Arizona just declared that pregnancies in the state begin two weeks before conception.
What, fetuses in Arizona are equipped with tiny time machines to travel back in time to two weeks *before* sperm meets ova in the womb? What next, the Arizona lege defines pi as being exactly 3, and that carbon dioxide is a protected species?!
- Badtux the Baffled Penguin
Talking about Sick Rick, that's the November contest, since Mr. Man on Dog quit, after polls said he'd lose his home state of Pennsylvania big-time to the Romneybot. So in the fall, we have the Romneybot vs. the Obamanator. What a contest. I'm gonna have such a hard time deciding who to vote for... will I vote for the soulless robot from planet Sociopath? Hmm.
It will be so appropriate getting robo-calls from the Romneybot campaign this fall...
- Badtux the "So long, Ricky!" Penguin
When viewing lesbian sex and straight sex, both the homophobic and the non-homophobic men showed increased penis circumference. For gay male sex, however, only the homophobic men showed heightened penis arousal.Heterosexual men with the most anti-gay attitudes, when asked, reported not being sexually aroused by gay male sex videos. But, their penises reported otherwise.
Homophobic men were the most sexually aroused by gay male sex acts.
As I've repeatedly said of Rick Santorum and his ilk, the only kind of people who obsess about gay sex are... well... GAY. Just sayin'.
In other news, studies find that racists dislike President Obama because he is black. Like, DUH?
-- Badtux the "Like duh, man!" Penguin
So John Derbyshire, the World's Dumbest Conservative Asshole, tries to be, like, racially progressive with a "conversation on race" and makes himself look like a racist moron.
Here's the only conversation that John Derbyshire needs to have with his kids: "Black people are people."
That's it. And his kids, if raised in a multicultural area, would just reply, "Duh!" because they have friends of all races and ethnicities already and that's been true since an early age.
But of course, John Derbyshire's kids weren't raised in a multicultural area, they were raised in a gated community that might as well have had a sign at the entryway saying "no blacks allowed", and not allowed to go out and play with any children of another race because they might get hurt or snatched or something. Because, y'know, there's all those scary brown people out there, and they're all criminals who want to hurt white people, so our precious little white snowflakes must be protected from them, yo...
At which point John Derbyshire chimes in with, "but... but... crime statistics!" Uhm, statistics describe probabilities across an entire population, not probability that any given person is going to do something. 90% of spree killers and mass murderers have been white. But I can assure you that the chance of me becoming a spree killer and mass murderer, considering I have difficulty with killing a cockroach and when dealing with a mouse humanely did catch-and-release to make him someone else's problem, is somewhere between none and zero. Stereotyping all white people as mass murderers because they've historically been the perpetrators of mass murder is wrong. Same deal as stereotyping all black people as thugs. People are people, and you have to deal with the person in front of you, not the stereotype. Just sayin'.
-- Badtux the Un-stereotypical Penguin
Legislators practicing medicine without a license force Danielle Deaver to inflict horrible pain and suffering upon her unborn child by prohibiting early-term abortion.
One wonders, what right do legislators have to interfere with what everybody involved felt was a necessary medical procedure? But wait, oh silly me. I'm thinking like a citizen of a free nation where the government doesn't interfere with science and medicine, not like a citizen of a fascist dictatorship run by the Christian Taliban where all sorts of things are outlawed by the Evangelical Inquisition for religious reasons. Gosh darn, how silly of me!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Oh yah, and while I'm at it, hey yo, World Nut Daily, I do *not* want to know the day of Jesus's return. If you're a Christian ya oughta live as if today is the day that Jesus comes back and judges ya, i.e., that ya can't just fuck over a buncha people like a real-life Gordon Gekko on crack, wait 'till Sunday, bend the knee at the pulpit to "wash your sins away in the blood of the Lamb", and go to Heaven, 'cuz five minutes from now before you get your chance to bend the knee Jesus, like, levitates from the sky like some skinny-ass kinky-haired olive-skinned big-nosed dress-wearin' Jewboy angel without wings and booms in a big scary voice "you're going to HELL Mr. Sinner for that evil shit you just did" and foosh, down ya go, burning in Hell with folks like Mark Twain and George Carlin whose ass you hate, now ya gotta have them haranguing ya in person, like, forever. If you claim to be Christian and you *don't* live like Jesus is coming back five minutes from now, you ain't a Christian -- you're just some poser liar pretending to be Christian. So don't give me that shit about "knowing when Jesus comes back", if you're a Christian the whole point is not knowing when Jesus comes back, 'cause otherwise why bother tryin' to act like, well, Jesus woulda wanted ya to act?
