"No More Baby Parts."

If the "mainstream media" is to be believed, Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooter, Robert Dear, said "No more baby parts," when he was finally taken into custody after his violent rampage.  But, why, whatever could he have meant by that, do you suppose? Maybe he was just down to the clinic to borrow a cup of baby parts and found they were all out?  Maybe he was building a Frankenstein-esque creature and got peeved at the glut of juvenile bits on the market? Maybe he was misheard and was unhappy with "A. B. parts."

As Sherlock Holmes might have said, if he were prone to using my vernacular, if every other possibility is so fucking stupid and fanciful that you'd have to be a lying bastard to propose them, you should consider the evidence staring you in the face.

And it might just sound a little self-serving if one admits that Dear was a domestic terrorist, as Gov. Mike Huckabee has, but then plays victim by saying it especially harms the pro-life folks. Does this make the anti-abortion people really look bad? Do they need much help, there? And the knee-slapper is, this is the guy who was going to use the US military to forcibly close health clinics. It's "domestic terrorism" if you are a DIY-type. If you're president, you do what you want!

Failed tech-CEO Carly Fiorina takes a slightly different tack--it's just "typical left-wing tactics" to blame anti-abortion rhetoric for violent actions.  How dare we connect those dots in chronological order! This was the candidate, mind you, who imagined a scenario that wasn't even in the highly-edited videos who had to go on to produce one yet more lurid. Which we are not supposed to find incendiary or deceitful in the least, mind you.

Now, a handful of people are just looking at this guy's criminal records and immediately dismissing him as a lunatic. Mental illness is a spectrum, charges against this miscreant were regularly dismissed, and the things he was accused of weren't necessarily out of bounds for people who are considered perfectly sane. Being antisocial or even sociopathic doesn't exclude this person from having political views. People have made note of the fact that Colorado Springs is the headquarters for Focus on the Family. The founding member, Dr. James Dobson, justified both wife-beating and animal abuse.  (Not that I'm saying Dear was influenced by Focus on the Family, at all, at all--after all, he wasn't originally from Colorado Springs. He was from North Carolina. Where Eric Rudolph was found holed up. And there's some folks to this day who consider Rudolph a folk hero. )

Don't Make This Great

So, I was pretty terse regarding the news in my last post, because I didn't even have words. (An earlier post in the way-past my bedtime zone was deleted as I mistakenly thought the BLM protest that was shot up was one of the many memorializing the death of Tamir Rice. I deleted it. The error is embarrassing and I'm totally admitting it.) The shocking thing is that the shooting of five demonstrators regarding another police shooting, of Jamar Clark, occurred on the eve of the charging of a police officer with the first degree murder of Laquan McDonald.

It took over four hundred days to charge an officer with the slaying of a 17-year old kid who had a three-inch knife who showed up and in 30 seconds put 16 bullets in a human being, and who was only stopped when he paused to reload, when that boy was as dead as dead can be.

This is not the America I cherish. This is something I am watching wondering how many terrible and shocking things occurred before we were even paying proper attention.

So when I see the kind of news that makes protesters in Irving, TX pace around armed outside a mosque, because of something that was in the news, or some damn idiot leaves a fake bomb outside a mosque in VA--I understand that words mean things, and there are stupidly ambitious people out there using words (and fake statistics)  in stupidly dangerous ways. Racism is our original sin, and xenophobia and religious bigotry are not terribly more creative.

This isn't "greatness". And this country can't be made great through these kinds of thuggish actions. And people who spread the kind of manure that let these violence-flowers blossom? Are just shit.

Even "and" and "the"!

I'm going to cut Senator Graham a little slack for his "joke" regarding everything starting with "al" (the word for "the" in Arabic) in the Middle East being bad. Not all jokes go over, and I think he might have been aiming for something like Mary McCarthy's famous diss on Lillian Hellman:" Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the."  We can't all have McCarthy's deftness of phrase.

But I think there is a bit of danger in joking about foreign policy too broadly, precisely because people may not always understand when one is joking.  It might seem temporarily "winning" to crack a joke in front of an audience whose sympathies one feels in touch with, but it can come across as being the type of clod who disdains foreign languages like Arabic "because if the King's English was good enough for Jesus..."

