fuck this up in every way it could be fucked up, and then be assholes about being called on it, over and over and over. You might survive with total transparency, a full house-cleaning, and a true lack of whining, but that wasn't in these guys' DNA. 

And by the by, these are not "scandals." A scandal is where a senator gets caught with a hooker. These are "criminal conspiracy to conceal child rape." Somehow, not as fun. 

A. 

NBC cockblocks EveryBlock

When we bought a Dyson vacuum a number of years ago, it came with a user’s manual as well as a brief history lesson on how Dysons came to be. One of the things that stuck with me was that James Dyson had pitched his design to several major players in the vacuum world, only to be rejected.

When he finally broke through on his own, one of the vacuum executives noted that his company should have just bought the patented design and dismantled the damned thing. In other words, something that worked well had become a headache because it would force other people in the business to think differently.

Journalism and vacuums have very little in common, other than the fact that they both suck. However, when it comes to this bit of news, it’s clear the owners of these businesses have a lot more in common than that.

NBC, which purchased EveryBlock.com, a hyperlocal/microlocal/nanolocal site that was once hailed as being the next phase of digital journalism, has decided to shutter the project.

EveryBlock, the brainchild of a journalism grad named Adrian Holovaty, grew from an idea of layering data into a searchable, map-based mash-up. Holovaty’s earlier project, chicagocrime.org, used police and crime data to show people how certain areas stacked up in terms of police calls, fire calls and more.  The upgraded approach that earned EveryBlock a $1.1million Knight grant took this a step further, augmenting the site with links that showed people news stories associated with their neighborhood, issues pertaining to their area and so forth.

The merits of EveryBlock are, as everything is, up for debate. I had heard from people I knew in the company that the data wasn’t always as perfect as it could be or that some of the details tended to get glossed over in the rush to keep growing the product. However, whatever shortcomings were attached to the project, Holovaty clearly tapped a nerve that needed tapping. As giant metro newspapers had struggled, often outstripping their usefulness, Holovaty went small, believing there was value in each flake of gold and that if he piled enough of them together, a richness would emerge. Whether it was going to be the “next big thing” or not, we’ll never know.

That said, the most depressing commentary on the issue, and the most telling as well, comes from this piece on Poynter, which quotes Senior VP Vivian Schiller: 

I asked Schiller about the questions many are raising online — why not turn over EveryBlock to another operator or give supporters a chance to keep it going? She answered: “I understand that the Everyblock community is disappointed. So are we. We looked at various options to keep this going, but none of them were viable. It was a tough call to make.”

The answer underlying this is pretty easy to see: we couldn’t make money on the deal using our traditional media model/lizard brain approach to money making, so we’re killing this thing. Sure, we could hand it over or sell it or something, but if we did that and someone ELSE figured out a way to make money, we’d look like the bunch of idiots we probably are.

Could Holovaty (or someone like him) have pulled off a Steve-Jobs-Rides-Back-To-Apple-And-Saves-Its-Ass move with EveryBlock? I don’t know, but it was probably worth the try.

Could NBC have tried to think outside of its “MUST CAN HAZ IMMEEEDEEATE CASH” model and tried to learn something? Probably not without a lobotomy and a few high colonics in the ol’ C-Suite.

Might this thing have died on its own somewhere along the way anyway? Anything is possible. Even the best, most perfectly, bulletproof products for a time (read: NetScape) make a sharp, ugly turn and die.

The point is we’re never going to know the answer to these things because when a major entity is faced with something that might be good and that forces them to think, their first and only answer seems to be: “buy it and dismantle the damned thing.”

And that’s a big loss for all of us.

A Good Christian Man Just Misspoke

So a coach says this: 

And people running around like, oh it'll get better, it'll get better. No, it ain't gone get no better until things change. I can give you example after example of that, but I don't want to use any local names to give you examples. Things won't get better until there's a change in some areas and stuff. And you know what his platform was? Change. We're gone change. We're all … aw it's OK …. for … and … y'all can get pissed off at me or not. You can go tell the principal, you can call the superintendent and tell her. I don't believe in queers, I don't like queers. I don't … I don't hate them as a person but what they do is wrong, it's an abomination against God. I don't like being around queers.

And just "misspoke." 

Grisham will have to attend mandatory sensitivity classes and meet with the assistant superintendent once a month.

The board has also removed him from his 5th period psychology class, and he will be given a different assignment.

Some people were pleased with the Board's decision; others think the punishment should have been tougher.

"I think it's fair because I'm a big supporter of Mr. Grisham. I've known him for years," said Lee Barclay. "He's taught my children. My son played football under him. He's a good Christian man; he just misspoke that day."

Are we now defining "misspoke" as "oh shit, somebody overheard me?" Are we now defining it as "I thought I was in a room full of friendlies but apparently everybody isn't down with my smug bigoted shit?" Because otherwise I don't see how this is an accident. It's not like he tripped and fell into a big pile of I Hate Queers. Hey, who left that box of Abominations Against God here, right where somebody could run into it with his mouth? I was aiming for Love is the Answer but somehow my dart landed on Gays Are Gross instead. 

(I didn't know anybody younger than my grandparents still said "queers" as a pejorative, by the way. I'm poking 40 with a short stick and even homophobes my age mainly use queer as a Scrabble word.) 

Call it wrong, but don't call it a mistake, because that implies innocence. Misspeaking is saying ten when you meant twenty, or calling someone Bill when his name is Bob. It's not saying you don't like queers when what you really mean is OH SHIT SOMEBODY WAS RECORDING ME HAVE I MENTIONED MY HEART IS PURE? 

Grisham told the TimesDaily on Wednesday afternoon he misspoke.“I misspoke in a debate-type situation,” he said. “I have no hatred toward anyone or any group. People that know my heart, they know that.”

Oh, it was a DEBATE! In that case, hey, he was just playing the part of an ignorant-ass neck. He was trying to teach his students a valuable lesson, perhaps about how difficult it is to live in a world where gay people exist. And if we'd just talk to all these people that KNOW YOUR HEART, why, then we'd see that you have no hatred against people you think are abominations against God. 

Silly us. When we said you were just a bigoted asshole who needs a crash course in how the world works here in the 21st century or at least some lessons in how to keep your cakehole pasted shut, we must have misspoke.

Schmuck.

A.  

Today on Tommy T's Obsession with the Freeperati - Guns and posers edition

Good morning, everyone - well, I've pretty much stayed away from the subject of Bushmasters and the nuts who love them - mostly because it's too blah blah blah predictable to parody. But, I guess it's time to mine some tinfoil out of Freepistan.

First up - Ooops - too late - we already shot him!

ALLEGED SANDY HOOK COPYCAT Threatens to Target L.A. Kindergarteners Tmz.com ^ | 01/08/2013 | Tmz staff

Posted on Tuesday, January 08, 2013 10:38:14 PM by diverteach

 EXCLUSIVE The 24-year-old man who threatened to commit Sandy Hook type crimes in L.A. claimed he was hell-bent on leaving "dead kindergartners" in his wake ... yet he will not be prosecuted.