And for folks who aren't Christian, we don't give a shit when you think some zombie-ass Jewboy is gonna start, like, lurchin' around moaning "brains.... BRAAAAAIIIIINS...." cuz, like, we're already sick of all that zombie apocalypse shit. Zombies are overdone. Jumped the shark, tragically unhip, as over as vampires now that we got fuckin' sparkle vampires (what the fuck? Vampires aren't suppose to fuckin' sparkle!), I mean, we got zombies driving fuckin' Honda Civics, for cryin' out loud. Over. Just sayin'.
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
So World Nut Daily sez the U.S. Marines need to be "more of a fighting force and less of a social experiment" 'cuz of a photo of two male Marines hugging and kissing at a base in Hawaii? WTF? Has Crazy Joe lost his fucking mind? The Marines have been kicking ass left and right in Trashcanistan and the World's Biggest Catbox for the past eleven years, they been fucking enemy's shit up like no other fighting force in history has fucked enemy's shit up, has he been on fucking Quaaludes all that time and sorta, like, forgot about that? Oh wait, that's right, we don't call him Crazy Joe Farah for nuttin'.
Way to go supportin' our troops, right-wing asshole. My suggestion to you: Do *not* go to a bar outsida Camp Lejeune and proclaim that Marines are pussies just 'cuz a coupla Marines groped each other. Your ass goin' to da *HOSPITAL* you try that shit in the presence of Marines that ain't got their commandin' officers around to order'em not to. Just sayin'.
-- Badtux the Known-a-few-Marines(*) Penguin
(*)Male, Female, gay, straight, don't matter, they were all kick-ass.
So, a federal appeals court has upheld the overturn of California's Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage. Are puppets getting gay married yet? Has every straight couple divorced and married their family dog? Wait, wait, I got it... here's the sum total of everything that happens if gay marriage is legal:
Or maybe U.S. infantry soldiers will don pink Crocs and dance, dance, dance the night away. Oh wait...
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
So Orly Taitz is throwing a conniption fit after the ruling against her. The problem is, there simply won't be a ruling in her favor, *ever*, because a judicial coup of that magnitude would utterly destroy the legitimacy of the court system in the eyes of the majority of Americans -- and that aura of legitimacy is the only thing that allows courts to have power, since they possess neither armies nor police forces, the only other possible source of power (i.e., *guns*). Without legitimacy, courts can issue rulings, but who will enforce their ruling? They would be in the position of Gorbachev after the coup against him, rattling around in their vacant halls issuing proclamations and orders to the waitstaff, proclamations and orders utterly ignored as the Soviet Union crumbled around him.
To understand what I am talking about, you must understand the fundamental nature of power. There are two sources of power: The will of the majority, or the will of a significant armed minority with guns. Laws -- whether we are talking about the Constitution or laws in general -- have power only because either the majority agree that they should have power, or because a minority with guns force the majority to accept them at gunpoint.
This reality has been responsible for a number of unpleasant incidents over the years where extremely popular actions that pretty much violated the Constitution were papered over by the courts because if they'd issued rulings, the rulings would have been ignored and thus destroyed the aura of invincibility that motivates many people to comply with laws that they don't agree with. Plessy V. Ferguson, the "Separate but Equal" ruling that justified Jim Crow, *had* to be ruled the way it was. The only other alternative would have been to force desegregation upon the majority of Americans at gunpoint, and courts don't have the guns to do so, the President does. And the President is going to deploy those guns only if the majority of voters support him doing so, because otherwise he's going to get impeached or at the very least not re-elected. The majority of Americans supported and demanded Jim Crow in 1896, and the President would never have deployed the Army to enforce the overturn of Jim Crow laws. So if the Supreme Court had ruled any other way in 1896, they would have destroyed their legitimacy. It was not until attitudes changed after WW2 and the majority of Americans realized that legally-mandated racial segregation was an atrocity that the courts could overturn that ruling.
And that is why, even if the election of President Obama did violate the Constitution as the birthers claim (BTW the birthers' claims are nonsense, but just pretend for a moment), there will be no judicial coup done by our courts. The majority of voters elected Obama. Attempting to overturn the election of a sitting President via judicial decree after it's already a done deal would result in a Constitutional crisis that likely would end the authority of any Supreme Court that tried to do so -- they would issue their order, but who would enforce it? The FBI under the command of the President? The Secret Service under the command of the President? The U.S. Army under the command of the President?