We are, after all, living in an age where what is said behind closed doors* can be broadcast around the world. Language matters, and sensitivity to it is a very good place for diplomacy to begin.

(And some people skip the closed doors and at once broadcast their ignorance around the world. Long story short: words mean things)

Boycott Mike Pence

Of course, this Move On petition sort of lacks a legal basis since Indiana does not have a recall for elected officials, but I think it at least identifies the problem with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act signed in Indiana, in that yes, this is a bit of signifying for social conservatives.  And I think it's the kind of thing a social conservative might push for specifically to look like he has a point if he were considering something bigger. My admiration for George Takei aside, I find that I side more with Melissa McEwan regarding not seeing this particular discrimination-sanctioning law as being a reason to discriminate against an entire state, including innocent people who never would support this kind of bill at all.

As an American, I just have a real problem writing off an entire state, you know? Thinking back to the various gay marriage bans, I never thought boycotting those states in particular would change hearts and minds--time and lawsuits and a gathering recognition that gay people are full citizens who should enjoy every right including the freedom to form a contract of marriage with another consenting adult would simply, over time, get acceptance of marriage equality over the finish line. Did I write California off over Prop. 8?

Warmongo Only Pawn in Game of Life

I think it was when Sen. Cotton actually said that Vice-President Joe Biden had never been right in 40 years (more years than this punk has been alive) that I basically had it--when in the two months this arse has been a senator has he risen to the opportunity to be right?

There's a real question regarding where this stupor mundi came from, what with his senate run being well-funded by the usual neo-con suspects, and the hard-right economic Spartans--Club for Growth besides; to launching this letter with 46 GOP confederates and then having a nice little handshake to-do with defense contractors. (His confederates have varyingly dumb ideas of why they went along with this.)

Neidermeyer  Cotton is apparently a very driven sort of person. Made his way to Harvard as nothing less would do, and turned like Cincinnatus from the plow of his studies to war at the time of our nation's need. Quotes the Founders and philosophers. Comes off a little bit like Otto from A Fish Called Wanda, that last bit.

Rudy Guiliani has Slipped the Bonds of Decency and Touched the Face of Derp

Like, he's gone, man. Gone:

Speaking on AM970 Thursday morning, Giuliani said that the president isn't paying attention to "enormous amounts of crime" and that it's the obligation of the president to explain "that our police are the best in the world."

"I hate to mention it because of what happened afterwards, but [Obama should be saying] the kinds of stuff Bill Cosby used to say," Giuliani said on the radio station, according to The New York Daily News.

Obama, actually, praises police often, including in a major speech he delivered in Selma, Alabama recently.

Cosby had frequently argued that African Americans should avoid engaging in crime and focus on being better parents.

Well, since what happened afterwards was that Cos was accused by 30-something women and counting of sexual assault, there may be something wanting about whether his pronouncements were honest or valid. And the funny old thing is, Obama is not at all short on the "pull up your pants" type of lectures.  Giuliani also blamed assorted crimes other people did on Obama, because, obviously, no one ever did crime before Obama got into office because...things. And stuff.

In 2007, this was the man the GOP field had to beat for the presidential nom, everyone. He is probably still wondering why his moment never happened--but between you and me? We all can figure it out.

47 Dumbass Ronin

I read about the open letter to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran last night and was just appalled. I couldn't put my finger on why, at first. They weren't offering aid and comfort to an enemy, per se, so you couldn't call it treason. They weren't in direct, private communications, solicited or otherwise, with the foreign government, so I don't know if you could consider it a violation of the Logan Act.  But is very unusual, and the tone was, I thought, disrespectful to the President, to other negotiators at the table, and disrespectful of their offices as US Senators. Because while this letter isn't necessarily treason or sedition--it's a political stunt over foreign policy made wide-open, which does not strengthen the President's hand in making a good executive deal, but rather aims at diluting the nation's effectiveness to carry out successful diplomacy.

I know this was the aim of the letter, because the freshman Senator who spear-headed the effort, Tom Cotton, has previously admitted he wanted to sabotage the negotiations. What astonished me is that he managed to get 46 other senators to go along with him. Not a one of them read the thing and thought it might be a bad idea?

