I don’t care how hilarious rapist / murderer-releasing, Christian Reconstructionist- supported, Man-On-Dog wannabe, former Arkansas governor, and Baptist minister-without-a-theology-degree Mike Huckabee thinks he is, this isn’t funny. We’ve already seen the yahoo vote unapologetic about the fact that they’d never vote for a black man — and plenty of them have an NRA card.

During a speech before the National Rifle Association convention Friday afternoon in Louisville, Kentucky, former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee — who has endorsed presumptive GOP nominee John McCain — joked that an unexpected offstage noise was Democrat Barack Obama looking to avoid a gunman.

“That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he’s getting ready to speak,” said the former Arkansas governor, to audience laughter. “Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.”

After all, look at what a Freeper posted yesterday in response to the marriage equality ruling in California. These folks are sick.

38 posted on Thursday, May 15, 2008 1:37:53 PM by Lancey Howard

Related:
* Noose found at Secret Service training center
* Dallas: weapons screening halted at Obama rally
* Other posts on the security breach

I’m really starting to wonder whether this level of stupidity and batsh*ttery by the Right — as they watch their political fortunes swirl the bowl because of Bush’s legacy — has completely untethered them from reality. Take a look at this unbelievable nonsense by Bill O’Reilly, who went on a tirade about the fact that Markos Moulitsas (Kos of Daily Kos) has a Newsweek column, and that O’Reilly was embarrassed that Markos ran a clip of the Faux News blowhard going ape on camera during his old Inside Edition days.

What’s even more entertaining is the bile O’Reilly’s fans unleashed into Markos’ mailbox — out comes the violent schooyard faggotry taunts from the intellectual giants. A sampling is below the fold.
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And I thought Bush’s lie that he gave up golf in solidarity out of respect for U.S. soldiers killed in the war was the winner of the dumbassery remark of the year. Boy was I wrong.

PZ Myers at Pharyngula points to an incredible statement by the movie critic, right-wing Clown Hall writer and radio show host. First, I love PZ’s opening.

Did someone declare this National Flaming Racist Idiot week, and I just didn’t notice until now? You have got to read Michael Medved’s latest foray into pseudoscience: he has declared American superiority to be genetic, encoded in our good old American DNA. Because our ancestors were immigrants, who were risk-takers, who were selected for their energy and aggressiveness. Oh, except for those who are descended from slaves.

Oh yes, Medved did, friends. I guess the best thing we can say about the following statement is that he probably wasn’t emitting the spittle Pat “A Brief for Whitey” Buchanan did yesterday when he was on Hardball. Medved even makes the gutsy move of explaining that the DNA shaped by our borders and risk-taking requires governing by Republican policies:

The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide - between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here, and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self-selection based on personality traits.

…Senators Obama, Clinton and other leaders who seek to enlarge the scope of government face more formidable obstacles than they realize. Their desire to impose a European-style welfare state and a command-and-control economy not only contradicts our proudest political and economic traditions, but the new revelations about American DNA suggest that such ill-starred schemes may go against our very nature.

Wow. Talk about junk science — so now Americans are a “race”? Holy smoke, this is incredible. Actually, Medved’s working from the same playbook as Buchanan — slavery was a good thing for the darkies, after all, those bringing the slaves over as cargo didn’t have genocide on their minds, they needed that cargo alive because good hard money was paid for them.

Estimates remain inevitably imprecise, but range as high as one third of the slave “cargo” who perished from disease or overcrowding during transport from Africa. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean. By definition, the crime of genocide requires the deliberate slaughter of a specific group of people; slavers invariably preferred oppressing and exploiting live Africans rather than murdering them en masse.

H/t, Oliver Willis.

(UPDATE: The GOP is in a panic over the legacy of this administration and its effect on November elections. See below the fold.)

We all know Dear Leader has no shame, but here’s yet another example of his terror alert leash jerking and fearmongering, intimating that electing a Democrat will lead to disaster if the U.S. withdraws from Iraq.

President Bush warned in an interview Tuesday that the Democratic presidential candidates’ plans to withdraw abruptly from Iraq could “eventually lead to another attack on the United States” and would “embolden” terrorists.

In a White House interview with Politico and Yahoo News — a president’s first for an online audience — Bush said his doomsday scenario for a premature withdrawal “of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States.”

I hate to break it to his highness, but he f*cked up the whole region with his Big Military Adventure. It’s hard to imagine anyone screwing over both this country and Iraq any more than he has.

In the interview, he also shows how he prays away any guilt at sending young Americans to perish fighting military battles based on his bad judgment and Darth’s dark hand. God’s comfort is all these families need, not an apology from the man sitting in the Oval Office.

His Christian faith has increased in office, since “part of the faith walk is to understand your weaknesses and is to constantly try to embetter yourself and get closer to the Lord, and that’s a daily occurrence.”

“Obviously, there’s been some tough moments in here,” he said. “When you know that somebody lost their loved one as a result of a decision that I made, that’s a tough moment. If you’re a faithful person, you try to empathize with the suffering that that person is going through. On the other hand, there is a knowledge that the good Lord can comfort during these moments of grief. And that’s what I ask for in my prayer.”

