Teabaggers and tighty righties have a new way to spell the word "black". They now spell it "F-R-A-U-D". As in, "our FRAUD President". Usually followed by references to his Kenyan birthplace and Muslim religion.
Alrighty, then!
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
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
An Indiana state lawmaker claims that the Girl Scouts are an evil organization because they include a condom with every box of Girl Scout cookies. Or spend their meetings giving each other free abortions and herpes vaccinations. Or something. It doesn't really make sense, but it doesn't have to, if you're a Republican.
BTW, does that photo of Indiana state Rep. Bob Morris make your Gaydar ping the way it makes my Gaydar ping? Want to bet that he's an advocate of the conservative gay agenda -- bigger closets -- and that sooner or later someone will catch him with his very own Rentboy.com rentboy? Just sayin'...
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
The above is apparently the theme song of Rep. Steve King (R-dumbass), who apparently believes that birth control is the same thing as abortion.
98% of women use birth control at some point in their adult lives. So somehow I can't see this as being a winning issue for Republicans. So hey guys, keep pushing the "birth control is evil!" thing, yo! 'Cause that's good news -- for Democrats.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
So birthers in Georgia filed complaints with the Georgia Secretary of State that Obama wasn't eligible to be President because he wasn't natural-born (apparently he was born artificially in a test tube?), and the Secretary of State sighed and put the matter in the hands of an administrative law judge to decide. Now, administrative law judges aren't exactly criminal or civil judges. Really, they're not judges at all in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, they make decisions about whether state regulations are being properly applied or not. They are, in essence, clerks, not judges in the traditional sense of the word.
So anyhow, O'Really Taitz was one of the complainants, and promptly subpoena'ed Obama to testify at the hearing via filing service on Obama's Georgia lawyer. Said lawyer than complained that this was nonsense, you couldn't subpoena a sitting President into what's essentially an administrative proceeding internal to the Georgia state government that should simply review the last two dozen court rulings against Taitz and dismiss the complaint out of hand, there was no jurisdiction to subpoena Obama because Obama was not a citizen of the state of Georgia and thus not subject to the jurisdiction of the state of Georgia. The administrative law judge said "Oh yeah? Well I'm going to uphold the subpoena anyhow!"
So there it stands. Obama's lawyer basically said "Screw this, you have no jurisdiction and we will not participate, you've stamped your subpoena, now enforce it." Which is going to be problematic, because see, the Constitution sort of foresaw this problem, and made the President a citizen of the District of Columbia and thus subject only to Federal law for actions he takes as President. The only court with jurisdiction is the Federal District Court in D.C., not some podunk administrator in Atlanta. The only court that Obama must answer to as President is that court, not some clerk in Atlanta. And the lawyer for Obama *couldn't* participate, because participating would implicitly imply that this over-titled clerk had jurisdiction to issue a subpoena, which would open the flood gates to every clerk in every city hall who had a beef against the President issuing a subpoena to their own dog and pony fiasco.
Which, BTW, is an apt description of what actually happened when the hearing actually got underway. No lawyer for Obama. No Obama. Just a circus side-show of freaks and lunatics that were so ridiculous that even the administrative law judge, who is apparently a hard-core Republican but not an insane one, started cutting them off while rolling eyes and sighing heavily.
And no ruling, of course. I'm sure he wants to be well away from that collection of lunatics before he issues a ruling, probably via having a courier deliver it rather than announcing it in person. Because by this time it *has* to be obvious to him exactly what kind of people he's dealing with and that ruling any way other than the obvious (that a dude born in Hawaii is a natural-born citizen as defined by the Constitution) will result in the sort of circus that will consume his life.
-- Badtux the Law Penguin
So Newt Gingrinch's SuperPAC is running ads in South Carolina blasting Romney because Romney can... speak French?