It's not happening. Period. Anybody who ever lived under a dictatorship, like Orly Taitz did, should understand that much about power -- a judicial coup without majority support and without guns is about as likely to happen as flying pigs. Well, other than flying pigs at a Pink Floyd concert. If Pink Floyd held concerts anymore, now that they're all 90 years old or something. So it goes.
-- Badtux the Power Penguin
When Clint Eastwood was born and raised, America was a can-do nation. There was no problem that Americans didn't attempt to solve, nothing that an American couldn't do. Vietnam broke the spine of can-do America -- suddenly we *couldn't* do something -- and ever since, can't-do America has been the rule. America can't provide healthcare for everybody. America can't solve homelessness or hunger. America can't provide a good education for everybody who wants one, America can't find jobs for all the Americans ready and willing to work, American can't, can't, can't, can't.
Clint is basically calling bullshit on that whole notion, on behalf of a car company that's back from the grave and making cars as good as any that it's ever made. And if Karl fucking Rove believes that advocating for a Can-do America is partisan, fuck him. Fuck him and the nihilistic defeatist divisive can't-do spirit that he represents. That is all.
- Badtux the Can-do Penguin
Remember the "trial" that was actually a hearing before an administrative trial judge who was charged with issuing a recommendation to the Georgia Secretary of State? Well, he issued his statement to the Birthers today:
Basically, his ruling said that the birther's "evidence" isn't -- in the words of administrative law, their "evidence" has "no probative value". I.e., it's speculations, made up silliness, unproven / unprovable nonsense, nothing that counts as evidence in the legal meaning of the term. A state administrative judge doesn't have to comply with the full multi-volume stack of books that comprise the Federal Rules of Evidence, but in every state you can't just come in and say "The President's birth certificate is forged!" -- you have to prove it, with actual evidence. Otherwise you're just expressing an opinion, and an opinion isn't proof of anything other than that, like every asshole on this planet, you got an opinion.
And in case you're wondering, even if you're a world-renowned expert on Photoshop, saying "the President's birth certificate is clearly photoshopped!" is *still* just an opinion. Under the rules of evidence of *any* state, you have to *prove* it's photoshopped, your opinion is just an opinion, which is worthless unless you can produce the actual person who photoshopped it and corroborating evidence that he indeed was there and did the job.
If there was anything the birthers had that met the most rudimentary of the rules regarding what comprises evidence in a court of law, Obama would likely be off the ballot in Georgia. But they have nothing. They will always have nothing. Because their actual problem with Obama isn't where he was born. Their actual problem is what he was born -- i.e., black.
-- Badtux the Law Penguin
The Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure didn't quit donating money to Planned Parenthood because they're being investigated by Congress. They quit donating money to Planned Parenthood for the same reason they quit supporting stem cell research -- because they've been taken over by right-wing zealots such as Karen Handel, former campaign adviser to Sarah Palin and former GOP candidate for governor of Georgia.
Apparently the only cure you're going to support if you donate money to this organization from now onwards are going to be faith-based cures -- I guess they're going to work on developing better prayers for praying the cancer out, sorta like praying the gay away. So if you're looking for an organization that supports real, evidence-based approaches to diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer, I'd suggest looking elsewhere.
-- Badtux the RWNJ-spottin' Penguin
On one side of this dispute between the talking heads of Fox News and the Muppets, you have a bunch of puppets with words put into their mouths by their handlers. On the other side is Muppets.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Hot on the heels of the scandal where Rupert Murdoch's papers wiretapped the Royal Family (bad show, wot -- those limeys seem to like their inbred snooty royals, go figure), now it appears that Sir Rupe's criminal enterprises have extended to circulation fraud -- basically defrauding advertisers. Senior executives in New York, including Murdoch's right-hand man, Les Hinton, were alerted to the problems last year by an internal whistleblower and apparently chose to take no action. The whistleblower was then made redundant.
In short: News Corpse committed a crime -- fraud -- against its advertisers by claiming it had one circulation, when it actually had a (much smaller) one. Looking for Sir Rupe to go to jail in 3... 2.... 1... *NEVER*. Because it's always a "few bad apples" who do these criminal things, right?
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
One county in Georgia has a solution for those outrageous salaries that firefighters are getting: Convict them of crimes, send them to prison, then assign them back to firehouses as prison laborers. Pure genius! If only the good colonels of the Old Confederacy had been so ingenious, they coulda kept slavery going in the South, like, forEVAH!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
(Who doesn't look good in stripes, thus is glad he's not in Georgia).