And what can only be described as the public ramblings of a sociopath, our president said he shows his solidarity with families who have lost loved ones in his military misadventure by...not going out on the links anymore. I’m not sh*tting you.

See the video below the fold.
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The rapist/murderer-releasing, Christian Reconstructionist-supported, Man-On-Dog wannabe, former Arkansas governor, and Baptist minister-without-a-theology-degree Mike Huckabee is back in the news — at least at U.S. News & World Report, in its Capital Commerce column.

A top McCain fundraiser with access to McCain’s inner circle, as well as one of those infamous “top GOP strategists” are saying that the Arizona senator has Pastor Huck at the top of his VP pick list. U.S. News’s James Pethokoukis on the purported logic of picking Huckabee.

1) He is a great campaigner and communicator who could both shore up support in the South among social conservatives (Huckabee is a former Baptist minister) and appeal to working-class voters in the critical “Big 10″ states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio.

2) As any pollster knows, voters search for candidates who “care about people like me,” and Huckabee would probably score a lot higher on that quality than millionaire investor Mitt Romney. Plus, given all the turmoil on Wall Street, 2008 would seem to be a bad year to pick a former investment banker for veep.

3) Economic conservatives and supply-siders may balk, but the threat of four years of Obamanomics and higher investment, income, and corporate taxes might be enough to keep them on board.

More below the fold.
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Washington University students and faculty are in an uproar over the decision to award anti-gay, anti-feminist Eagle Forum fossil Phyllis Schlafly an honorary doctorate at its May 16 commencement ceremony. A Facebook group created to protest the move has over a thousand members.

Mary Ann Dzuback, the director of the women and gender studies department at Washington University agreed, said it was “grossly inappropriate” for the university to honor Schlafly with a degree.

“She’s spent her entire career speaking against women in the workforce and for them remaining in the home,” Dzuback said of Schlafly, who rose to prominence during the successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.

…The university issued a statement Sunday defending its decision, saying it — like many other universities — chooses to honor those “who have become a part of the broad public discourse on vital issues of the times.” The statement cited other controversial figures, such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whom the school has honored.

Steve Ralls of PFLAG National:

PFLAG and our St. Louis chapter are proud to join those on the ground in Missouri and call on school officials to do the right thing and, as executive director Jody Huckaby said today, “find a more suitable person to applaud.”

Steve also points out some of Mother Schlafly’s winning cultural touchstones:

On California’s SB-77, to protect GLBT students: The legislation “represent[s] a repudiation of 2,000 years of Christian moral teaching on human sexuality, marriage, and the family. The result is that California’s schools are now promoting behaviors and lifestyles that are physically and spiritually dangerous for children.”

On the idea of any protections for GLBT youth: “The bottom line is, don’t count on the courts to protect public school students from being subjected to the promotion of homosexuality.”

On sexual harassment laws: “Sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women.”

Yeah. I think they could locate someone who isn’t terminally frozen in the dark ages.

Out. Of. Control. Dateline Kamloops, British Columbia - Three Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers apparently couldn’t subdue an elderly patient. The sadistic sickness continues. BTW, you can see pics of the man’s stun gun burns at the CBC site.

Frank Lasser, 82, appeared fragile Thursday when he showed the stun gun marks on his body and talked about the ordeal he went through Saturday.

“They [police] should have known I had bypass surgery,” Lasser told CBC News.

Lasser has had heart surgery and needs to carry an apparatus to supply oxygen at all times. He was in the Royal Inland Hospital Saturday due to pneumonia but has since been released.

RCMP said nurses called police after Lasser became delirious and pulled a knife out of his pocket.

Lasser told CBC News that he sometimes become delusional when he can’t breathe properly. He said he couldn’t explain why he refused to let go of the knife even after the Mounties arrived.

“I was laying on the bed by then and the corporal came in, or the sergeant, I forget which it was, and said to the guys, ‘OK, get him because we got more important work to do on the street tonight,’” Lasser said.

The article also refers to the Taser as “the conducted energy weapon.”

Hat tip, Shane.

The Blend Taser files.

Last night in another thread, I commented again about how poorly Hillary Clinton has been served by her hired campaign guns. Of course, the senator has stuck her foot in her mouth on her own as well, but nothing compares to this. From a new USA Today interview, she manages to top any dog-whistle race-baiting that her husband put out on the campaign trail with this naked appeal.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

Wow. Just. Wow. That didn’t blow by without comment, even in the article.

Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said Clinton’s comment was a “poorly worded” variation on the way analysts have been “slicing and dicing the vote in racial terms.”

Is that another variation on “misspoke”?

You see the problem and beauty of Senator Clinton’s statement is that it boldly embraces the undiscussed fear in this Reagan Democrat demographic, the people who do consider race a major factor — concern that white privilege is being threatened, that somehow Barack Obama as president would exact retribution against “hard working white Americans” for past or present institutionalized racism. You know, like this candid Kentucky voter:

I’ve talked to people-a woman who was chair of county elections last year, she said she wouldn’t vote for a black man.” Patrick said he wouldn’t vote for Obama either.