But hey, maybe the Grinch has a point. If not for France helping us out during the French Revolution, we'd have an actual real national anthem that can be sung by mere mortals, rather than the screech-inducing ode to fireworks that is our current national anthem, which trips up far too many pop tarts who attempt to scream it out at the beginning of football games. Not to mention that football would be played with round balls, kicked with your foot, rather than being some bizarre mashup of rugby, wrestling, and line-dancing. And if not for the French, we'd all speak English.
So thanks for nothing, France. Seriously.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
I suppose I should post something about the dwarf race. Creepy Dwarf won, as expected, but 60% of GOP voters still don't like him and voted for someone else. Goldy Dwarf came out with a surprising second place finish -- apparently New Hamster *likes* cranky old septuagenarians who yell "you darn kids, smoke my grass!", probably something to do with too many fumes from the grass. Oily Dwarf's oil millions apparently worked good enough for a third place finish, followed by Grumpy Dwarf, Frothy Dwarf, and basically out of the race, Dopey Dwarf with basically 0%, who is going to give it one last Texas try in South Carolina then go home to tend his chattel.
I was going to extend the allegory to dwarf vs. camel but at this point we're already too politically incorrect towards the little people so I'll let you watch that race and create your own allegory. Heh.
- Badtux the Dwarf-watching Penguin
Well, it appears that Creepy and Frothy are the winners in Iowa, with Goldy slightly behind. Grumpy, Crazy, and Dopey are well behind. And of course Doughy already dropped out.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Just got home after a long day at work, so going to blog about stupidity rather than about the economy. Everybody already tweeted about Michelle Gaffman's notion that the U.S. has an embassy in Iran (we don't, and haven't since 1980). Then there was the story from last week about how Russian hackers had hacked into a water system's SCADA and burned out a pump, cutting off water to the town. Except they didn't -- the "Russian hacker" turned out to be the water system's IT consultant who ssh'ed in while on vacation in Moscow and Berlin to diagnose a problem with the system, and the "hack burned out the water pump" turned out to be just a worn-out water pump that the water system knew was failing that finally gave up the ghost. So the Department of Homeland Security spun up this whole story about the Russian hacker menace that, err, wasn't, out of thin air apparently because if there are clean undies in any IT machine room they wanted to remedy that situation. Go figure.
So what other stupidity? BAE gets into a fight with a Medal of Honor winner. Even bets on who wins that one -- the Marine, or the international mega-corporation. And Teabaggers continue to whine that they're overtaxed... despite the fact that the only nations that collect less in taxes than the United States are third-world hellholes.
And finally, yet another GOP politician caught trading meth for sex with a gay prostitute. So now we know how Sheriff Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. stayed so slim as he aged... it was all the exercise in the closet that did it for him.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Once upon a time, all that was required to be a GOP candidate for President was a pulse. Then Dick Cheney happened. Dick famously no longer has a pulse.
The fact that men without a pulse can potentially be President opens up a whole new realm of possibility. For example, I have now come up with the perfect GOP candidate:
Oh sure, he needs brains, but then so do the rest of the GOP candidates so why not?
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
... Democrats. The most amazing thing was when the crowd bloodthirstily clapped when Goodhair boasted of how many innocent people he'd executed. Yeah, not a lot of Democrats in that crowd. Anyhow, Crazy White (Lady) and the Seven Dwarfs put on the show we've been expecting to see, even though the dwarf "Boring" got replaced with the dwarf "Dopey" for this debate. Hmm, let's name the dwarfs. Sleazy, Grumpy, Creepy, Dopey, Dope, Goldy, and Skeezy. What a collection. And of course Crazy White complements them quite well.
Which reminds me, the preliminaries for Wet Your Pants Day have started with the usual bogus terror alert to keep us all anxious for kindly Big Brother to protect us from them mean terriers who want to destroy our freedoms (huh, don't terriers usually just wanna destroy your shoes?!) and thus we must destroy our freedoms first or the terriers win and... err... I think I lost the plot here. But that's okay, the whole fucking nation lost the plot on September 11, 2001, so remember, we must all wet our pants on command in three days or Zombie Osama will KILL US ALL and the terriers will win!