Kyle Bangayan posted threats on Facebook the same day as the Newtown shooting ... and claimed he was targeting L.A. schools ... this according to a search warrant obtained by TMZ.

*************************************************************

All I can say is unbelievable. Well that and I hope they have cops tagging his rear end 24/7

1 posted on Tuesday, January 08, 2013 10:38:24 PM by diverteach

Huh? Just for excercising his First AND Second Amendment rights at the same time?  It's a twofer!

To: diverteach

I blame the media a lot. They are in over drive to take away guns and they go on and on which will cause the copycats to become perplexed into possibly going off.

4 posted on Tuesday, January 08, 2013 10:48:10 PM by Christie at the beach (I like Newt. Our nation's foundation is under attack.)

Yeah! The media!  We should all shoot the messen...........huh?

To: diverteach

The libtards want this guy on the loose so he CAN go out and kill little kids.

Then they’ll REALLY have a case for going after LAW-ABIDING gun owners.

Don’t worry, none of them are thinking about doing away with gun-free zones. They WANT MORE VICTIMS!

6 posted on Tuesday, January 08, 2013 10:53:01 PM by 43north (BHO: 50% black, 50% white, 100% RED)

I personally can't wait until another grade school full of kids are gunned down. I live for that shit.

And of course, the Freeperatis' answer to the horror of gun vlolence?

To: diverteach

So what would be wrong with a little 1800's justice on this sorry SOB?

Just plug the rotten little craphead and plant him on boot hill.

21 posted on Wednesday, January 09, 2013 4:02:32 AM by exnavy (Fish or cut bait ...Got ammo, Godspeed!)

Why, that's an excellent idea! In fact, the Posse Comitatus and I just came back from his apartment after filling him full of more holes than a James Cameron movie plot. That'll teach him!

.

Got a few bystanders as well, but you know - omelet, eggs.....

To: diverteach

I read a few news stories about this, and apparently he did not have guns at his apartment. They found guns at his parent’s home, where they arrested him. It wasn’t clear to me whether the guns were owned by his parents or him. I think the fact that they found nothing threatening in his apartment, in conjunction with whatever conversations they had with him and his parents, were what led to his release. I’m not saying I agree with that decision, but it does appear to be a little different story than at the surface.

24 posted on Wednesday, January 09, 2013 5:59:58 AM by pieceofthepuzzle

Oops - too late.  We already shot him.

.

OK Freeperati - who can my posse and I blame for this senseless violence?

To: diverteach

This was likely a false flag op to help push the anti-gun narrative. He could have been a government plant to make people get all emotional about the nut with all them guns.... Why else release him without even psych evaluations?

26 posted on Wednesday, January 09, 2013 6:03:45 AM by Mechanicos (When did we amend the Constitution for a 2nd Federal Prohibition?)

Whoopee! I'm off the (Sandy) hook!  Damn that Soros and has false-flag black ops!

.

.

I said: "False flag".

.

More rootin' tootin' shootin fun after the magazine speed-swap.

Men Suck, And It's Your Fault, Ladies, Because of Babies

You know what has been missing from our discussions about ladies in the workplace? The perspective of a middle-aged white man who thinks bitches be trippin' to have menz babies: 

Look, most grown men are still 12-year-old boys inside. Most men still expect their working spouse to assume responsibility for the household chores. Most men turn immediately to their wives when their kid has the sniffles (“you don’t expect me to miss work, do you?”). Most men raise their eyebrows and give each other a nudge when a good-looking girl appears at a meeting. We check out the way they’re dressed. We’re shocked (still) when they make off-color jokes (she seemed like such a nice girl!). And most men still don’t feel comfortable golfing and drinking with their female colleagues because we can’t make jokes about sex and farting.

First of all, you're not talking about most "grown men." You're talking about the caricature of idiot man-child that the sitcoms of the 90s have tried to convince us is the true picture of most men, a caricature lots of lazy, entitled assholes use to excuse their crappy behavior instead of being grown-ups and taking responsibility for themselves. 

I keep saying this: I HATE THIS FUCKING DODGE THAT MEN ARE CHILDREN OR PETS. Men are not secretly little boys. Men are people. They are insecure, or confident, or good at stuff around the house, or bad at stuff around the house, just like women. Just like everybody. There is no goddamn two-for-one deal in the womb on a penis and a Peter Pan complex. As sick as I am of how this allows lousy shitheels to get away with treating women like dirt, I'm also sick of how it disappears the good men who don't try to make themselves out the intellectual equivalents of a bucket of KFC because herf derf According to Jim. 

(If you're not comfortable drinking and golfing with the chicks in your office, consider why they don't seem comfortable drinking and golfing with you. Possibly they can drink you under the table and don't want to embarrass the boss, and fuck golf, seriously, it's the dumbest thing ever.) 

How could this story get worse, you ask? Oh, just wait, because sometimes dumb bitches who bring themselves to the office to make men feel uncomfortable go and get themselves pregnant, apparently by magic, and men who are not fucking them are not always privy to when this will happen exactly: 

I am not embarrassed to say that when I interview a young woman, my first thought is “what happens when/if she gets pregnant?” This is a legitimate business question. Right or wrong, the fact is that men delegate mothering to women. And most women (thank God) want that job too—it’s natural. So am I wrong to ask if that smart young lady who I’m about to invest in plans to start a family anytime soon and whether she will actually come back to work in six weeks after she gives birth? Or ever? I need to make plans otherwise. Allow me to ask that question. Oh by the way, guys should face the same scrutiny about their “paternity” plans too.

But they never do, do they? Does anyone look at a young man, married or engaged, and start calculating how long he has before he knocks up that pretty girl and starts needing to get home for soccer practices? PLEASE. Men who love their children and want time to participate in those children's lives are like UNICORNS, amirite laydees? Women are just naturally made for that sort of shit, whereas men are made to drink, golf, and talk about sex and farting. 

(If only men participated in creating a pregnancy in some way. If only they had some role in the process, then they might not be so terribly inconvenienced by it all. Like, say they had an appendage, like a penis, and they could choose to use or not use it for its reprodutive purpose. And then, if they insisted on using it, if only there was some way to legally and safely prevent pregnancy, like, say, sheathing that penis in some kind of protective garb.)

If you want to ensure a woman in your employ comes back to work after maternity leave, here's a radical fucking idea: Try to make the job worth coming back to in comparison to an itty bitty human who she likes very much. Try to give her enough paid time off so that she can decide how best to arrange her life around the new person in the house and no, six weeks is not enough time. Try to value her as an employee, as if you know her and care about her well-being. 

Most of all, try not to make out like she's done you a personal wrong by reproducing, unlike a male boss of mine from a few years back, who used to act like women got pregnant to spite him. First of all, fucko was the one making the hiring decisions, and second of all, I sincerely doubt any of the female employees who did get knocked up were thinking of him in their moments of wedded bliss. Sometimes it's not all about you, boss. 

BE A GOOD BOSS, and maybe she will come back. Or she won't, in which case you've lost an employee, and the world will not end, and the earth will keep turning and we'll all get over it someday. 