Why not?

“Race. I really don’t want an African-American as President. Race.”

What about race?

“I thought about it. I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion.”

The frame is specific — that’s why Clinton referred to hard working white Americans. What happened to “blue collar Americans?” Oh wait, there are a lot of hard working black and brown blue collar/working class Americans, and many of them they voted for Obama, so she had to slice that demo down to the bottom line. Dog whistles no more.

I want to believe that it wasn’t a purposeful slip of the tongue because it’s too painful to contemplate that the black vote is now perceived as a “problem” because it skews to Obama, and because there are more white voters who have a problem with him based on his race, we have to nail that demo.

Remember, the black vote has been the most reliable Democratic vote, not the Reagan Democrats. Black voters don’t turn out for Obama solely because he is black. I’ve blogged before about this bizarre train of thought — if the affinity vote is so powerful we would have seen a bum rush for Alan Keyes. What Clinton is saying is not inaccurate (polls slice and dice this way), but its use here is inappropriate and inflammatory. It’s because the last core demo left for her to appeal to is resistant to Obama for reasons that have little to do with policy differences, or 3 AM readiness. She’s brought the microtarget out into the light and it’s one many of us don’t want to face talking about, with a different name — scared white people.

She is naming her remaining trump card, and considering our country’s pitiful history of not frankly dealing with or discussing race — aside from painful, fumbling defensive fits and starts — we’re left to deal with the fallout of a “poorly worded” statement, lacking a sufficiently stocked toolbox to deal with the ramifications of courting a vote with implicit and explicit biases.

The question never explored is why are these people scared more about a black president (regardless of political viewpoint) than the prospect of a McCain presidency and four more years of failed economic policies that have left this very demographic high and dry? What do we want to do about this as Americans? Apparently nothing, that’s a third rail topic and there’s an election to win.

Naming it means acknowledging problems we haven’t dealt with, and exploding the myth of a post-racial America. Barack Obama may be the first post-racial candidate because of his personal heritage, but the United States of America is nowhere near “post-racial” when it comes to politics.

Need I say more? Now it’s come down to official scrubbing the use and abuse of Tasers by law enforcement. From Ohio, a look at where the police state is going.

A Summit County Common Pleas judge ordered the county medical examiner to delete any reference that Tasers contributed to the deaths of three Ohio men.

All three men were in an ‘agitated’ state and ‘on drugs’ when police officers shot them with Tasers, and the judge ordered their deaths be ruled ‘accidental’ also that any reference to “homicide or “electrical pulse stimulation” should be deleted from death certificates and autopsy reports.”

Five sheriff’s deputies had been indicted on charges related to the death of one of the men, who also had a history of mental illness. The judge further ordered that man’s death be ruled as “undetermined” and to “delete any references to homicide and the death possibly being caused by asphyxia, beatings or other factors.”

Wow. Not only the Taser reference is scrubbed, but all the other kinds of abuses common in police brutality cases! My, my. And yes, someone from Taser International had something to say about the ruling. It’s after the jump.
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Any other country at any other time, and there’d be nothing complex about this:

Democrat Barack Obama took a hit yesterday when rival Hillary Rodham Clinton put up an Indiana TV ad highlighting his opposition to a summer-long suspension of the gas tax. Today he fought back with an ad that says the suspension would save consumers maybe $25 and wouldn’t bring down prices…

I’m here to tell you the truth. We could suspend the gas tax for 6 months, but that’s not going to bring down gas prices long-term. You’re gonna save about 25, 30 dollars…or half a tank of gas. That’s typical of how Washington works. There’s a problem, everybody’s upset about gas prices – let’s find some short-term, quick-fix, that we can say we did something even though, even though we’re not really doing anything.

Democratic support of the gas tax repeal is kind of typical: “We scoffed at Bush in 2000 for offering everyone ‘only’ a $300 refund, but we’re willing to smear each other over $30.” Democrats: Like Republicans, but 1/10th.

And of course, we wouldn’t even get that $30; the Tax Policy Center says prices would rebound almost “immediately.”

“Unless the goal is to temporarily boost profits for petroleum refineries and foreign producers, the proposal makes no sense,” says Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center.

And at least Hillary wants to replace the money with taxes on the oil companies, as unlikely as that notion is. McCain, as far as I know, offers no such compensation. Either way, as Matthew Yglesias notes, this kind of “[policy] gimmickry” is harmful to America:

But when national leaders act as if they believe current fuel costs are a passing phenomenon to be weathered with short-term measures, then at least some voters are going to believe them and make bad personal and political decisions that we can ill afford. A lot of electoral gambits are nonsense without being actually harmful, but McCain and Clinton are making problems worse just with their rhetoric.

(Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to see, say, truck drivers offered a repeal and consumers offered a boost in gas tax, but the average voter who doesn’t drive for a living would have to be crazy to make a gas tax suspension some sort of make-it-or-break-it issue.

The average American voter.

Would have to be…crazy.

Ah, shit.)

In Tennessee, an attempt to curtail PDA in school leads to outing young people. This is wrong on so many levels.

