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Archive for June 2005
More Nonsense from Cliff May
Posted by Clif on 06/30/05 at 11:46 pm
Category: Wingnuts, America's Shittiest Website
Cliff May, one of the most clueless contributors at America’s Shittiest Web Site™ graces the web pages of Clown Hall today and takes the opportunity to say this:
There is no such thing as an experienced suicide bomber.
This insight seems to have eluded the Central Intelligence Agency. A few days ago a classified CIA report was leaked to the media. It put forward the frightening “assessment” that terrorists in Iraq are developing greater skills than those who learned their trade in Afghanistan under Taliban/al-Qaeda rule in the 1990s.
Think about that: The most effective weapon the terrorists utilize in Iraq is the suicide bomber. Surely it is the rare suicide bomber who improves his performance mission after mission.
Cliff is so clever! Why, of course, suicide bombers can’t gain experience. What a stupid CIA!
However, if Cliff had taken his nose out of the White House’s butt long enough to take a breath, he would have read news accounts that indicate that many suicide bombers are set off by remote detonation either because the driver loses his nerve or because the driver has no idea of his real mission. And the remote detonators survive and learn how to do it better. Read about remote detonation here and here.
Dirty Little Secrets
Posted by Clif on 06/29/05 at 8:45 am Category: Gay Issues, Radical Clerics
Richard Land is a spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention and a spiritual adviser to George Bush. Yesterday he gave an interview in which he countered any notion that the Southern Baptists had gone soft on gays and reiterated that Southern Baptists hate gays as much as they always have.
During the course of the interview he compares gays to rapists and pulls out of his ass what must certainly be the most bizarre, and patently false, explanation for why people may be gay:
“One of the dirty, little secrets of the homosexual movement is that a significant majority of adult male homosexuals were introduced into the homosexual lifestyle by molestation when they were children,” Land said, noting that many lesbians are in the homosexual lifestyle because of “male sexual abuse when they were children.”
If male sexual abuse makes girls want to have sex with women, you might wonder why it has the exactly opposite effect on boys. But logic has never gotten in between a Southern Baptist preacher and a bigoted lie that he is hell bent on telling.
One of the dirty little secrets of the Southern Baptist movement is that a significant majority of adult preachers were introduced into the lying lifestyle by lies told to them when they were children.
Senator Bellerophon
Posted by Clif on 06/28/05 at 7:58 am Category: Loathsome Republicans
Sam Brownback (R - Kan.) stays up late at night thinking of ways that evil scientists might do wicked things and then introduces legislation to stop them dead in their tracks. Lately Sam has been worried about chimeras. No, this is not a cute way of saying Sam is worried about non-existent things. No, honestly, Sam has introduced legislation to prevent scientists from creating chimeras. No joke. It’s called, not surprisingly, the Human Chimera Prohibition Act of 2005.
The chimera was a creature in Greek mythology that was equal part horse, serpent and goat. I’m against those too, even if you could whip one of those up in the laboratory, mostly because snakes are just not good particularly if you give them the size and speed of a horse. Bad idea.
But Sam is not talking about an animal threefer. Sam has his sights set on creations that are part human, part animal. You know, like half-person/half-ass (which means that Sam’s legislation may actually make most Republicans illegal). Sam is concerned about this application of stem-cell research because Jesus was quite clear, as was the Old Testament, that stem-cell research is evil, probably more evil than rum, poker and dancing combined.
Sam’s legislation provides an exhaustive list of prohibited chimeras, many of which are quite funny. For example, one type of prohibited chimera is “a human egg that has been fertilized by a non-human sperm.” Nevermind, of course, that this won’t work. Best of all, Sam also defines another kind of prohibited chimera as “a human embryo that consists of cells derived from more than 1 human embryo, fetus, or born individual.” Sam apparently has no clue how babies are made.
Of course, it’s easy to make fun of all this were it not for that fact that this legislation would have a sinister result. Mice with human immune systems have been important in AIDS research. But the need for creating these “chimeras” is much broader as explained yesterday in Scientific American:
With such a namesake, laboratory-bred chimeras may sound like a bad idea born of pure scientific hubris. Yet they may be unavoidable if stem cells are ever to be realised as therapies. Researchers will need to study how stem cells behave and react to chemical cues inside the body. Unless they are to do those risky first experiments in humans, they will need the freedom to test in animals and thereby make chimeras.
Now aren’t you glad Sam is watching out for you?