But hey, maybe it's all hopeless anyway because women are so PRIVATE about this stuff: 

Most women will not become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. The numbers already prove that. A significant reason why is that grown, responsible men are still adolescent boys at heart. But it’s not all our fault. Because while we are still prohibited from asking reasonable questions like “do you plan to start a family anytime soon and what impact will that have on my business?” there will always be discrimination in the workplace.

What does this guy think a woman who is being nattered at by an interviewer about pregnancy plans is going to say? WHY YES I PLAN TO GET PREGNANT IMMEDIATELY UPON BEING HIRED. Nobody's gonna say that. And preventing you from asking is not oppressing your freedom to do business. You are not Rosa Parks. Nobody is victimizing you with a nursing bra.

Though after reading that, I certainly wish someone would. 

A. 

Culliver's Travels

San Francisco 49ers player Chris Culliver is already running away from his imbecilic homophobic comments. Under pressure from his team and coaching staff, he issued an apology. One thing that struck me about his idiotic remarks was how he pretended that *he* had the power to ban gays from the Niners locker room. Who died and made you coach, asshole? Here's how the story played out at the San Francisco Chronicle's web site, SF Gate.com:

49ers coach Jim Harbaugh has, in the past, said that gay players would be welcome on his team, but a clip aired on the Artie Lange show on Tuesday night seemed to indicate that cornerback Chris Culliver doesn’t agree.

When asked by shock jock Lange at Super Bowl media day if there were any gay players on the team, Culliver answered, “No, we don’t got no gay people on the team, they gotta get up out of here if they do.

“Can’t be with that sweet stuff. Nah … can’t be … in the locker room man. Nah.”

Asked in November how he would react to coaching an openly gay player, Harbaugh said, “I have no discrimination in my heart. I ask all players to play through their own personality and be who they are. What you ask of a player is to be a great team player and be a good player. My expectations (of a gay player) would be the same.”

Other players asked the same question for a 49ers digital magazine story said they would also accept an openly gay player.

Here is a statement from the 49ers about Culliver’s comments:

“The San Francisco 49ers reject the comments that were made yesterday, and have addressed the matter with Chris. There is no place for discrimination within our organization at any level. We have and always will proudly support the LGBT community.”

And here is a statement released Wednesday afternoon by Culliver:

“The derogatory comments I made yesterday were a reflection of thoughts in my head, but they are not how I feel. It has taken me seeing them in print to realize that they are hurtful and ugly. Those discriminating feelings are truly not in my heart. Further, I apologize to those who I have hurt and offended, and I pledge to learn and grow from this experience.”

I did not know that about Jim Harbaugh but good on him. He *does* coach in the unofficial capitol of gay America, after all. It's just a pity that he has a Lilliputian like Culliver on his team.

They'll love this back in San Francisco

Niner player opens mouth, inserts foot at Super Bowl media day:

 San Francisco 49ers cornerback Chris Culliver has reportedly made inflammatory comments regarding homosexuality in football just a few days before Super Bowl XLVII.

Shock jock Artie Lange revealed he had interviewed Culliver at media day Tuesday and aired a segment on his show that night, where the player insisted that any gay players would not be welcome on the team.

I don't do the gay guys man," said Culliver, whose Niners play the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday. "I don't do that. No, we don't got no gay people on the team, they gotta get up out of here if they do.

"Can't be with that sweet stuff. Nah…can't be…in the locker room man. Nah."

When quizzed by Lange whether any homosexual athletes would need to keep their sexuality a secret in football, Culliver responded: "Yeah, come out 10 years later after that."

Yo, dude, your team has many gay fans, and the odds are that you have at least one gay team mate. I'd avoid Castro Street if I were you...

Mothers and Friends

I write over at Sexy Feminist about the New Mommy War: 

Let’s grant I might have a shorter wait for a child if women were coerced to surrender babies for adoption if those women were young or unmarried or their families disapproved, as was the case once upon a time.

Let’s grant that if Roe v. Wade had gone the other way, things might be easier for me.

And then let’s wrap our heads around this, which Christina Locke seems unable to do: Sometimes it’s not all about me.

My desire for a child isn’t about those other women. My desire for a child does not convey upon them any obligation whatsoever. And their desire not to have a child isn’t about me. How dare I ask them to endure misery so that I can have happiness? How dare I take advantage of their poverty, desperation, frustration, fear? Am I inherently better than them? Do I have any right to expect anyone else’s downfall, just so I can benefit?

No. I don’t. I don’t have any right to ask anything of anyone. Their lives are theirs.

They show you the embryo, you know. They show it to you at my clinic, before what they euphemistically call "the transfer," and then they give you a picture of it. I carried that picture around after the first transfer I had, the one they were so sure was gonna take I started arguing with Mr. A about names and which grandparent would probably be the favorite. I thought it would be fun to show the kidlet someday.

That still doesn't mean any other woman has to feel the same way about an embryo, or a pregnancy. And it doesn't mean I have the right to judge her if she doesn't. It certainly doesn't mean I should write preachy posts for the Times about how much better I am than my abortion-having whore friends.

(Who the fuck DOES that? People think unkind things about their friends all the time. You go home, talk shit to your mother or your partner, and get the snark out of your system. You don't put that snark on the Internet where everyone, INCLUDING THE FRIEND YOU'RE TALKING SHIT ABOUT, can read it. Jesus.) 

There's been some truly spectacular writing this week about the terror of the childless, like this horror about how if you don't want kids, you should have them anyway just in case. No really: 

She doesn’t want to be rushed into having kids (which is why she’s still doesn’t have any) and she’s worried that she doesn’t feel ready. Or worse—what if she finally feels ready at age 46 and it’s too late? What if it’s already too late?

Sometimes Doris reminds me of my kindergartner—“What if I get sick tomorrow and can’t go to school and I never learn to read?” Sometimes Doris reminds me of my toddler twins—wanting whatever toy the other twin has.

"In case I want it later" is a reason to get an extra bag of Oreos at the supermarket. IT IS NOT A REASON TO CREATE ANOTHER HUMAN. This takedown puts it well: 

My point is that maybe Doris really doesn’t want children. Maybe she likes being a career woman, and her fears about having children are justifiable. Maybe the pressure she feels to have children comes from a culture that values mothers, but not middle-aged career women. What Doris might need is support for her feelings. It’s OK to not want children right now, yes, even in this culture where you’re not encouraged to make such a choice as a woman. I’d like to think you and Doris could make different choices and still respect one another. But I also think she needs to find a new friend. 

Jesus, yes. This isn't so much about mom versus not-mom as it is about us all needing to leave each other the fuck alone. Your abortion isn't about my desire to have a child. My job isn't about your stay-at-home motherhood. We are all just trying to get through our weeks without killing each other. We are not intentionally designing our lives to make others feel bad.

And as hard as it can be to not judge others, it's even harder to not judge yourself in comparison, and then turn that judgment outward, so that everyone who isn't you is wrong. But if you want to live in the world we have, which in our ideal imaginings would allow every woman the freedom to make the choices best for her, you have to let some of the mommy war go. Put off your armor, because there isn't a fight here, except the one you make. 

A. 