A public high school principal who posted the names of two boys on a list of students believed to be couples, revealing their relationship to their parents as well as other students and teachers, violated the students’ constitutional right to freedom of association, the American Civil Liberties Union charged Tuesday.

In a letter to school board officials in Memphis, the ACLU demanded that the school reprimand the principal and take steps to ensure such actions never happen again.

In September of 2007, the principal at Hollis F. Price Middle College High told teachers she wanted the names of all student couples, “hetero and homo,” because she wanted to monitor them personally to prevent students from engaging in public displays of affection.  

The two students now represented by the ACLU, Andrew and Nicholas (who have asked that their last names not be revealed), were two A students who had been seeing each other for a short time and were attempting to keep their relationship quiet and private. 

So why didn’t my outgoing governor just go ahead and say “faggot“?

ABC News’ Eloise Harper Reports: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton received the endorsement of North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley Tuesday morning in Raleigh, NC. After touring a bio-manufacturing training center, Gov. Easley, First Lady of North Carolina Mary Easley and Clinton held a ceremony at NC State University. The Governor formally expressed his support saying that there was “nothing I love more than a strong powerful woman.” Easley concluded his remarks saying Clinton — “makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy“.

Note that Hillary, who was right there with the NC gov, said nothing about his remark. Of course Easley infamously received the endorsement of Equality NC in his re-election bid, then in a debate said he’d sign a marriage amendment if it hit his desk, so why should we be surprised. And who is Hillary trying to court here — the “traditional Southern conservative.” Take the homo money and run, as it were. (The Politico):

Easley is a meaningful ally in the culture war she’s waging against Senator Barack Obama, as she seeks to cast him as a hopelessly unelectable liberal elitist and to persuade the Democratic Party leaders who will decide the nomination – the “superdelegates” – to choose her instead.

Both of the Dem candidates for governor here have endorsed Barack Obama, btw. I don’t see Easley’s nod to Clinton as significant; what matters are mayors and state reps, and the majority have publicly endorsed Obama as well.

Hillary Clinton was backslapping laughing with the NC governor. The same Hillary Clinton who has sucked millions of dollars out of the LGBT community. The same Hillary Clinton who cannot use the words gay or lesbian in front of general audiences, the same Hillary Clinton who has a web site where there’s no way to find any information on her LGBT positions.

Activist Phil Attey, former Human Rights Campaign staffer and online strategist, had a lot to say. It’s below the fold.

This release landed in my inbox:

Today in his endorsement of Senator Hillary Clinton, Governor Michael Easley of North Carolina ended his speech with an anti-gay epitaph. The hateful and sexist comment was that in his opinion, Senator Clinton makes Rocky Balboa look like a “pansy.” Directly following the word “pansy” the two veteran politicians burst into laughter and then embraced on stage.

When LGBT activists across the country heard this, our jaws literally hit the floor, as did our hearts. Since the Pennsylvania primary, we’ve been concerned that Senator Clinton is now courting and beholden to an anti-gay demographic, but never did we ever expect to be so whimsically made the butt of a joke nor blatantly thrown under the bus by politicians we once revered and some continue to support.

The statement was calculated and hateful. Americans over the age of 50 are fully aware that the word “pansy” is that generation’s polite way of publicly saying the word “faggot.” Both Governor Easley and Senator Clinton are of that generation, and both of them know what he meant by the word. This was not a slip of the tongue. This is part of Senator Clinton’s new “Rocky theme” … a theme that sadly includes now gay bashing.

On behalf of the LGBT community, I demand the following three things:

1. Governor Easley immediately issue a public apology for his use of hate speech and commit to launch a new state-wide campaign in North Carolina to educate the public on the issue of anti-LGBT hate speech and hate crimes.
2. Senator Clinton make good on a previous campaign ascertain that that she would strongly “reject and denounce” any endorsement from someone who engages in hate speech by immediately rejecting and denouncing Governor Easley’s endorsement.
3. Governor Easley face me in a public boxing ring in Raleigh, NC this weekend, so I can show him and the those who make such hateful comments, that if you go up against a real “pansy,” you’re going to end up pushing daisies. And, yes, I double yellow dog dare him.

Grasping at straws. This is ludicrous. The RNC is threatening to sue CNN and MSNBC for running this DNC ad, which simply uses John McCain’s own words against him. A little sensitive on that whole Iraq shebang?

Marc Ambinder:

The RNC is ginning up the threat of legal action to give weight to their criticism of the ad’s content. [RNC lawyer Sean] Cairncross would not say whether the party will sue CNN or MSNBC, the two cable networks airing the ad, if they refuse to kill it.

The RNC’s content charge is not black and white. The DNC wrote the ad carefully. Nowhere does the narrator or any chyron state that McCain is fine with the Iraqi war persisting for 100 years. The visuals — explosions, bloodied troops — take care of that association.

Don Wildmon’s screeching again, calling for action against the manufacturer of Pampers, Tide and Crest over the long-awaited kiss of a gay couple on As the World Turns. My how the mighty have fallen if this is the what gets Don worked up.