- 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
The left wing blogosphere and twittersphere is abuzz with the news that GOP Presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann today warned of impending attack on US by Attila the Hun and his Horde. Or some long-defunct nation, anyhow.
Thing is, this kind of gaffe doesn't matter to Michelle Bachman's base, who would be puzzled about the whole thing. Soviet Union, Russia, whatever, it's all just somebody "over there" to them, and everybody knows that all them furriners hate America and want to kill us, right? You have to remember that her base are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know...
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
The above was basically the unofficial campaign slogan when Edwin Edwards (D-Crowley) was running against David Duke (R-KKK) for Governor of Louisiana. Edwards, a notoriously crooked former governor, won his 5th term of office as governor in a blowout. Edwards was only recently released from Club Fed, in case you're wondering.
I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes the ideal is the enemy of the good. What brings this to mind is this editorial cartoon:
I may think the President coddles criminals too much. But he is at least an intelligent adult. The same cannot be said about the Republicans (though I must admit neither Romney nor Huntsman is crazy -- but they do not have a snowball's chance in hell of being the Republican nominee either).
Come November 2012, vote for the crook. It's important.
-- Badtux the Pragmatist Penguin
Now, there's some folks who wonder why Idaho State Sen. John McGee (R)didn't just call a taxi when he was four sheets to the wind. I mean, calling a taxi is a lot easier than walking out into the parking lot, peering around into cars looking for one that has keys in it, finding a Ford Excursion with a 20 foot travel trailer hooked to it, and taking it for a joyride and crashing it, followed by subsequent arrest for DUI and grand theft auto (and trailer!).
But look, you're thinking like a liberal Democrat. Everybody knows that taxi drivers are mostly immigrants. BROWN immigrants. Often MUSLIM immigrants. The horror, oh the horror! And you would subject Mr. McGee to that horror?! For shame, shame!
Oh yeah, remember the chant: IOKIYR. Alrighty, then!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
I like reading mysteries. I tend towards the more hard-boiled edge of the genre, not the cozy side, because that has the most opportunities for exploring the underbelly of society and the mysteries of human nature. That said, I cannot stand most of the series mystery books out there. No series that has a murder in every book should ever be longer than two books, three maximum, unless your protagonist is a special investigator for a big city police department. We have a word for folks who accumulate a pile of dead bodies in their background. We call'em "serial killers" :).
Note that this is why I haven't tried to make a living as a writer, not that it's possible to do so anyhow in today's world, where a typical midlist writer sells 20,000 books total, worldwide, period, and most books don't break the 5,000 mark, and about $1 per book actually gets to the writer. You have to go "series" and accumulate an audience before you can start moving up the sales list in the mystery genre, and the longest "series" I can come up with has three books in it, and in that one the protagonist is a serial killer of sorts, or at least not a very nice person. (Though most of the dead bodies are not directly caused by the protagonist, who does, however, have a touching scene while standing in the middle of a field strewn with dead bodies).
Oh yeah, back to the Weiner "sex scandal": Uhm, wouldn't there have to be, like, actual sex for there to be a "sex scandal"?
Next up: Some right winger will tell me that a photo is the exact same thing as the actual act. Hmm. So if I deliver to him a photo of a pizza, it’s the exact same thing as actually delivering pizza to his apartment. So he has nobody to blame but himself next time he orders delivery and receives a photo rather than the expected food, because the photo is the exact same thing as the food, right?
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Okay, so Caribou Barbie got the Paul Revere thing as confused as George W. Bush, who once proclaimed to a worker at a cafe, "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family." But she had a point to more than her head. That point being that Paul Revere *was* warning that the British were coming to take the guns -- of the Massachusetts militia. A *real* militia, formed by local governments for self defense purposes, and their guns were kept in *arsenals*, not at home. Just like our National Guard today. Dudes don't get to take their military weapons home with them from the Guard arsenals, yo.