'Women no longer need to be beautiful to express their talent'

Bitches, please: 

Reading through an otherwise insipidEsquire profile of Megan Fox (bitch believes in leprechauns!) about how she's aiming to "escape from her fate as a sex symbol" (which she goes about doing by posing in her bra and panties for the magazine?), one is suddenly slapped with this gratuitous little nugget from the piece's author Stephen Marche: "[W]omen no longer need to be beautiful in order to express their talent. Lena Dunham and Adele and Lady Gaga and Amy Adams are all perfectly plain, and they are all at the top of their field."

First of all, yes, Amy Adams, that horse-faced hellbeast:*

I think she's perfect and I want to brush her hair. 

Second of all, you know who didn't need to look conventionally hot to "express her talent?"

FUCKING AMELIA. 

FUCKING MARIE.

FUCKING NINA.

Now, you could make an argument that being unusual-looking is a new thing for FILM ACTRESSES OH WAIT FUCKING BETTE:

YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID.

A. 

*This is not about whether Amy Adams is hotter than Megan Fox. It's about WHAT THE FUCK, THIS GUY. 

We're Not Animals

NSFW at the link. Probably. Depending on where you workl. 

This. THIS THIS THIS THISTHISTHISTHIS: 

We (men) are not fucking sharks!

We are not rabid animals living off of pure instinct

We are capable of rational thinking and understanding. 

Just because someone is cooking food doesn’t mean you’re entitled to eat it. 

Just because a banker is counting money doesn’t mean you’re being given free money.

Just because a person is naked doesn’t mean you’re entitled to fuck them. 

You are not entitled to someone else’s body just because it’s exposed. 

What is so fucking difficult about this concept?

My New Year's Resolution was going to be to spend less time on Tumblr but then there's stuff like this. 

A. 

No It Won't, You Fucking Poser-Loser ... Ploser? We Need a New Word, That's How Much This Guy Sucks.

God, armchair revolutionaries make me tired. 

1776 will not commence again, because that would require that you give up your job that you hate and your family you don't like very much and your fucking recliner and your Bugles filled with spray cheese and actually DO SOMETHING, and if you were capable of improving the world in any miniscule way you wouldn't be such an angry fucking insect in the first place, and you wouldn't need to use the prospective deaths of others to yob off in front of the world on national television to make yourself sound important. Fuck you.

God, can all these people just get back to me when there's a meeting I actually need to be at? At least ten times a day somebody within earshot of me wishes armed revolution would commence over something or other, and is this me getting old, that I've been on this planet long enough to remember EVERY TIME that we are always promising that THIS is gonna be the big one and it never fucking is? How 9/11 was going to make us better people (SO FUCKING GROSS) and how we were gonna be serious again, how the wars were going to teach us not to be so susceptible to bullshit, how Obama's election would end racism forever, how this time, today, this morning, it was all gonna change? 

(And it never goddamn does, and I don't even care that it doesn't. I care that we keep saying stupid shit. I care that we keep making promises we can't keep, instead of getting up every day and picking up the laundry off the bathroom floor for once. The big promises DAMAGE us, they ruin us with their hopelessness, because they make us think ALL promises are hopeless, and ALL change is impossible, and all progress is a forlorn dream with no chance of coming true.)

So now the gun nuts are going to rise, huh? No they're not. Not en masse. Not in a wave that will remake this nation. Not to throw off the yoke of oppression or to protect "freedom" (Hey fuckos, you want to shoot shit for a living and defend freedom? The recruiting office is right there.) or even to keep the rusty hunting rifle Granny kept for shootin' varmints. A few people will cause untold amounts of carnage because bullshit merchants like this guy keep yelling, and the majority of people will go on about their lives.

Grumbling, sure. Resentful, sure. Just like every other Tuesday in the entire universe ever, because we have made these kinds of declarations before, and I'll believe in the next leader of the Last Free Republic when he puts down the remote and does something, anything other than talk about what he's gonna do someday, this time, for real. 

A. 

A really funny gang rape

Here’s a great joke:

How do you know a 16-year-old girl is likely dead?

“You don’t sleep through a wang in the butthole!”

Wait, here’s a better one!

How dead is a 16-year-old girl who was kidnapped by a group of high school classmates and repeatedly raped?

“She’s deader than O.J.’s wife!”

Have you stopped laughing yet? Then you'll love this one:

How hard did a group of high school football players, one by one, rape a girl after they had to physically carry her unconscious body from one party into their “rape crew” party?

“They raped her harder than that cop raped Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction. And they raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl…”

Do you need to catch your breath? Laughing so hard? Yeah, here’s another one that will have you just crying:

How pointless is it to try to help a 16-year-old girl who, after being raped while unconscious (possibly because some asshole roofied her), was peed on and still didn’t wake up?

“That’s like trying to help wood turn into stone. That’s like trying to help the Padres to a .500 season. That’s like trying to help Tim Tebow be a good quarterback. That’s like trying to help Natty Light become a refreshing beer.”

Wait… You’re not laughing?

I guess you’re not from Steubenville, Ohio’s proud high school. If you were, you’d probably think this stuff was hysterical. At least, that’s what the video evidence that was leaked earlier this week reveals.

An anonymous hacker posted a 12-minute clip of a young man, identified as former Steubenville High School baseball player Michael Nodianos, detailing how “raped” a young woman was at the party. Those one-line zingers above? Nothing but his comedic genius at work.

Not satisfied to simply take his one-idiot improv act to video, Nodianos is said to have also tweeted about the incident, so his brilliance could be enjoyed by those without the inclination to sit through a fifth of an hour of pure dickheadery.

The rape was said to have occurred in August, but the prosecution of the football players who were said to be responsible for these acts failed to gain traction until the blogosphere took hold of the story. Allegations that police had brushed the incident under the rug in this 18,000-person football-crazed town were refuted by prosecutors, who said almost no one came forward to offer any information about this vile act.

Now, it seems that everyone’s eyes are on this hamlet best known for its dying industrial base and as the birthplace of famed gambler Jimmy the Greek.

Prior to this national shaming, it seemed as if nothing could bring down the “Big Red” spirit. To wit, here’s the opening line from the “investigative” piece from the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

It’s Monday, and ominous-looking clouds are pushing over Harding Stadium as dozens of football players in practice jerseys prepare to take on Cleveland’s Benedictine Bengals.

But this day two key players are missing from the field.

Right. Because that’s the news. We’re missing two key players from this “Championship-Bound” group of extraordinary young gentlemen. Never mind that the story also notes that several players linked to this shameful act were still PLAYING ON THE TEAM at the time this was written.

Talk about a joke…

If you want to spend 12 of the creepiest minutes of your life, watch the video. Usually, when someone tells me something is “extremely disturbing” they’re trying to warn me off about a blood-soaked scene, an obscenity laced tirade or a speech Mitt Romney is giving. In any of those cases, I can eat a ham sandwich and watch it no problem.

This one? No way. I saw it twice and that was three times too many.

The worst part was that this kid and most of his friends were in no way empathetic. They laughed. They cracked jokes. They sipped beverages out of Styrofoam cups while musing about how little this girl's life mattered.