Procter & Gamble has resumed using explicit, open-mouth homosexual kissing in their soap opera, “As the World Turns.” P&G decided to include this type of content as a commitment to “diversity.” P&G stopped showing such scenes some months ago, but has now decided to again help promote the homosexual agenda which includes homosexual marriage.

Gay activists are hopeful that the P&G effort will desensitize viewers to the homosexual lifestyle and help make the unhealthy and immoral lifestyle more acceptable to society, especially to children and youth.

View a scene from the April 23, 2008 episode by P&G. WARNING - content is repulsive!

“As the World Turns” is owned and controlled completely by P&G. No network made this decision. P&G alone made the decision to support the homosexual agenda.

Here, folks, is the “explicit” kiss — maybe Don has access to some alternate hard core version we don’t know about.

Hat tip Joe.My.God.

***

While we’re on the AFA, take a look at its reaction to McDonald’s decision to partner with a pro-gay business organization.
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As Richard at All Spin Zone notes, shouldn’t there be an investigation by officials into this? Inciting a riot is a felony. Here’s Rushbo:

He said the riots would ensure a Democrat is not elected as president, and his listeners have a responsibility to make sure it happens.

“Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats,” Limbaugh said during Wednesday’s radio broadcast. He then went on to say that’s the best thing that could happen to the country…

…Limbaugh said with massive riots in Denver, which he called “Operation Chaos,” the people on the far left would look bad.

“We do, hopefully, the right thing for the sake of this country. We’re the only one in charge of our affairs. We don’t farm out our defense if we elect Democrats … and riots in Denver, at the Democratic Convention will see to it we don’t elect Democrats. And that’s the best damn thing that can happen to this country, as far as I can think,” Limbaugh said…

Richard:

Someone needs to tell me the difference between Rush Limbaugh and Moqtada al-Sadr (above and beyond the fact that al-Sadr is an ordained cleric, and Limbaugh is just an ordained asswipe). And I want to know how Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, etc. etc. can continue getting away with inspiring their listeners to violence, yet are never called on it by either the Republican Party leadership or law enforcement authorities.

If you feel so moved, you can contact the Colorado Attorney General’s office and express your concerns. At a minimum, inciting to riot is a serious offense. When the call goes out from someone of Limbaugh’s stature, who has legions of loyal dittoheads hanging on his every word, it’s very, very likely that his “call to arms” could motivate some right wing crackpots to action.

Note this is not an exaggeration — Mr. Hillbilly Heroin could be in a heap of trouble. Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper realizes that a line has been crossed, saying “Anyone who would call for riots in an American city has clearly lost their bearings.”

Why does Rush Limbaugh hate America?
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When I first heard about the Open Source Boob Project, I was sort of overwhelmed by the dipshittery and couldn’t really begin to tackle the multi-layered asshole levels required to be a part of this thing. (Summary: A bunch of dudes at some comic con decided that it would be awesome to trade on a handful of women’s serious insecurities and get some fondling. Gack, it’s complicated—just read the link.) Now that it’s been thoroughly dismantled by the rest of the feminist blogosphere, I feel like I can safely make fun of the whole thing without feeling like I’m missing something.

You have to give the assholes credit. Most men who have a strong need to have women flail around doing humiliating things (like being likened to open source software—aka, those other bitches you got to pay for, but you guys give it away for free) have to go the long, hard road and get a woman financially or socially dependent on them. You need to either go the Hugh Hefner route and just pay women openly for the favor or you go the route of any abusive fuckwit Joe Blow U.S.A. and charm her first with talk of love until you get her into a committed relationship and then start humiliating her, secure in the knowledge that it’s going to take her a lot, emotionally and financially, to break the commitment. In other words, you got to work for it most of the time. But these guys just waltzed in, declared themselves the judges of female beauty, and next thing you know, women are making absolute asses of themselves seeking the approval of these self-appointed judges. Nice racket if you can work it.

Not that I’m blaming the she-geeks that were sucked into this. As a she-geek of sorts, I fully understand that when you are old enough to vote but probably not old enough to drink, you are still getting over the fact that everyone who told you that you were too ugly and unsexy for admission in the human race in high school was probably exaggerating the case. And thus, you might be vulnerable to the flattery of some asshole who says, “Your tits are just good enough to be groped by random dudes who think showering every day is for peons.” But I promise you, young ladies, you don’t need the affections of men who hate you in order to get your grope on. Time passes and even those of us with the most unfortunate nicknames in high school can often go on to be considered full members of the human race, and attractive even to decent people.

Holy mother of Disco Ball, is this just wrong. It’s a semen detection kit that is marketed for catching cheating spouses and teenagers who have unruly amounts of autonomy. Naturally, they are trying to suggest that it’s for catching both men and women, but of course, we know that’s just some ass-covering and defies all common sense that tells us that since men shoot the semen away from their bodies, clean-up to the point of avoiding detection would be simple enough. Also, as blogger Slut Machine notes, this would be really good at catching male masturbators (i.e., all men), if not cheaters. I’m sure some woman out there will try it, and much sorrow will be had as she discovers that her husband is a man and thus has trace amounts of semen in his underwear all the time, but on the whole, I see this being marketed towards men who are looking for novel ways to control wives and daughters now that the law is less cooperative than it used to be.