While Obama was in Selma, GOP was in Iowa. Again.

It goes without saying that I think that Obama's speech in Selma is one for the ages, and cements his actual commitment to the experiment that is America. So it should also go without saying that while President Obama made his most excellent speech regarding the history and thrust of freedom and the arc of justice in this country, while his own brother sat mere feet away from the current president, Jeb Bush was displaying the very pandering reason why he has no business thinking about being president.

Obama, he said, is "the first president since World War II who does not believe that American power is a force for good" in the world. The president's approach, he added, has brought "uncertainty, instability and greater risk" to the nation.

In Selma, Obama reiterated his belief that America is perfectable and tries to improve upon the past. What in the world suggested to Jeb Bush that the Giuliani bill of goods was the most saleable? And what does he mean "since World War II"?!

Also, Mike Huckabee thinks immigrants will steal his food. Oh, not if they don't want teeth marks in their arms, hoss. And Carly Fiorina was in the mix saying how Hillary Clinton never did shit like be one of history's worst tech CEO's or how she never had one of the worst ever Senate campaigns.

So, thanks again, Iowa.

This is Just Sad.

Dinesh D'Souza        ✔ @DineshDSouza

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AN INTERESTING PARALLEL: MLK was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, an unsavory character; I was targeted by the equally unsavory B. Hussein Obama

10:29 AM - 19 Jan 2015

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I get that Dinesh D'Souza has simply stayed the same in principle and philosophy since his college years.  But given that the world actually has moved on...

No. Wait. D'Souza is an unwavering pivot. A racist, homophobic stake in the ground marking a territory so thoroughly pissed-upon no one but the sorts of people who think a discredited adulterous boob who somehow doesn't understand that "having our freedoms"* isn't to blame for AL-Qaeda hating our freedoms, and that anti-colonialism is pretty much what the founding fathers of the US were on about--and calls himself an "intellectual"--is one.

(*Debbie Schlussel is an odd link for me --but I like her honesty about stuff . She gets some things not entirely wrong.)

But need I say it? Dinesh D'Souza is like Martin Luther King Jr. the way that punching oneself in the nuts is just like getting crucified. As in, why can't Dinesh D'Souza stop punching himself in his nuts?

Rhodes Scholar Tells Europe A Lie About Themselves

I had to wait until LA Gov. Bobby Jindal actually gave a speech in front of people telling them about the "no-go" zones in their midst before casting shade at him, because that's the way I roll. Sure, he telegraphed his intention to make the speech about the unidentifiable "no-go" zones days beforehand, but I wanted to give every benefit of the doubt that he would pull out and point his nose in the direction of a target that wasn't...some shit FOX News made up.

I don't know if this is my bad, or his, really. I should have realized that once committed to blather, blathers gonna blather, blather, blather (h/t, Taylor Swift). What I did not actually entirely realize was that he had a defense ready--go on. Seated? Arm rests--clutch them. 

After the remarks, Jindal was grilled by CNN about the remark. “Look, I’ve heard from folks here that there are neighborhoods where women don’t feel comfortable going in without veils,” Jindal said. “That’s wrong. We all know that there are neighborhoods where police are less likely to go into.” 

When pushed about backing up his statements with facts, Jindal added a qualifier, calling them “so-called no-go zones.” A Fox commentator who talked about no-go zones in London and Birmingham provoked a response from British Prime Minister David Cameron who said he nearly choked on his porridge when he heard about the remarks.  

“I think that the radical Left absolutely wants to pretend like this problem is not here,” Jindal said. “Pretending it’s not here won’t make it go away.”

Ew. So, he saw that 60 Minutes episode where Muslim brothers were disrespecting women and generalized it to all neighborhoods that had a Muslim population? And then conflates it with neighborhoods that police won't go into (like, we talk about the "Philly Roll" as being something even cops did in certain neighborhoods in North Philadelphia, but even that is, actually, urban legend, and no--not a problem with Muslims). Then he implies that the "radical Left" isn't really up for a conversation about Islamic extremism unless they--what, ignore him talking about things that aren't true?

So, Approval of Rectal Feeding, Party of You....