When a friend asked, “What if it was your daughter?” Nodianos replied, “It’s not.”

Well, I have a daughter.

She’s seven.

I worry every day about what’s going to happen to her.

When I see assholes like these strutting around like roosters, proclaiming the awesomeness of someone else’s daughter being brutalized, every ounce of fear and rage I have heightens in my desperation to protect her.

The kid recording all this said he planned to watch this video every day.

I hope he does. I hope it eventually sinks in what actually happened to this girl.

I don’t know if that kid or Nodianos or any of the other vidiots can be charged with a crime. At the very least, I wish they would be forced to stand in front of their peers, the school administrators, the parents and the loved ones of everyone in their school at some giant assembly.

Then, I want someone to play this whole video on a projection screen as they stand there and watch how people stare at them in horror and disgust.

I want every college recruiter and every employer who Googles these pecker-heads to have that video pop up front and center so they can see exactly what they had to say about how “raped” this poor child was.

I hope they do have families and then have to explain to their kids why Daddy was laughing in that video about the hurt girl. I also want them to simply have to worry about people like them being out there, all too ready to take advantage of an incapacitated child.

I’ll bet all of that would just be downright hilarious.

'All of it is an act of love'

Go. Read. NOW. 

There was something disturbing about Romeo and Juliet’s relationship—if you can even call it that. Within less than a week, they profess their undying love to each other and get hitched. Juliet delivers her famous “parting is such sweet sorrow” line, and the next time Romeo sees her, she’s unconscious from a potion that was designed to work for 42 hours, just enough time to trick her family into thinking she’s dead so that she won’t have to go through with the arranged marriage to Paris. Romeo, with whom she has had about three conversations, was supposed to find her alive and whisk her away to a life totally cut off from her friends and family for all of eternity. GOOD PLAN.

I think we celebrate tortured romance in art because conflict is inherently dramatic, whereas doing the laundry for 20 years really ... isn't, but we've fallen down somewhere when our ideal of love is agony. Worse than that, is uncertainty: Do you know how exhausting it is to be with someone you're not certain of? It's so exhausting. It doesn't leave you room to have a life of your own because you're so busy watching your own soap opera. Some of my Facebook acquaintances, I don't know how they hold down jobs and still have time to keep track of who lied to them about who was still sleeping with his ex even though he promised last time was the last time and whatever. 

Before Mr. A I kept auditioning losers and wondering why it wasn't working, and I'm talking about a cokehead poet and a guy who made a lot of money and thought that was as good a reason as any to order me around. In actual fact none of those relationships were designed to be relationships at all. They were designed to be sideshows, distractions from life. They weren't life. They weren't about building a home or a life or a place or anything bigger than ourselves together. It's no wonder we would end up making each other miserable even though we had all kinds of chemistry and things in common. We didn't have a life in common, and we didn't know how to make one. We didn't even really know we had to. 

A lot of our ideas about love are poisonous. It's not just the "love is drama and heights of ecstasy and depths of despair." It's the "love is HARD WORK" stuff, too. People say relationships are work, that marriage is work. They usually mean drudgery, like ha ha, sometimes he wants to watch the game instead of Sex and the City with you. But work is joyful, work is purposeful, work gives shape to your waking hours and improves the world around you, or at least it should. It should reward you as much as it wears you out.
It should be the good kind of worn, like after a hard workout, when your muscles are tingling and you feel like you could go another mile even though you know in a minute you'll collapse into the embrace of a pizza. If it just grinds you down, if you're always watching the clock, if you're making cute little jokes about hanging in there until Friday, you need to find something else to do, and if you're dragging yourself through your relationship with the idea that suck and yawn is what it's supposed to be like, oh God, no it's not. 

I think we spend so much time rationalizing the bad stuff, calling anything that isn't constant implosion boring, making the lows about the corresponding highs as if the latter justifies the former, we overlook all the ways in which love is every day: 

I think there’s another kind of cherishing that is possible, one that doesn’t kill us. Last month, I went with my parents to the dentist to get a cavity filled. My mother went to get some groceries while my father and I were in the waiting room. I noticed that he had his phone clipped to his belt.

“That looks so dumb,” I said.

“Well, I don’t miss your mother’s calls this way.”

A. 

Not That I Shopped There Anyway ...

But suck it, Hobby Lobby. 

They've always been sanctimonious assholes and look, at times convenience overrides my conscience and I go get something somewhere because it's cheaper or closer, but this kind of thing's a no-brainer. These people, and the pizza dicks, and everybody else braying all day long about their religious freedom, are just begging for attention. They don't actually want to help anybody, they're not actually concerned about their immortal souls, and they can't see the difference between the freedom to do what they want to do (like, don't take birth control pills if you think they're putting you in danger of hell) and the ability to coerce others into behaving like you would. Giving someone coverage for something is not the same as mandating they do it, whereas denying them coverage may well prohibit it. 

To Michael's for yarn I shall go. 

A. 

Without A Sidearm

What the fuck do they think goes on in black neighborhoods? 

The finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, who also was Michigan’s former GOP chairman, was captured on video telling a tea party meeting that voters in Detroit get picked up at pool halls and barbershops and bused “from precinct to precinct where they vote multiple times.”

Ron Weiser also said at the Aug. 9 meeting in Milford that someone not from Detroit would not want to go to the polls there at 6:30 a.m. “without a side arm.”

I hear this miserable fraidy-cat shit all the time and it is becoming a THING with me, like what do you think, nobody's at the polls with their coffee and their friends in Detroit because Teh Negroes live there and their ways are strange to us all? Not fellow humans, are they, who are voting before work and then going to work and going home and having dinner and trying to get the kids to bed on time and watch Idol and go back and do it all the next day? 

You wouldn't go to the polls in Detroit without a sidearm? Fool, ain't nobody nowhere gonna screw with you UNLESS you show up all aggro and packing your Wal-Mart arsenal. Otherwise you're just some other dude and you're not bothering them one bit. I've been in just about every neighborhood in the city of Chicago at just about every time of the day and night, and not once did anything happen to me that could remotely be construed as threatening. I got invited to a self-confessed gang member's birthday party once. A coke dealer gave me directions when I was lost. Those are the scariest things that have ever happened to me in neighborhoods that appear regularly in the police blotter. 

(I regularly do just the stupidest shit. Last night after dark I drove out to meet a fellow who'd advertised some furniture on Craigslist. As I drove my car into his locked storage lot behind his creepy van, it occurred to me that this was pretty much the plot of every third Morgan Freeman movie, but hey, too late. The furniture was great, the guy was nice, his price was fair, and he offered to deliver it free of charge. Horror.) 

Am I lucky? You fucking bet I am. Could I have been raped and murdered that night or any one of a hundred nights and days when I've been driving around places we've allowed to decay until they look like demilitarized zones? Absolutely. You know what else could happen? I could get pasted all over the freeway by a semi truck out of control. I could drop dead of a heart attack while jogging. I still drive and I still jog and the universe is random and horrible so you tell me where this kind of thinking leads. I'm a grown-up. I lock my doors at night. I live where I live because I believe it's as safe as can be found within the limits of how I want to live. But I try not to live like there's some magic line somewhere that's going to protect me because there just fucking isn't. 