If right-wingers were really so serious about how much they love children, they wouldn't make it so expensive to have children.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Michelle Bachmann opened her crazy trap and opined that the recent East Coast earthquake and hurricane were a message from God.
Dear Michelle: If God is omnipotent enough to send an earthquake or a hurricane to "send a message", why can't He just send an email or an IM or even a Twitter tweet? What, the keys on these keyboards are too small for His big giant omnipotent God fingers or something? But... but He's GOD, right? He can just *create* him some little fingers to press the keys if he wants to, right? I mean, you're sayin' that He can create the world, and dwarfs, and everything else in it, but He can't even send a fucking TEXT MESSAGE?
Lame, dude. Just sayin'.
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Rick Santorum, R(Dog-on-Dog), complains that gay activists are conducting a most fabulous jihad against him. Poor little Ricardo, oppressed by those wicked, wicked gay people... you gotta watch out for those drag queens and leather boys, they got claws, yo. Case in point:
'Nuff said ;).
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
So anyhow, earthquakes apparently never happened in NOM's universe back in the days when America discriminated against gays. (Erm... New Madrid. Just sayin'). So then Pat Robertson weighs in and says the cracks in the Washington Monument are a sign from God. Unlike, apparently, the damage to the National Cathedral, which is just an accident.
I am eagerly awaiting what these folks are going to say about Hurricane Irene coming ashore somewhere on the East Coast. Presumably that's going to be The Gay Agenda's fault too. Talk about one heckuva blow job!
-- Badtux the Rude Penguin
Looking at the right-wing insistence that the poor aren't really poor because the poor aren't starving to death and dying in the streets in mass numbers, I was initially baffled. Over 40 million Americans receive "food stamps" via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. That's over 13% of Americans. And the eligibility requirements for that program are high -- for example, if you are a single male, you basically aren't eligible. Over 50 million Americans are enrolled in Medicaid. That's around 17% of the population of the USA. And again, the eligibility requirements for that program are very stringent -- e.g., if your car is worth more than $2,000, forget it, no Medicaid for you, and single men aren't eligible period -- so this undoubtedly underestimates the number of poor people. And finally, thanks to Social Security propping up the incomes of older Americans, a larger percentage of the young than the old are poor -- 20% of children are being raised in poverty.
Given that we have close to 20% of Americans requiring monthly food assistance and medical assistance to keep from starving to death or dying of treatable illnesses, the notion that they aren't poor doesn't pass the laugh and giggle test. Yes, our poor have it better than the poor in Somalia thanks to these government programs that keep them from starving to death or dying of treatable illnesses... but do right wingers seriously submit that receiving food and medical assistance makes you somehow NOT poor?
But of course, the whole point of this exercise, for the oligarchs who run the GOP, has nothing to do with facts. It didn't occur to me until this morning what's going on: It's that old game of the New Confederacy, NIGGER KNOCKING, where Southern politicians competed to tell poor white trash, "You may be poor, but at least you're not a NIGGER! And we're going to keep those niggers in their place!" The point being that if the oligarchs could keep one class down further than the white trash, then they didn't have to address the lack of educational opportunities, lack of healthcare, and lack of adequate housing amongst poor whites. Because if a white man complained about his status, he was told "hey, look, you have it better than niggers at least!"
And of course Somalis and Mexicans are the new niggers in this scenario -- two nations basically destroyed by the United States or its proxies, kept down just like the black population of the New Confederacy prior to the Civil Rights Act. And now the poor white trash are being told "hey, you're not rich, but look, at least you're not a MEXICAN!" As if that somehow makes them any less poor, the fact that some other group of people has it worse than them.
Will it work? Well, it worked in the New Confederacy for generations -- by keeping the blacks down, the oligarchs who ran the New Confederacy managed to avoid the sort of investments in human capital that turned places like New York and California into thriving engines of innovation. Will it work today? Well... I haven't seen that poor white trash have gotten any smarter. After all, that's the oligarch's plan, as it's been for generations -- to keep the majority of their constituents so poor, working so hard, and so undereducated that they'll buy whatever drivel the oligarchs are handing out. So why *wouldn't* it work?
Or as JzB is fond of saying: WASF.
-- Badtux the Once-poor(*) Penguin
And yes, it sucked big time -- I much prefer my current situation where I'm in the upper quintile rather than the lower quintile.