My main concern here is that the abstinence-only nuts are going to find out about this. (Probably shouldn’t blog about it, since many of them read this blog to get their daily titillation thinking about women who have sex without apologizing for it.) You think the metal detectors at school doors are ridiculous? Or think about all the annual dust-ups with over-zealous, perverted school officials start doing underwear checks on high school students. This could make the situation a thousand times worse, with school officials getting the brilliant idea of having panty drills, like fire drills except everyone has to submit to panty-testing to make sure that they’re not having Teh Sex. Sure, various civil liberties organizations would sue them into the ground, but don’t think the idea isn’t attractive. Though I suppose it would encourage young women to use condoms.

Anyway, it’s a rip-off. If you want to find out that there’s biological material in people’s underwear, you can just assume that there is. And if you’re skeptical, I recommend the black light as a cost effective alternative to satisfy your doubts.

Wow. In light of the recent gay panic verdict in Michigan, the idea that a defense attorney can float the idea that 15-year-old Oxnard, CA student Lawrence King deserved to die because he didn’t conform to gender norms is sickening. We’re looking at a trans-panic defense.

On Feb. 12, King was shot during an English class minutes after school started, and classmate Brandon McInerney, 14, was arrested a few blocks away. King later died in an Oxnard hospital, and McInerney was charged with first-degree murder and a hate crime.

It’s a tragedy, McInerney’s defense attorney said in an interview, but one he believes might have been avoided if someone had stepped in to help beforehand. Senior Deputy Public Defender William Quest said E.O. Green’s administration knew about tension on the middle school campus and allowed the situation to fester — allegations the school district says are untrue.

…Students have said they witnessed confrontations between King and McInerney in the weeks or days before the shooting, including King’s teasing McInerney and telling him that he liked him.

McInerney perceived King’s treatment as harassment, Quest said. Quest, however, declined to discuss any specific confrontations or issues between the boys. He also declined to say if McInerney ever sought help from an adult to deal with the issue.

Quest said he believes school administrators supported one student expressing himself and his sexuality — King — and ignored how it affected other kids, despite complaints. Cross-dressing isn’t a normal thing in adult environments, he said, yet 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds were expected to just accept it and go on.

So wait, the idea here is that it’s an understandable reaction to kill someone if you don’t agree with or understand someone whose gender expression is not what you think it should be? King had been harassed for some time at the school, so the defense is also saying that some sort of herd mentality caused McInerney to snap, get a gun and shoot his classmate.

Hat tip, Lena.

And it was caught on tape by Houston station KTRK. Add this foul man to the list of moralist sexual hypocrites.

The founder of a Christian school is confronted after 13 Undercover catches him soliciting sex from a parent, who’s trying to get her daughter a high school diploma.

At graduation ceremonies he talks about God, but you’ll hear the founder of a Houston-area Christian school not only talk about sex, but ask for it on tape.

It’s the middle of the day when a white pickup truck pulls into the back of a motel on 1960. Then it goes to the very back to park for a long while. We already know who the driver is. His name is LaVern Jordan and he runs Parkway Christian School.

There is a transcript of the foulitude and video. Read a snippet of what pious Jordan said — in very raw language — to the mom after the jump.
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Blogging from Birmingham, Alabama…meeting up with Kathy of Birmingham Blues later today.

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I swear, I lay off the posts about the Clinton campaign and candidate in meltdown for a few days and she and her minions put themselves back in the news again.

Hillary Clinton, who is apparently running a campaign completely ignorant of recording technology, as we saw with the Bosnia lie caught on video, does it again. An audio tape has surfaced from a private fundraiser that was given to the Huff Post, and it ain’t pretty.

She blasts Moveon.org (lying getting facts wrong in the process), but even more shocking, she blames grassroots activists - who have been energized in this primary season, turning out new voters in droves, for her difficulties in picking up votes. The tape was recorded after Super Tuesday, when she and her campaign were in shock that the coronation wasn’t going to happen.

“Moveon.org endorsed [Sen. Barack Obama] — which is like a gusher of money that never seems to slow down,” Clinton said to a meeting of donors. “We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party. MoveOn didn’t even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that’s what we’re dealing with. And you know they turn out in great numbers. And they are very driven by their view of our positions, and it’s primarily national security and foreign policy that drives them. I don’t agree with them. They know I don’t agree with them. So they flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support me.”

…Clinton’s remarks depart radically from the traditional position of presidential candidates, who in the past have celebrated high levels of turnout by party activists and partisans as a harbinger for their own party’s success — regardless of who is the eventual nominee — in the general election showdown.

The comments also contradict Clinton’s previous statements praising this year’s elevated Democratic turnout in primaries and caucuses, and appear to blame her caucus defeats on newly energized grassroots voter groups that she has lauded in the past as “lively participants” in American democracy.

MoveOn was quick to set the facts straight.