It makes me insane, the way we wall ourselves off from one another and act like it HAS to be that way. It drives me up a fucking tree, hearing people put limits on their movements because of absolute bullshit. Yes, you can drive there safely. Yes, you can park your car there. Yes, you can order from that restaurant. Yes, you can live your life as if you're not shit-stupid and scared of people who don't look like you. These are CHOICES you're making. Own that at least. Give yourself that much credit. This isn't me saying you need to seek out the most Beirut-like place to live. This is me saying you can venture places without a sidearm, if you want, because it's up to you. 

And think about this: If you're scared to VISIT someplace, why are you okay with anyone living there? Statistically the people who live in these places are far more likely to be the victims of crimes than those just passing through, so where do you get off exactly muttering darkly about where you won't go and what you think happens there? 

Apparently if you're the bag of fuck cited above, you get off before you get anywhere near anything new, so your beautiful mind doesn't have to be troubled by it. 

A. 

How Did You Learn to be a Homo in Your Day?

Apparently they teach Kids Today in school now! 

“So, here you are, you’re an animal and you’re a god! So, what are we going to teach you about in school? Well, we can teach you about sex, we can teach you how to rebel to you[sic] parents, we can teach you how to be a homo! But we’re definitely not going to teach you about the word of God! Amen.”

I'm furious. Not on my own behalf, although it might have been nice to get some lessons in before encountering actual gays in the wild. Mostly I'm furious on behalf of my friends who had to do ALL THIS EXTRA WORK teaching me how to be a homo. 

I mean they had to teach me EVERYTHING. Paying bills on time, applying for jobs, catching the bus, gathering in liquor-serving establishments with friends, going on dates, playing instruments ... it took FOREVER. Some of them took me to movies and bought popcorn to demonstrate how it was done. Hell, a couple of them even had to get married and raise a damn kid together around me. They had a Fourth of July barbecue and all. They bought a house. 

What a tremendous amount of effort. Kids today are freaking spoiled. They don't know how good they have it. 

A. 

The Stomach

Framing, by the Very Liberal New York Times: 

The new inflation calculations, for instance, would probably not affect wounded veterans and disabled people on Supplemental Security Income. And Mr. Obama is sticking by his request for additional upfront spending on infrastructure and an extension of expiring unemployment benefits.

He would also secure some tax and policy changes long sought by both parties but unattainable in the context of smaller budget deals. His proposal would permanently extend popular tax breaks like the credit for corporate research and development, permanently stop the alternative minimum tax so it does not expand to affect more of the middle class, and stop a long-planned and deep cut to Medicare health providers, which Congress has never shown the stomach to allow to kick in.

It is always the height of political courage to fuck over old, poor or old and poor people. Taking care of them, of course, involves no bravery at all. 

I hate just about everything right now. Somebody show me a kitten. 

A. 

The Idiocy

Courtesy of friend of the blog Hobbes.

She's a great artist. I may have helped with the text on this one.

Puny God

I've spent approximately six minutes on Facebook in the last 72 hours. Treacly remembrances of things make me crazy, appropriation of other people's pain to make oneself feel important makes me crazier, and in the history of everything there has never been an intelligent discussion of anything on Facebook. It's the butthole of the Internet. I like mine because I like memes and pictures of my friends, but Christ almighty, sometimes I want to set two thirds of it on fire. 

In those six minutes I managed to see this about nine times:

Forget arguing the actual point, because there isn't one beyond modern Christianity's eager self-martyrdom reality show. Let's talk about this:

SOMEBODY CAN KEEP YOUR GOD OUT OF SOMEPLACE HE WANTS TO BE?

Really? Your God listens to the Supreme Court? People ON the Supreme Court don't listen to the Supreme Court, but your God obeys them? Your God takes orders from the Freedom From Religion Foundation? Your God listens to that dick who has to inject his lack of belief into every conversation about everything from recipes to road head? Your God is cowed by that? Even other atheists think Richard Dawkins is an asshole, but your God takes one look at an op-ed of his and turns tail and runs?

What kind of pathetic weak-ass God do you worship, anyway? A God who needs national approval to show up in the schoolyard and help out kids who are being bullied and beaten and stabbed and shot? A God who needs an official memo complete with TPS report cover to get His job done that day? A God who respects a lock on the door, a bar on the window, a sign that says go away?

Have you ever read the Scriptures you claim to revere?

That God drew water from the rock, parted the seas, raised the dead from their graves, smashed the cruel and corrupt. That God swept down over the earth and uprooted tyrants, freed slaves, inspired nations, lifted up the widow and the orphan, all before His daily Chipotle run. That God was here for the ones who wanted Him, sure, but He was there for everybody else, too, and certainly wasn't waiting for an engraved invitation to get shit done. His Son declared that He had sheep not of this flock, and that no one, no one at all, would go to the Father except through Him, that He was there for everyone. He didn't ignore the people who rejected Him, wag His finger and cluck that He told them so and they'd be sorry.

He forgave them their rejection and welcomed them to His cosmic party no matter how late they came or how lousy their hostess gifts were. That was the WHOLE FECKING IDEA.

That's the God worthy of worship, not this petulant bastard who whines that He didn't even WANT to be in your stupid school anyway, and if a bunch of kids get shot then GOOD because it proves His point. I don't know who'd want to worship that jackass. I wouldn't sit next to Him on the subway, much less build Him a temple and name Him my king.

A.

Waiting for the End of the World

In my day, people with root cellars filled with guns, butter and likker or backyard bomb shelters were called survivalists. They're now called "preppers," which is a term that I'd never heard of until today. It turns out that Nancy Lanza, the mother of the mass murdering Newtown monster, was a prepper.

Nancy Lanza, whose gun collection was raided by her son Adam for Friday’s massacre at Sandy Hook school, was part of the “prepper” movement, which urges readiness for social chaos by hoarding supplies and training with weapons.

“She prepared for the worst,” her sister-in-law Marsha Lanza told reporters. “Last time we visited her in person, we talked about prepping – are you ready for what could happen down the line, when the economy collapses?”

Paranoid mother, crazy son, it now makes a sick sort of sense. Logic obviously had nothing to do with this mayhem but the great explainers in the MSM are already trying to turn this into a "teachable moment." Step away from that thought, y'all. Nothing teachable here other than assault weapons are lethal and shouldn't be in the hands of preppers, survivalists or whatever you want to call them.

The most perplexing thing  about today's revelation is that a small and very prosperous town of the sort that is usually known for preppies is now known for prepper madness. I guess Stephen Stills got it right back in the 1960's when he wrote, "paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep."He wrote those lyrics before he worked closely with David Crosby who had a cocaine driven descent into paranoid gun toting madness in the 1980's.

I've never liked guns, never owned one or even lived in a house with anything beyond a squirt gun or cap pistol. My Republican father carried one for 3 years during World War II and never wanted guns around.I have no problem with responsible gun owners-and they do exist- but I wish more of them would speak out against the NRA, which has morphed during my lifetime into a doomsday cult worthy of the People's Temple.