I'm still absorbing some of what I've read regarding the US torture program (I will not ever call this bullshit "enhanced interrogation techniques" or EIT, because calling things by nicer names does not make those things any nicer in actual fact)  with a definite sense that the full report is probably even worse.  But let's just get right to the shocking thing--one of the "techniques" as the term is ever-so-quaintly put, that was used on the detainees as a measure of control in the event of hunger strikes and other flourishes of free will, was something so pleasantly referred to as rectal feeding.

To be a bit closer to the mark, let's call this thing "sodomy with a feeding tube". And in my innocent (have you met me? think I'm all that innocent and not-cynical?) little brain, I kind of thought that the idea of ass-rape of anyone, especially via shoving food up there to be violently expelled in a physical state known as "dumping", with a long-term potential for harm in the form of anal prolapse or fissuring, would be viewed as beyond the pale. No. This is not about interrogation. This is about doing the nastiest thing you can think of to a dominated and prone body for the sheer sake of being sadistic that can be found.

And I thought that might even be where the shame might leak in. Because anally-raping prostrate human beings with a feeding tube for non-medical reasons (and the reasons are just about always non-medical) should occur to anyone as being obscene.

More Like Death Panels For Small Websites

I dunno. Senator Ted Cruz says standard-issue stuff that right-wingers and telecom lobbyists have been saying for years like "Net neutrality is Obamacare for the Internet", and somehow, it's like no one ever said that before. Oh, they have. But it's kind of a niche issue that pretty much tech-savvy people have followed, and Ted Cruz pretty much assumes that if you aren't in the know--he can go ahead and snow you with a line as absurd as:

'"Net Neutrality' is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government."

Ok. That's stupid. Net neutrality is basically what we mostly have now, and Obama wants to preserve that. It would be doing away with net neutrality that would result in crappy service and unfair policies like "throttling" that would slow down internet service to certain customers or certain websites based on whatever criteria the internet providers decide on. (Here's an excellent visual explainer from The Oatmeal.) Basically, how much do you love the fees and services you are getting from your cable company? Right. Your internet company is either a cable company or the next best thing, and that is what they will do to your service.

In fine--Ted Cruz does not know what the hell he is talking about, or is really, really dependent upon the idea that most people listening to him do not know what he is talking about. I don't care how cute "Obamacare for the Internet" sounds--it's actually really dumb. And instead of repeating ignorant bumpersticker schtick, it would be really great if we just called a big-bidness toady out for croaking the company line.

Ted Cruz? Ribbit ribbit, you are so toady. And we are not that stupid.

Rick Santorum Does Not Understand that Words Mean Things

I held this particular gem in blogular reserve, because the sense of what my former senator was saying was rare and illogical to the kind of degree that that one needs time and sensitivity to broach.

But here is the thesis:

During the discussion, Santorum said that Christians have allowed their faith to be removed from the public square and need to start fighting back, arguing that removing the Bible from public school classrooms is not neutrality but rather the promotion of the secular worldview. He suggested that conservative Christians should respond by "calling secularism a religion because if we did, then we could ban that too."

Now, some people of faith are altogether comfortable enough calling us atheists and agnostics religious: we're accused of being pagans, of being Satan-worshippers--this isn't new. But the actual, basic definition of secularism is the separation of religion from government business. Just because some confused people decided to call secularism a religion, would not make it a religion. There is no particular way that secularism imposes other religions upon people of any particular faith. It only happens that attending public schools might make a child reared in a certain faith aware that people of other faiths exist--and living on our planet would eventually reveal that special information.

Secularism is kind of a protection against religious discrimination in that no particular faith is imposed--or critiqued. I've often wondered what a genuine course of study of the Christian Bible--a no holds barred study, might accomplish--but it would genuinely provide a distraction from the reading, writing, and 'rithmetic curriculum that any student might find more useful in the long run, so I've never thought it to be a curricular necessity as, oh, critical thinking might be.

Certain religionists, however, explicitly reject even the value of critical thinking. I find that appalling. If our capacity to act as moral creatures relies in part on our ability to reason--how is deriding reasoning in any way a valid start to a moral education?

I'm not shocked in any way that possible 2016 GOP Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum thinks this way--he has for a long time been skeptical of the value of education and practically equates information with sin. I'm not even not clued-in that numerous other Bible-bangers are trying to rewrite history to make things appear more amenable to a moral narrative that never previously existed.