In a statement to The Huffington Post, MoveOn’s Executive Director Eli Pariser reacted strongly to Clinton’s remarks: “Senator Clinton has her facts wrong again. MoveOn never opposed the war in Afghanistan, and we set the record straight years ago when Karl Rove made the same claim. Senator Clinton’s attack on our members is divisive at a time when Democrats will soon need to unify to beat Senator McCain. MoveOn is 3.2 million reliable voters and volunteers who are an important part of any winning Democratic coalition in November. They deserve better than to be dismissed using Republican talking points.”

The disturbing trend we’ve seen as Clinton and her team saw her fortunes fritter away at the polls, has been to blame losses on various constituencies, demographics in whole states, the caucus system — everything except the fact that she couldn’t make the sale in those primaries.

It’s almost a pathological level of denial — she’s not winning the popular vote, number of states won, the delegate count or in the money race at this point. Her campaign blew the huge war chest on the high life, based on the premise that she wouldn’t have to stay in the race beyond Super Tuesday.

The netroots didn’t do that to her.

More below the fold.
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Billionaire BET founder Robert L. Johnson, who has publicly done little more than make an ass out of himself in public as a supporter of Hillary, continues down the familiar bottom-feeding path of race-baiting, this time by lifting the wisdom of Geraldine Ferraro.

“What I believe Geraldine Ferraro meant is that if you take a freshman senator from Illinois called ‘Jerry Smith’ and he says I’m going to run for president, would he start off with 90 percent of the black vote?” Johnson said. “And the answer is, probably not.”

“Geraldine Ferraro said it right,” Johnson added. “The problem is, Geraldine Ferraro is white. This campaign has such a hair-trigger on anything racial it is almost impossible for anybody to say anything.”

Last time I looked, 90% of the black vote alone won’t elect you President of the United States. And it’s balls to say the Obama campaign has a hair-trigger on “anything racial” (definition, please?) when the Clinton campaign and its surrogates have not hesitated in playing upon the worst fears in people in regards to race, a topic that is rarely engaged on any rational level. Why Bob Johnson himself didn’t mind conjuring up stereotypical imagery himself back during the primary in South Carolina.

See below the fold.
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This perv has a rap sheet with 30 arrests for sex abuse, 13 for jostling and two for grand larceny, according to the NYPD, and his behavior is so compulsive that he was barely out of the clink before he started up with the sexual abuse again.

About two weeks after he was released from prison, Freddie Johnson boarded a crowded subway train in Manhattan and illegally rubbed up against a woman, authorities said.

It is a fairly common crime on subways in New York. But this was no common criminal. Johnson has been arrested a staggering 53 times — the majority for groping women on the subway, police and prosecutors said.

In his latest arrest, Johnson was being followed by plainclothes officers who recognized him from police photos, authorities said. He was charged with persistent sexual abuse, and if convicted this time, he could be sent away for life. The district attorney’s office branded him a “recidivist transit grinder” at a court hearing earlier this week.

But the fact that Johnson was roaming the subways in the first place has raised questions about how the state deals with the problem of repeat sex offenders. His case even drew the scorn of a newspaper editorial this week that labeled Johnson the “Subway Rat.”

I’m surprised this dick still has his wing-wang; surely if he rubbed up against my cousin, it would be swiss cheese by now.

My story of pervy subway behavior is below the fold.
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I have the urge to say something about “crackers,” but I’ll let it rest…let’s just say that it’s healthy for the political process to have Republicans show their true colors in such beautifully raw fashion. Two snaps to this utterance by Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) as he paid tribute to the good old days of the Old South.

U.S. Rep. Geoff Davis, a Hebron Republican, compared Obama and his message for change similar to a “snake oil salesman.” He said in his remarks at the GOP dinner that he also recently participated in a “highly classified, national security simulation” with Obama.

“I’m going to tell you something: That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,” Davis said. “He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country.”

Davis was evidently nudged by someone who realized this was a bigot eruption of incredible proportions — after all, the public use of “boy” to refer to black men has fallen out of public favor among the well-heeled race-baiting set in the GOP. He personally delivered a letter to Obama’s office offering a CYA apology, saying it was a “poor choice of words.” Yes, indeed.

UPDATE: Oliver Willis on this crap:

If you want to know why this sort of thing is going to be an ongoing problem for McCain and the GOP as Obama moves up to officially become the nominee look no further than the comments on conservative blogs QandO and Rick Moran. Both McQ and Moran know that this is really really stupid but at least of their commenters simply cannot see the problem with calling a grown ass black professional man, let alone one as accomplished as Sen. Obama, a “boy”. They simply chalk it up to “political correctness”.

What’s next? Some con calls Obama a n****r and they shrug their soldiers and say “What’s the big deal?” I wouldn’t bet against it.

Don’t you love these creepy prosyletizing pastors who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time traveling the country on a mission to pollute college campuses with insane homophobic, sexist diatribes?

You have to wonder do they realize how crazy they appear to the average person? Take “Brother” Micah Armstrong, a “preacher” from the “Miami Open Air Mission” (Brian, aka Incertus, had to deal with this whack job when Micah turned up at his campus). Watch the action after the jump.
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A follow up: Steven Scarborough was charged with felony murder and faced mandatory life in prison without parole in the death of 62-year-old Victor Manious.