I get frustrated with the predictable back and forth that always follows a massacre such as this. I *wish* it would lead to sensible gun control legislation but there's nothing sensible about the Newtown Massacre or about the gun culture itself.

I don't usually favor symbolic actions but I'm glad that Dianne Feinstein plans to go back to the future,as it were, and push to restore the assault weapons ban. I have no illusions that it will pass the Senate let alone the Teabagger controlled House, but sometimes you've just got to take a stand and this is one of those times.

Does anyone seriously imagine that the framers envisioned  military-style weapons in the hands of some whackadoodle loser with Mommy issues? I would hope not. I also don't recall the NRA or Huckabees and Gohmerts of the world challenging the assault weapons ban in court, which would have been litigation that only Wayne LaPierre or Nino Scalia could love. I know Justice Scalia is an opera buff. I wonder if his taste extends to Wagner and not just to Rossini and Verdi...

Circling back to Senator Feinstein. This is a rare Senator who has personal experience with gun violence. I'll never forget her announcing the murders of Moscone and Milk in 1978. After that and Jonestown, which occurred not long before, I was concerned that we really could be:

 

It's Always Time to Talk About Shit That Doesn't Matter

I keep going back to this, from the brilliant Cleolinda: 

(Here's my thought on that in a nutshell: Violent movies and videogames do not make people violent. Violent people are attracted to violent media. Of course, so are many of the rest of us, just for different reasons. I ended up watching The Matrix about 46,000 times--at one point on a three-day loop--for the book, and I shot nobody. If you want to talk about warning signs, don't look at the kid's taste in movies or his literary output--look at those two things in the context of his real-life behavior, which was already disturbing his teachers and classmates. Stephen King? A folksy, personable guy in real life. Quentin Tarantino? Full of energy and enthusiasm. Consequently, no one expects them to go on shooting rampages. The bitter, stalkative kid who won't even speak when spoken to, who also writes about bloody murder sprees? For God's sake, keep an eye on him.) 

I would never say we don't need to have a less nihilistic, brutal, violent culture. But we can start working on that by refraining from blowing up so many fucking kids in the world and starving them of food and care here at home. Once we are done with that I will listen to you about shooting hookers in GTA or whatever the hell we think is the problem right now. Once we are done making sure everyone can EAT, we can get on to what disaffected suburban brats are reading these days. 

Once we're done with this: 

The police came quickly and carried my son screaming and kicking into the bowels of the hospital. I started to shake, and tears filled my eyes as I filled out the paperwork—“Were there any difficulties with....at what age did your child....were there any problems with...has your child ever experienced...does your child have....”  

At least we have health insurance now. I recently accepted a position with a local college, giving up my freelance career because when you have a kid like this, you need benefits. You’ll do anything for benefits. No individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing.

No individual insurance plan, and until the laughably toothless health care reform passed last year which has been called a staggering overreach of government power, few insurance plans AT ALL. The kinds of intensive therapies children need, even with Cadillac insurance, can bankrupt middle class families. Can bankrupt relatively wealthy families. Can, even if there is money to pay for them and doctors to provide them, can quite simply drag a family under with the grinding, every day process of staying level enough with the horizon to buy groceries and go to school. 

It is one of the grand ironies of what little mental health assistance exists that when you need it most, that is when you are usually so far beyond the beyond that accessing it seems like going to the moon. 

But getting back to Cleolinda's wise words up there, what we're not doing very well right now is creating a nonviolent world for any of us. (I almost wrote "our kids," as if adults have no need of peace and decency.) That violence is not, primarily, on screens or in "the media" or anywhere imaginary, but imaginary violence is all we can seem to bring ourselves to talk about when things like this happen. 

It's all we can bring ourselves to try to address, because real violence, real agents of violence, are political, and controversial, and emotional and upsetting and they're going to make dinner conversation awkward and difficult. Everybody agrees that shooting fictional aliens is probably not the most productive use of anyone's time. Almost nobody agrees on the correct number of children that have to be killed in drone strikes so as to properly elevate our national dick, or how much money we spend turning schools into prisons instead of the other way fucking round. 

It's like there's a list somewhere, of Things We Can Address, and it's all stuff like why so many kids have ADHD, and how parents aren't hugging their children enough, and where precisely in the schoolyard we should stick the plaque proclaiming GOD IS LOVE because that'll fix everything. It's how many teachers need to be armed, and how many cops need to be at every entrance, and the opinion that perhaps we need fewer cops in schools and OH SHIT RIGHT FEWER HOLES IN THE SCHOOLS' ROOFS WHILE WE'RE AT IT never quite makes it through the World of Warcraft soundtrack blaring on every goddamned Sunday show.

(See, already there you go, asking why I have to put it just that way. Can't I use nicer language?)

We have limited ourselves to addressing matters that don't need addressing, so as to drown out the screaming of the things that do. 

A. 

Republicans Also Propose Bill Saying Kittens Fucking Suck

Seriously, what is wrong with these assholes? 

A. 

Oh, NOW You Want a Big Tent

If only you had some kind of power position in the party, or were once its standard-bearer, or something: 

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said that the Republican Party, which lost minority, women and young voters in 2012, needs to have a "bigger tent" during an appearance on "Fox News Sunday."

"I think we have to have a bigger tent," McCain said. "And obviously, we have to do immigration reform. There's no doubt whatsoever that the demographics are not on our side."

Watching these people flail about is really amazing. It's like they just woke up JUST THIS MORNING and oh holy shit, brown people everywhere. Chicks. With their chick bits, which need attention. WHERE DID ALL THIS COME FROM? If only there had been some sign, in the past 40 years, that singing Dixie under your breath wasn't gonna work forever. If only someone had warned them. 

Also I love how they're flat-out stating that it's not that dealing honestly with minorities and women is the right thing to do, or that minorities and women have legitimate needs of any kind. It's that "the demographics are not on our side." In other words, we can't win with just the old white racists anymore so NOW it's a crisis and I guess we HAVE to listen to them, god, the indignity, but what are you going to do? They keep existing and breathing oxygen. Inconvenient. 

"And as far as young women are concerned, absolutely, I don't think anybody like me -- I can state my position on abortion. But to -- other than that, leave the issue alone," McCain said. 

"I'm proud of my pro-life position and record," McCain said, clarifying that he did not mean he was now pro-choice. "But if someone disagrees with me, I respect your views."

Do you respect his or her views enough to allow him or her equal rights under the law? If not, NO YOU DON'T RESPECT MY VIEWS, you colossally panderiffic assclown. 

In other words I love women but I MEAN I DON'T OH GOD PLEASE DON'T PRIMARY ME TEA PARTIERS. So much for the courage to call for a bigger tent. 

Schmuck. 

A. 

Men and Women Must Not Speak, Lest They Screw

A former colleague, Howard Ludwig, writes in his stay-at-home-dad column about some serious insanity overtaking the lifestyle section these days: 

A good number of at-home fathers I know dropped their collective jaws last month after reading an article titled “Navigating Play Dates with Stay-at-Home Dads.”