Potemkin Prison Field Trip
Posted by Clif on 06/26/05 at 3:33 pm Category: Lying Republicans
Marsha Blackburn (R - Tenn.), caught in the photo on the right sporting rhinestone sunglasses, took a field trip yesterday to Gitmo with some other members of Congress. As soon as Blackburn returned, she rushed over to CNN and started lying her heart out.
TONY HARRIS (CNN): What’s the single most important thing you learned on your one-day trip?BLACKBURN: You know, what I learned is that most of the reports that the Americans are seeing are wrong. What we saw was a well-run, secure facility. We saw that the detainee population there is there for a reason. We’ve got 520 detainees that are there. They have been through administrative reviews. We know the people are there for a reason. . . . They’re people that are trying to harm our men and women in uniform.
To hear Marsha prattle on about the detainees’ certain guilt you’d almost imagine that she spent the afternoon at Gitmo reviewing the files for each and every one of them. Mostly though she had lunch.
I had lunch with some Tennesseans . . . . And was able to visit with some Tennesseans there and talk with them about their job. They feel like most of the media accounts are very unfair. . . . There have been no strikings. Dogs are not used. Sexual innuendo is not used.
I suppose the FBI and military investigators who made these reports are just a pack of liars.
There have been 28,000 interrogations. We are getting information . . . that is leading us to — that led us to Saddam Hussein.
Now that bit about Saddam is one world class whopper. You know, you really have to admire someone who can go on TV and say whatever she wants to without even being vaguely troubled by the truth.
But Marsha saves the best for last. The reason she knows so much about what’s going on at Gitmo is that right after lunch they let the visitors see three real live interrogations:
You know, we saw three interrogations yesterday . . . We saw how those . . . are being carried out . . .
Bless her heart. Marsha actually thinks that if the guards were sodomizing prisoners with glow sticks, they’d show a visiting Congressional delegation how it’s done.
GOP Scenic Wonders
Posted by Clif on 06/26/05 at 11:06 am Category: Loathsome Republicans
Last week, during debates over energy legislation, the ever-preposterous Trent Lott (R - Miss.) simply outdid himself. Trent took issue with Bill Nelson (D - Fla.), who had shown pictures of oil-soaked pelicans to support his objections to the provisons of proposed energy legislation that would lift the national moratorium on off-shore drilling. Trent, with his typical Republican flair for the absurd, countered Nelson by claiming that offshore rigs increased the scenic beauty of shorelines:
I remember sitting on my front porch seeing the natural gas wells being flared. It wasn’t ugly. It was really quite pretty.
Next we’ll be hearing Lott and the other Republicans claiming that smog layers, strip mines, and clear-cut forests are things of beauty as well.
Liars In Training
Posted by Clif on 06/25/05 at 12:15 pm Category: Lying Republicans
This weekend the Crystal City Marriot has been transformed into the Clearasil City Marriot as hoardes of college Republicans descend upon the hotel to vote on the new national chairman of the College Republican National Committe (or as they call themselves, and I’m so not making this up, “Crank”). Not surprisingly the election is so tightly controlled that one conservative commentator says that some of their elections have been “rigged” — which, of course, is only appropriate for the future Karl Roves of the world.
The hands-on favorite for new chairman is Paul Gourley. But, hey, Gourley earned his coveted position by being up to his thick neck in the group’s fundraising scandal. You remember: these are the folks that sent misleading letters to the elderly suggesting that the contributions were for the Bush campaign (rather than for the kiddy Republicans’ coffers). And guess who signed those letters? None other than Paul Gourley.
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Paul is from the no-shame branch of the GOP which, come to think of it, really isn’t a branch of the Republican party but a frank description of the whole lot of them. So he frankly admits that the fundraising letters made some of the group’s officers “uncomfortable” and that he gladly signed them because “no one else would.” Attaboy Paul. That’s what we call stepping up to the plate, little feller. We hope you win. Really.
Other highlights from the Crank Convention:
Tom DeLay, apparently drunk off his ass, slurs through Karl Rove’s blood libel of Democrats during his speech to the group.
Crank kiddies were polled on the four things they most hate and here’s what they said — liberals, hippies, gays and Democrats, in that order. I would’ve thought that maybe high taxes, terrorism, and crime might have been on that list. (I don’t know about you, but I think that kid holding the Gourley sign ought to make a quick exit while there’s still time.)
FROM THE MAILBAG: The college Republican in the picture read this post and then wrote to tell me that he is “quite comfortable with [his] heterosexuality.” We are certainly glad to hear that and know that you will be too.