I suspect that might be considered "bearing false witness", but I am not pretending to be expert in such things. I'm just being critical--as any secularist might well be.

A Little Reminder This International Workers' Day

 There are people who do not think that a day's work should be necessarily compensated by anything above a miserable subsistence.

Actually, I can't say for certain that Sen. Coburn actually thinks anything. Free market principles would drive down costs in a buyers' market, unless I'm mistaken, which means that the labor of a human being could be had for food and a straw mat on the floor to rest on once the system has worked its merry way on to the floor. And there have been people working under just those very conditions. That is why people have marched and fought for the basic respect and dignity of their work--to be compensated enough to actually live on. If this is a vision that Sen. Coburn thinks is fine and dandy for the mass of humanity then I would say he has the outlook of a slaver to go along with the morals of a pimp.

I can not fathom the kind of audacious idiocy that might suppose having no floor on wages would somehow result in a better quality of life for anyone but the masters job creators.

But maybe he just worries that the American worker could become too dependent upon the idea that anything should be invested in keeping his or her body and soul together and make ridiculous demands for such basics as food and water. As if we were animals. As if even working human animals deserved enough to eat.  Hah!

The lowest bid for a worker's day labor would be a hole in the ground, and not even another person's labor to cover one. This is the pernicious philosophy that people have to organize or at least be on guard against.

This Makes Sense to Me

I think one of the problems I've been having with the IRS/Tea Party scandlette is that when groups indicate that they believe they were targeted for partisan reasons, it kind of suggests that they actually were partisan political groups and probably shouldn't have been claiming they weren't for tax exemption purposes. Part of that bias, though, comes from the word "party" being right in the name of some of these groups--and I think when we hear Republican politicians, like, for example, Michele Bachmann, describe themselves as "Tea Party" conservatives, it only adds to the misunderstanding. But I do seem to recall some blather back in 2009-2010 that the Tea Party wasn't supposed to be about conservative or liberal politics, per se, even though the movement is credited with getting an awful lot of Republicans elected in the 2010 congressional elections.

But to clarify, when the term "Tea Party" is being used, a distinction should be made between a "political party"--the thing where like-minded individuals work on getting particular candidates elected, and the more loose kind of party, where people wear silly hats.  Lines have clearly been blurred, people. If only the IRS questionnaires asked fewer questions about what these groups did, and just concentrated on the hats, things would obviously be different.

Keynes Wasn't a Communist, Just a Touch Pink?

I don't mind addressing Niall Ferguson's somewhat thoroughly erroneous take on the personal life and philosophy of John Maynard Keynes even after his fairly prompt apology if only because the error wasn't an error nor was this cranky ad hom out of the blue, either as a tactic from the right (re: personal arguments against Keynes) or from Ferguson (re: ad hom in general).  (To be taken seriously, I would think it would be better not to say things that are specifically untrue because they suit one's argument but then conveniently forget one's actual meaning in saying them in the first place when either defending oneself or apologizing, but what do I know?) Just to sum it all up, what he was saying is:

[Ferguson:] Keynes was a homosexual and had no intention of having children. We are NOT dead in the long run…our children are our progeny. It is the economic ideals of Keynes that have gotten us into the problems of today. Short term fixes, with a neglect of the long run, leads to the continuous cycles of booms and busts. Economies that pursue such short term solutions have always suffered not only decline, but destruction, in the long run.

Right up until everyone understood what he was saying and properly thumped him for it.   After being reminded that Keynes very nearly became a father and was actually concerned about the future enough to have written a bit about it, he can't imagine why he said anything about it at all, at all:

My disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life. As those who know me and my work are well aware, I detest all prejudice, sexual or otherwise.

I don't necessarily believe he's prejudiced. But he doubtless knows some people are, doesn't he? And doesn't that go some way to suggest why he uses this particular line of offense against Keynes? It wouldn't be a impossible thing to suppose regarding a popularizer of ideas, perhaps?

Don't ask me. I'm probably just inferring too much from the times he's had to point out that he is an imperialist, not a racist, by Jingo.

(I think I will add a label "word mean things" to my list of tags.)