Wilmette-based Make It Better, an online and print publication for families on the North Shore, produced the article. Tips include avoiding play dates with “a dad you find attractive” and asking your husband to chaperone a play date with a stay-at-home dad and his children.

Now, the article was called to my attention by a group of at-home dads, many of whom actively advocate for full-time fathers. Their reaction mirrored my own, which was equal parts astonishment and feeling offended. One of my buddies even referenced the article on his Facebook page and changed his status to read, “I’m too sexy for your play date.”

Like we're not already paranoid. Now every guy taking his kids to the playground is a potential sex pervert? Christ. 

And a CHAPERONE? I get how going blind on tequila with somebody you secretly think is a babe is probably a bad idea, but "HUNNY, come along to the jungle gym with me and the kids so I don't accidentally make out with Dadster McHottie over by the swings?" Really? 

(Also, apparently lesbian moms are not a threat, though you would think, if being around someone who could potentially want to sex you was cause for concern, this would be an issue, too.) 

It's one thing to say to YOURSELF that perhaps the texting with the guy down the street is getting out of hand and you should back it off. It's another to view even the presence of menfolk as a de facto temptation. The idea that men and women can't be friends because mere proximity sets off some kind of MUST SCREW NOW beacon needs to die a bloody, painful, most of all quick death. Then we can stake it, cut off its head, bury it at the crossroads, salt the earth, buy a spaceship, and nuke the site from orbit just to be sure.

I hate this trope. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it. It's demeaning to women, it's demeaning to men, it advances dangerously sexist nonsense about how we're separate species who can only speak through interpreters, and it teaches us not to trust each other because OMG SEXING. If we don't think of one another as people, how can we have any expectation of respect? 

Yes, high-pressure situations can blur boundaries and yes, people cheat on each other all the time, but none of those situations are occasioned by geography. We're not guinea pigs, where if you put us in the same aquarium we have to hump. 

A. 

I Didn't Fight For Your Freedom

A re-post from a couple of years ago that I hope, some day, never needs to be said again.

 

Nope. No freedom being defended here.

So it's Veterans Day, which means that the US is awash with mostly obligatory tributes to military personnel. 

I hate this shit.

I didn't fight for your freedoms.  In the six years I was in, I never once defended your right to vote, or to carry a gun, or to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure (that one doesn't really apply anymore, anyway), or any of the other things you enjoy as a citizen of this country.  I just didn't.  Neither did anyone who went to Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam.  It's all bullshit.  It's a fucking lie that we tell ourselves and each other so that we don't have to think about why we send young men and women to serve, suffer, and die for old men's vainglorious ideas and profit margins.

I passed through Burlington, WI on Saturday to visit their annual chocolate festival.  Who could say no to that, right?  Well, while there (this being Wisconsin), I got myself a beer.  To do so, you had to put up with the shitty metal cover band in the beer tent.  There's a 45-year-old lead singer acting a fool--pouring beer on his own goddamned head, making dumb-ass sexist remarks, saying stupid shit about his teen-aged daughter, etc.  Since that wasn't reprehensible enough, he then proceeded to thank all the veterans in the crowd, specifically pointing out one man whose--well, I'll just quote this asshole.

I wanna thank all of our veterans for what they do for us.  Every guy in the band, our fathers were all in the military.  My dad was in Korea!  This guy right here in front--his son is in Iraq right now.  He's over there FIGHTIN' FOR OUR RIGHT TO PARTY!

I wanted to rush the stage and strangle that fuck with a microphone cord. 

It's all bullshit, folks.  We don't do anything for anyone's freedom.  The military hasn't actually deployed en masse to defend your freedom in a long, long time.  Unless you call rich people fucking over the world's poor and powerless a form of freedom.  As you may have guessed, I don't.  It's bullshit.  And it needs to stop. 

I don't mind honoring sacrifice, but the military doesn't have a monopoly on that, now does it?  I also don't mind remembering military dead and wounded.  But we do it all wrong.  We just fetishize the suffering (like good Catholics, no?) without wondering why it ever happened in the first place.  Remembrance and memorial, it would seem, also involve reflection and assessment.  Just because someone died or was wounded doesn't automatically validate how he or she came to be in that state.  We send our young people overseas to be bored, pull duty, sometimes get shot at, and occasionally get hit.  Then we never ask why they're over there in the first fucking place, because doing so, apparently, does them a disservice.  What kind of jack shit is that? 

A real Veterans/Remembrance Day would involve commitments to cease sacrifices that don't actually, you know, do anything in the name of freedom.  Losing your legs so that Chevron can see higher profit margins is not noble.  It's a god damned shame.  Dying in the service of defense contractors doesn't bestow sainthood on the deceased.  It just means that a life got snuffed out for no good reason.  Reflexive military worship is a cancer on society.  Unscrupulous people use it to justify their actions and avoid any criticism.  That shit makes the act of asking why we should send young people to absorb bullets and get blown to pieces into some kind of subversion and/or sedition.  How fucking ridiculous is that?  Wondering if someone's death was worth the cost doesn't dishonor the person.  I don't know how we've confused evaluating the motives and actions of leaders with spitting on corpses, but we have.  And until we can untangle those things, we're just well and truly fucked when it comes to international affairs.

So this Veterans Day, take a minute to actually reflect on the acts and deeds of people in uniform.  But that involves critical thought instead of blind acceptance of the rightness of our leaders' actions.  Honor the dead and care for the living, but don't think that people in uniform today are actually standing between you and tyranny. 

Remember that.

Further Adventures In Social Media; or, We Just Can't Be Educated

Instead of engaging these dopes, I think I'm just going to have this. ALL OF THIS.

Well, I'm back for one more pre-election go with Adventures In Social Media.  Please kill me now.  Anyway, today I bring up an acquaintance from high school, who gives us the following:

 

I just stopped at this point.

Folks, that guy is under the impression that he was right.  If there are any of you out there who think that this world can actually see a riot that "upholds violence," please--take a few minutes to say goodbye to your family and friends, then swallow your cyanide pill. 

And the hell of it is, I didn't even bring up the RACIST AS FUCK underlying assumption.  Hmmm...what could it possibly be about Obama supporters that would make these crackers think that they're more prone to mindless violence.  What could it be?  What could they be assuming?

You know what they're assuming--the same thing white folks have been assuming for almost half a millennium in this fucked-up part of the world.  They assume that BLACK PEOPLE ARE NOT RATIONAL HUMANS.  Period.  End of story.  End of fucking story.  That's been a constant trope for centuries now: the wild savage blood, the jungle lust, the frantic dancing and trance-like states of The Negro mean that they're not nearly as intellectually advanced as us calm white folks.  These people are so familiar with it they don't even recognize it.  You know, like how a fish is unaware of water.  But the unstated assumption is just hanging there for anyone with eyes to see.

I didn't even call them out, because they would instantly deny that they could ever think such a thing, and then I'd hear a chorus of how I'm the real racist because I think they're racist, and I'd blow my fucking brains out. 

So thus ends my pre-election jaunt through social media.  It's done a good job of convincing me that education is a lost cause.  If you need me, I'll be over by the liquor cabinet.