Majure Idiocy
Posted by Clif on 06/24/05 at 10:33 am Category: Red States, Civil Rights
Harlan Majure, the former Mayor of Philadelphia, Mississippi, made headlines when he testified in the Killen trial that the Ku Klux Klan was a benevolent association that did alot of good. Rather than slip away into obscurity, Majure crawled out his hole and repeated this and alot more last night on Anderson Cooper 360:
ANDERSON COOPER: Why do you believe the Ku Klux Klan at any time in their history was a peaceful organization and did a lot of good?HARLAN MAJURE, FORMER PHILADELPHIA, MISSISSIPPI, MAYOR: Because when I was a small child, in the mid-’30s and during the Depression years, my daddy worked at a little country store and made $2 or $3 a day. At night, when he would come in from being at that store, he would say, Well, the Klan was busy over the weekend. . . .
But he’d say, They went by to see whoever, so-and-so, because if there was anybody in the community, of the neighbors, that would not take care of the family, too sorry to work, or waste their money and not take care of the wife and the children, the Klan would pay them a visit. If there was somebody in the neighborhood that was messing around somebody’s house, or with somebody else’s wife, the Klan would pay them a visit. And they visited more white people, and they whipped more white people than they did black people. . . .
That would be because they didn’t whip blacks — they lynched them.
COOPER: Are you kidding? Do you know that the U.S. Senate just apologized for their role in not preventing the lynchings of several thousand African-Americans going back more than 100 years, 4,700 lynchings that happened between 1882 and 1968?
MAJURE: No. I’m not aware of that.
Right here you can see Majure scratching his head and wondering “now why in the Sam Hill has the United States Senate gone and done that?”
COOPER: You were a twice-elected official. . . . If you’re going make comments about the Ku Klux Klan, shouldn’t you read some history books about it?
MAJURE: Well, I didn’t plan to be making any comments about it. I was summonsed to be up there. I didn’t believe even that the people were killed. I thought it was a publicity stunt until later on in the — while they were looking for them, the FBI and whoever else were having those search parties. Then I realized [that it] had actually happened.
Because, you know, those Northern liberals are always faking their deaths to get attention.
MAJURE: And it should not have happened. I — we were never in favor of that type of an operation. We wasn’t in favor of what they did, came down here. But certainly not killing anybody. . . .
COOPER: You’re saying, you’re, you’re, you, they should not have been killed, but they shouldn’t have come down there?
MAJURE: Well, I’m saying that the people that were responsible for their death were the people that organized them, wherever, whatever times they were in, I think one or two of them from New York City. They should have been properly trained and expected more or less what you come into, and to try to change the tradition one summer that had been going on for hundred and maybe thousands of years, it just doesn’t happen.
The Mayor, obviously an astute student of history, thinks that the South had been denying denying voting rights to blacks for “thousands of years” or since sometime around the birth of Christ.
COOPER: I’m sorry, sir. . . . You said the people who were responsible for their deaths are the people who sent them there there to do voter registration, not the actual people who pulled the triggers?
MAJURE: Well, I’ll say they were responsible for them, without schooling them. . . . It would have happened in any city, in any state. Where are you? Where am I talking to you?
COOPER: New York City.
MAJURE: All right. If I recruited a group of young people. . . .to go in and say, We’re going to clean up the drugs, the prostitution, the money laundering, the gang wars, and stuff like that, in the city of New York, we’re just going to move in and take over, because that stuff is illegal . . . . Do you think we’d see the sun rise the next morning if we went in there, forcibly, changing that?
Umm, yes.
COOPER: I mean, you say as if these three people came down were aliens from outer space. I mean, yes, two of them were from New York. But you know what? James Chaney was from Meridien, Mississippi . . . . not too far from where you are right now. . . . What’s wrong with someone from Meridien, Mississippi, an African-American, saying, I want to be able to vote?
MAJURE: Not anything wrong with it, far as I’m concerned. The timing was bad. . . .
COOPER: When was the right timing to give African-Americans the vote?
MAJURE: I don’t have the answer to that question.
That is to say, as far as Harlan, is concerned the answer was probably never. Now do you understand why Trent Lott wouldn’t sponsor the anti-lynching legislation?
Lying is a Traditional Value
Posted by Clif on 06/23/05 at 9:11 pm Category: Radical Clerics
Lou Sheldon, the gay-obsessed radical cleric who runs the Traditional Values Coalition, is pissed, really pissed that the Southern Poverty Law Center called the TVC a hate group. So yesterday Lou struck back. With a bunch of lies, of course.