Scarborough admitted in taped police interview that he hit Victor Manious with a bat, stuffed him in a car trunk after either 1) he was come on to, or 2) he woke up to find Manious performing oral sex on him, and in either scenario Scarborough felt that this violated his beliefs as a Southern Baptist, justifying the bat attack and all the rest of it — including the theft of Manious’s wallet and mobile phone. The Southern Baptist convictions of Scarborough also made him use the man’s credit cards for shopping sprees, gas and air fare to Texas.

Manious was alive when stuffed into the trunk — medical authorities said he would have survived if 911 had been called at the time Scarborough was “out of danger.”

The jury decided that, despite the ludicrous account and changing stories, Scarborough was indeed assaulted and the bat attack/murder/criminal spree didn’t merit a sentence of felony murder — they gave him manslaughter. It carries a 15 year max.

Related:
* Gay panic: the defense that will not die (and on Pandagon)

So, remember how some really badly targetted marketing was trying to get me to hear an interview with Art Alexakis?

Well, now I know why.
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And the problem with being a lesbian is…? I am so sick of these Cro-Magnons pontificating on the air. (Media Matters):

SULLIVAN: Two things. One, it’s important to clear up that he [Wright] did not say “The Jews are going to get you” in some conspiratorial, classic anti-Semitic fashion. I think that’s just —
HITCHENS: He [Wright] thinks only Jews are going to object to [Rev. Louis] Farrakhan and [Libyan leader Moammar] Gadhafi. Excuse me?
SULLIVAN: No, he didn’t say “only.”
HITCHENS: No, but —
SULLIVAN: Again, you keep playing with that quote. We’re happy to have it on the record. And now you’ve made me forget my second point, which is —
HITCHENS: Oh, well, don’t be such a lesbian. Get on with it.
SULLIVAN: I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten my second point. But I do think that’s important. And I don’t think Wright is Farrakhan. And I don’t think Obama, in any conceivable way, represents anything but racial inclusion and integration. And anybody that looks at any part of his career and can be in any doubt about that is beyond me.
The reason he went to that church, clearly, if you read his biography, is he wanted to understand what it was to be black in America. He didn’t understand. He’s a very polyglot person. He grew up in Hawaii, he had some time in Indonesia.

I’m serious — I don’t know what the f*ck Hitchens is talking about here. Are lesbians slow to make a point? Foot-draggers? Jesus. It’s nice to know he can combine misogyny and homophobia in one fell swoop. Admirable multitasking.

Perhaps Hitchens knows how many lesbians it takes to screw in a light bulb, or where the stock of conversion toasters are stashed. Inquiring minds want to know. Andrew Sullivan didn’t even bother to counter this crap. Sigh.

I don’t listen to WDCG’s G-105 morning drive time bigot Bob Dumas of “Bob and the Showgram,” I did years ago, but it’s easy to tire of juvenile, offensive frat boy humor that gets him in hot water all the time, and he’s an equal opportunity offender. (N&O):

In the radio segment, Dumas and co-hosts kidded an intern about her upcoming marriage to a Lumbee Indian. Dumas joked that Indians are “lazy” and that “a lot of Indians live on the reservation.” He also asked whether the groom’s grandfather would stand on the side of the road “with a single tear.”

Co-host Mike Morse asked: “After you guys get married, are you going to have a tepee-warming party?”

After that BS, complaints to the FCC and Clear Channel Communications quickly rolled in. WDCG General Manager Dick Harlow released this statement on the station’s web site:

“WDCG apologizes to any listener that may have found remarks or recordings played Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 during Bob and the Showgram to be offensive, derogatory or insensitive. WDCG does not condone inappropriate behavior, language or insensitive remarks.”

…Paul Brooks, chairman of the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs, released a statement lambasting “Bob and the Showgram” for the Tuesday remarks, as well as a history of “derogatory and insultuous comments against American Indians, African Americans, Asians and Hispanics.”

This is the same station, by the way, that sponsored a Straight Pride Parade in Chapel Hill, NC.

More below the fold.
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Check this out - McCain was booed in Memphis today.

The imagery in this video is thought-provoking. Here is McSame, who is not only getting booed at a ceremony for voting against the national holiday celebrating the accomplishments of Dr. King, and he’s standing up there with a black man holding an umbrella over him. Nice touch.

I guess he’s still evolving. Read Rock’s rundown of the spinning going on, Martin Luther King, John McCain and The Hate McCain Cannot Hide.

Also:
* Honoring Dr. King - McCain’s sorry record
* Color of Change fact sheet on McCain’s civil rights record

John McCain is going to appear in Memphis today, on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. That's worthy of a brass balls award as the Arizona senator has a long history of opposing civil rights legislation, including the federal MLK holiday, something he voted against as a Congressman in 1983. He now says he "evolved" and regrets that vote.

In 1983, when I was brand-new in the Congress, I voted against the recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King. That was a mistake, OK? And later I had the chance to … help fight for … the recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King as a holiday in my state."

The good folks at Color of Change have a fact sheet up on McCain's civil rights record. It's questionable whether his evolution is occurring at even a glacial pace. Decide for yourself as you read the items below the fold.
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