A Podcast

Wanna glimpse of what a CEO Presidency would look like?  Cast your eyeballs on Gov Rauner in Illinois. (at about the 36:00 mark)

Go Baphamet

The Christianistas continue to trip over their own dicks.  They seem to have become completely isolated inside their little bubble.  They've sold themselves on the rhetorical non-sense of "America is a Christian nation and the federal government was founded on Judeo-Christian values etc etc etc".  They believe it, and they're convinced everybody else believes it too, and so they're just charging ahead (like Greaves says) without stopping to think that the all-important First Amendment thing that gives them the right to preach their version of "the truth" cuts the same for everybody else too.

From Raw Story:

This week, the state of Missouri’s draconian 72-hour waiting period for an abortion was in the spotlight again when a conservative state legislator made it clear he would try and stop a graduate student from studying the wait period’s impact on women.

But conservative Christians who have been pushing these ideologically-driven policies may have created their own demise without realizing it. The Satanic Temple sprung up to challenge the attempts to turn the United States into a Christian theocracy. And as the constitutional activists point out, they fight theocracy using the same laws and legal arguments pushed by conservative Christians.

“We’re fighting an enemy now that hasn’t had to think things through, and that’s what gives us such an advantage,” said Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves in an interview with The Raw Story. “They’re used to being the only beneficiaries of the privileges that they have fought for, and that kind of monopoly has made them complacent, stupid and weak, and it’s just made it that much easier for us to come in and assert ourselves the way we have.”

As for me, on the whole Abortion Issue, I think I know maybe 4 things:

1. A caterpillar is not a butterfly.
2. A tadpole is not a frog.
3. A fertilized chicken egg is not a chicken.
4. Nothing that's going on in my daughter's uterus is any of your god-dammed business, so fuck the fuck off, motherfucker.

New Music

Madisen Ward and (his mom) The Mama Bear

Silent Movies
Sorrows and Woes
Daisy Jane

Dead Daffodils

Skeleton Crew (full album)

Today's Toons

Thanks For Clearing That Up

Month 11, Day 11, Hour 11

Pix N Toons

By Way Of The KrugMan

Gotta love it when the facts are so obviously stacked against the Right Radicals.  Of course, this will only mean that the Librul Press is lying again in order to make their Dear Leader look good etc etc etc.

Fun to imagine it'll make some small difference tho.

From WaPo via Paul Krugman:

Between the January he took office and the January he left it, private sector employment declined by 463,000 and government employment increased by 1.7 million.

President Obama, by contrast, has seen a net change in private sector jobs of 9.3 million, as of the new jobs report out on Friday morning -- and that's even after the dip due to the recession. Government jobs, meanwhile, are down 591,000. 

Only In Politics

...and only in USAmerica Inc.

We decided that all anybody needs in order to do anything well is a little common sense.  

So now we have people with no education or experience in Education who're making decisions on what should go on in our schools.

We have people with no education or experience in Law or Law Enforcement or Corrections who're making decisions on what should go on in our "Justice" System.

And and and.

Why does anybody have to wonder why we get some of the candidates we're getting from a certain end of the political spectrum?

And so - 

I'll stick with my assertion that we're looking at a high probable for Jeb/Kasich 2016.

Florida and Ohio.  Not sure it's enough for them this time, but that's gotta be on lotsa minds in what's left of the GOP's Executive Suite right now; along with trying to figure out how to blow off Trump and Carson without losing the fervor of their voters. 

Unfortunately, the problem of disappointed primary voters failing to show up for the general election may be less of a problem now that it seems Gerrymandering and Voter Suppression, and maybe some straight-up illegal schemes for manipulating the results are starting to show signs of success.

eg: It bodes well for the GOP to get a 9-point landslide win in Kentucky for a Repub Governor candidate who was polling 3-5 points down almost literally hours before the polls opened, combined with the fact that lots of Dems on the down-ballot got elected.  

BTW, we prob'ly won't actually do anything about that because that would require us to make a fucking decision and stand up for something, which is scary and it might cost us half of our Facebook friends and so we won't be doing any of that.

Anyway, just to complete the circuit - always mindful that Right Radicals play the long game because politically nefarious things need to progress slowly so as not to cause needless alarm - let's remember that it's likely that Jeb's guys fucked with things in Florida in 2000 to put W in office, and I can't dismiss the thought of some kinda double-digit plausibility that it was Kasich's guys who fucked with things in Ohio* in 2004 to keep W in office.  I'm sure they both feel they've been waiting rather patiently for the big payoff, and now's the time to step up to the window and collect their winnings.

I guess we'll see what we'll see when we see it.

*update: Ohio passed a thingie aimed at "fixing" the Gerrymandering problem, so that's gotta be seen as good news, assuming something gets done before Nov 2016 - uuhmm yeah, prob'ly not.  But hey, we can hope.

Redefining

Here's a weird little blast from the past - and there's a bit in here that's been eatin' at me for a while.

First - at about 6:00, when Huck makes the claims about how he wants his faith to be questioned?  That sounds a whole lot like good old Sales Training shit - I think he 'welcomes the feedback' so he can be looking for ways to anticipate the objections and get a few plausible-sounding bromides handy for rebuttal.

But that ain't the big one - here's the big one - starting around the 8-minute mark:
Guys like Huckabee are always slicing it nice and thin when it comes to the question of an all-loving god, especially when you try to make the point about sin and evil and why are there so many shitty people doing so many shitty things?  If god is god, then why do we have to fix all this shit?  The apologists always flop straight over into the Free Will of the Godly Volunteer thing - god loves us so he set it up so we can choose our fate by choosing to love god back or to reject god's love - and after all, if he forces his love on us, then he'd be raping us blah blah blah.  

Wait just one fuckin' minute, bub.

Problem - rape isn't only a situation where the rapist physically assaults the victim.  There's that little thing called coercion too.  And that becomes a huge problem if you then ask, "Isn't god really trying to force himself on us by threatening to send us to hell for an eternity of suffering if we spurn his advances?"

Set aside for a minute the bullshit deflection that "we decide to send ourselves to hell if we decide not to love god", and let's concentrate on the real point.  The real point here is that now we've got a Beyond-Even-Bill-Cosby level problem with a Rapist God - and btw, if Mary really didn't have much choice about whether or not she'd go along with the idea of getting knocked up by a coercive god, then doesn't that make Jesus the product of rape?  And then, all of a sudden, we've got the Son Of God born of sin - and holy fuck, man - this is  some kinda big fuckin' trouble right here.

Enter the TheoCons.  How many Repubs have found themselves in hot water because some dumbass thing or another fell outa their tater traps when they were trying to make a point about rape?

They needed to save Jesus so they needed a new definition for rape, and they decided to hide these cynical maneuverings and manipulations by fucking with the rights of women to make their own decisions for themselves(?)  

And they've been pullin' this kinda shit on our time, on our dime.

Seriously, guys - what the fucking fuck?