Sheldon doesn’t dispute the bulk of the SPLC report on his hate group, but instead alleges that one quote used by the SPLC report was “fake.” Sheldon doesn’t bother to reveal the substance of the disputed quote used by the SPLC, which was this quotation from a Jimmy Breslin column in Newsday:
In 1992, Sheldon reportedly told columnist Jimmy Breslin, “Homosexuals are dangerous. They proselytize. They come to the door, and if your son answers and nobody is there to stop it, they grab the son and run off with him. They steal him. They take him away and turn him into a homosexual.”
“Reverend” Sheldon called the quote “fake,” “incorrect,” and “discredited,” allegedly on the basis of a Newsday statement issued after Sheldon complained about the column. But if you read the Newsday response, which Sheldon improvidently quotes in full, you can quickly see that the not-so-good Reverend is not-so-truthful as well.
In response to the column, Sheldon, the chairman of the conservative lobbying group Traditional Values Coalition, said in a telegram to Newsday: “I do not recall ever meeting or being interviewed by Mr. Breslin. I have never made statements like these to Mr. Breslin or anyone else.”
The Newsday statement then gives Sheldon a smack-down about his claim to have never met or been interviewed by Breslin:
Breslin said he interviewed Sheldon on the floor of the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston and wrote a column about the encounter that was published in Newsday on Aug. 18, 1992. . . . The day after the 1992 column, The Orange County Register published a story quoting Sheldon as dismissing Breslin’s column as “sour grapes.” In the Register’s article and in conversations with reporters who covered the story at the time, Sheldon did not deny meeting Breslin . . . .
Oops. Mr. “Traditional Values” lies about whether he had spoken with Breslin, which clearly he had. Apparently telling the truth isn’t a traditional value.
Then the Newsday statement addresses the quote at issue:
Breslin said . . . he drew the quotes from memory. The result is that the quotes attributed to Sheldon in the April 7 column were incorrect and not Sheldon’s precise words. Breslin maintains, however, that they were an accurate reflection of the essence of the reverend’s views on homosexuality in the 1992 interview.The April 7 Breslin column did not adhere to Newsday’s standard of publishing only direct quotations that are accurate and precise.”
In other words, since Breslin was using his memory rather than notes he shouldn’t have put direct quotes around the statements. But calling the quotation “fake” and “discredited” considerably overstates the situation where Breslin stands by his position that the quotation accurately reflected the substance of what Sheldon said.
In the end, either Breslin or Sheldon is lying. I put money, of course, on Sheldon as the liar. Sheldon lied and said he’d never ever talked to Breslin when in fact he had. Moreover, the statement at issue is indistinguishable from stuff you can find on Sheldon’s website. Like this:
Homosexual militants are pushing for aggressive recruitment programs in public schools. If you want children, what better place to find them than in the public schools? After all, since homosexual couples can’t reproduce, they will simply go after your children for seduction and conversion to homosexuality.
Frankly, I think conversion of children in the public schools by the likes of Sheldon is a much greater danger.
Spreading Religion and AIDS
Posted by Clif on 06/22/05 at 10:21 pm Category: White House, Radical Clerics
Our Glorious Leader has never addressed the conventions of the mainstream religious denominations such as the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, or the Presbyterian Church. However, the recent convention of the American Taliban Southern Baptist Church was another story, with Our Glorious Leader taking time out of his busy schedule yesterday to address the evangelical wingnuts of the Southern Baptist Church with a special word of support.
Here’s a little snippet from Bush’s panegyric to the Southern Baptists:
In Uganda, Southern Baptists have emphasized abstinence and helped as that country reduced the percentage of people infected with HIV by more than two thirds in less than a decade and a half.
That, of course, is a complete lie. Bush is referring to a handful of Southern Baptist missionaries in Uganda who have been pushing a complete abstinence message. The Ugandan government instead pushed a message which included the use of condoms. There is little question, as described in this Human Rights Watch report, that the use of condoms was central to AIDS reduction in Uganda.
Worse yet, the Bush administration (with the wild applause of the evangelicals) is trying to eliminate condoms from the Ugandan program and push abstinence instead. As the Human Rights Watch report stated:
Teachers interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that USAID-funded trainers had encouraged them to omit information about condoms in favor of an abstinence-only message.
I suppose this is the Bush adminstration’s notion of equal opportunity: young adults in the U.S. and in Africa have an equal opportunity to die as a result of U.S. government policies informed, in equal measure, by evangelicalism and ignorance.