So anyhow, the Brits decided these local militias were arming for something other than peaceful purposes and decided to go seize those weapons from the arsenals, and in the famous tale Paul Revere supposedly rode to warn the colonials that the British were coming to seize their guns -- from the arsenal (a.k.a. "National Guard armory"), not their personal weapons from their homes, because if people did own a personal weapon it was likely a fowling piece useless for military purposes. Which means the Brits *were* going out to seize guns. But not people's personal guns. Militia guns stored in the colonial equivalent of National Guard armories.
So in a word, Caribou Barbie's point was mostly on her head, but there is at least a *little* truth to the notion that Paul Revere did ride to protect the right of the National Guard to have guns in their armories. Oh wait, that wasn't what Caribou Barbie was saying at all, was it?
- Badtux the Pointless Penguin
Mr. Noun Verb 9/11 thinking of entering GOP presidential race. Well why not? Look at the rest of the clown parade that is the Republican lineup. Mr. Noun Verb 9/11 is hardly out of place amongst the creepy magic undies wearer, snowbilly grifter, man-on-dog obsessor, and so forth that are currently cluttering the GOP race, none of whom have any hope at all of getting significant votes in the final election unless Obama is found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.
- Badtux the "Call in the clowns!" Penguin
And as fitting for such a dynamic candidacy, Tim Pawlenty's announcement that he is running for President of the United States of American ran in a prominent place in his hometown newspaper: the obituary page.
How appropriate.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Newt "The Lizard" Gingrich claims he's not a Washington insider despite, err, having been 3rd in line for the Presidency for much of the 1990's and lived in Washington and worked as a Washington lobbyist ever since. If he's not an insider, I'm a seagull. (Hmm, checks for wings... nope. No wings. Guess not). Newty Newt continues to go down ever since he basically read the polls, saw that eliminating Medicare and replacing it with a voucher program was a non-starter with the American people, and made a statement to that effect on national TV. That makes him a non-starter only to drooling Randian zombies and lizard people who rub their hands together with glee over the thought of sending all those unseemly OLD people to the ice floes for the crime of, well, getting old. Unfortunate for Newtie, drooling Randian zombies muttering "Brraaaaaains.... BRAAAAAiiiiiins...." under their breath are the Republican "base" right now, led by a contingent of cold-blooded lizard people whose compassion for humanity got left on Planet Sociopath. Newtie may be one of the latter, but he can't seem to make the Randian zombies like him, so I think he's toast.
Meanwhile, Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum takes a break from obsessing about man-on-dog sex (what kind of person obsesses about man-on-dog sex, I ask you?), and, based upon his extensive experience (having watched *EVERY* episode of "24"!), proceeds to lecture John McCain about how John McCain doesn't know anything about torture despite, err, actually having been tortured by the North Vietnamese. Err... yeah. Okay. Pull the other flipper, why doncha?
The situation is so dire that Rick Perry's hair and Jeb Bush have both been mentioned as possibilities that could be drafted to run for the GOP nomination, despite the disadvantage of being closely related to Texas Gov. Rick Perry and George W. Bush (respectively). I doubt Rick Perry's hair is going to run because the questions of "where's the birth certificate?" would get annoying. The notion of Jeb Bush running for President despite being the brother of the most-reviled President of the past 30 years is worthy of laughs and giggles, but not much more -- Jeb's no teabagger, his candidate for Floriduh governor lost to a teabagger, so that pretty much disqualifies him all by himself. In short, like Huckleberry, he just ain't crazy enough to be a Republican candidate this election season...
Saw Ted Nugent's performance with Huckleberry on Huckster's Fox show. The Nuge looked *really* deranged there. As in, had the same expression on his face as Jack Nicholson in "The Shining" when Jack axes the door, sticks his head through, and says "Here's Johnny!". Eeep!
The fact that this is the cream of the Republican crop says... err. Nevermind. It doesn't say anything. I mean, spittle-flecked frothing at the mouth might be communicating something, but it's not saying something, kapiche?
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
