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Archive for September 2005
Go, er, Marry Yourself, Stanley
Posted by Clif on 09/30/05 at 5:55 pm
Category: Gay Issues, America's Shittiest Website
Honestly, you really have to wonder about somebody as obsessed with the evils of gay marriage as Stanley Kurtz, a “research fellow” at the Hooha Institute and occasional contributor to the Corner a/k/a America’s Shittiest Website™. Almost every single one of Stanley’s posts at ASW is devoted to Stanley’s chicken-little-the-sky-is-falling take on gay marriage, each one positing some new and more horrid outcome that would ensue were gay marriage to be legalized.
Today Stanley warns us that if gay marriage is legalized then, the next thing you know, people will start marrying themselves. You know, Mr. and Mrs. Carl Roberts announce the marriage of their son John Roberts to himself. The problem here is that, of course, there are megabazillion people who want to marry themselves and who will, no doubt, insist that people send them all the expensive sh*t they’ve listed on their own Williams & Sonoma wedding registry and which they fully intend to keep even after they divorce themselves several months later.
Just to prove that this far-fetched mountain of hooey isn’t the far-fetched mountain of hooey that it is, Kurtz points to a Dutch woman Jennifer Hoes who allegedly married herself in Holland and who also appears to be the sole person in the history of the universe ever alleged to have married herself. What Stanley either doesn’t know, or choses not to reveal, is that Jennifer Hoes was an artist, that the “marriage” was a performance piece, and, more importantly, that the “marriage” was never intended to be officially recognized in Holland. The only thing that Jennifer Hoes proves is that right-wing mouthbreathers will believe anything you tell them if you tell them it happened in Holland.
Stuck on Stupid
Posted by Clif on 09/28/05 at 7:38 pm Category: Stupid Republicans
Every time Steve King (R - Iowa) opens his mouth, he manages to say something even more breathtakingly stupid than the last time he opened his mouth. You almost have to admire this in the same way you admire a pitcher for throwing a no-hitter or a figure skater for doing 18 quadruple kludges or whatevers in a row. No ordinary person can be so profoundly stupid so consistently
Steve had this talent on display yesterday when he got himself all tangled up in an effort by the folks of Berkeley, California, to name their local Post Office after Maudelle Shirek, age 94. Ms. Shirek had served on the Berkeley City Council for more than 20 years.
But on Tuesday, King, a second-term House member from western Iowa, surprised Democrats by objecting to the proposal and demanding a roll call vote, saying Shirek’s past “sets her apart from, I will say, the most consistent of American values.” . . . .In an interview with the Associated Press, King said Shirek had an “affiliation with the Communist Party” because she was involved with the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Berkeley.
Barbara Lee [the California congress woman sponsoring the name change proposal]. . . blasted King, saying his “campaign of innuendo and unsubstantiated ‘concern’ is better suited to the era of Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover than today’s House of Representatives.”
To which King responded: “I think that if Barbara Lee would read the history of Joe McCarthy, she would realize that he was a hero for America.”
Yeah, right up there with Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and George Wallace. Or perhaps King is so stupid that he’s gotten Joe McCarthy and Charlie McCarthy confused.
And, as you might imagine, the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library that has Steve in a tizzy isn’t affiliated with the Communist Party. According to the mission statement on its web site, the library is “inclusive, independent, non-sectarian, anticapitalist, and committed to struggle against racism and sexism.”
The Full Moonie
Posted by Clif on 09/27/05 at 10:55 pm Category: Gay Issues, Wingnuts
The predictably wingnutty religion reporter for the Moonie Times, Julia Duin, defended the homophobic Anglican Bishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, today in an opinion piece disguised as a news story. Duin’s piece starts out by quoting with disapproval a letter written by John Chane, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C. In that letter, Bishop Chane accused Akinola of ignoring poverty and AIDS in his own country while being an outspoken opponent of the U.S. Episcopal church for ordaining gays and blessing gay unions.
Because of the ordination of a gay bishop by the U.S. church, Akinola has refused donations from “liberal” Episcopal churches in the United States. Further, he has become the de facto spokesman for Anglican churches, including the Anglican Church of Nigeria, that have broken relations with the U.S. Episcopal church over gay issues, and has even traveled to the United States to set up a break-away church for the handful of anti-gay Episcopal parishes. And he has said things like this:
I cannot think of how a man in his senses would be having a sexual relationship with another man. Even in the world of animals, dogs, cows, lions, we don’t hear of such things.When we sit down globally as a communion, I am going to sit in a meeting with a man who is marrying a fellow man. I mean it’s just not possible.
Duin however claims that Bishop Chane is wrong and that Akinola is a “staunch, outspoken leader” in his own country on poverty and AIDS. What evidence does she offer of this? Try this:
According to the Sept. 4 Sunday Independent, a newspaper in Lagos, Nigeria, the archbishop chided Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo to his face during a funeral for “harsh policies,” which he said keep many Nigerians poor. He also criticized Mr. Obasanjo in front of the congregation for being 45 minutes late.
Well, pimp my mitre! He actually criticized the President for being late to church. To his face even!! I bet several hundred thousand people were fed and thousands were cured of AIDS just because of that. Give this man a Nobel Peace Prize before anyone realizes that people are dying in Nigeria while he is running around the world telling people that gay men are lower than cows and dogs. And give Julia Duin a Pulitzer before anybody figures out that she’s a ridiculous hack paid by a fake Messiah from South Korea.
Quick, To the Kern-Mobile!
Posted by Clif on 09/26/05 at 1:38 pm Category: Lying Republicans, Wankers
Proving once again that there is no Republican misconduct which they won’t try to defend at Powerlie, Paul “Deacon” Mirengoff is trying to explain why Bill Frist wasn’t lying when he said this:
[A]s far as I know, I own no HCA stock. . . . It is illegal right now for me to know what the composition of those trusts are. So I have no idea.
Frist said this notwithstanding that two weeks before the trustee wrote Frist and told him that he had $15,000 and $50,000 in shares of HCA.
The little hooter starts out his defense of the Republican majority leader with a tried and true Powerlie tactic:
A claim that Frist lied in this regard strikes me as quite premature. First . . . we don’t know whether the alleged letter is authentic or for that matter whether he had seen it or had it in mind.
“We don’t know whether the alleged letter is authentic” - Quick, get ButtMissile to the Kern-Mobile! Look, the document uses a font that wasn’t installed on the trustee’s computer!! High fives all around!!! Another Republican saved by the font!!!!
“Or whether he had seen it” - Uh huh, sure. Frist received at least four letters advising him of HCA holdings, the first arriving one year before the interview in question. Obviously, he must have left all four letters from his trustee unopened for up to a year. Yeah, I’ll buy that.
“Or had it in mind” - I particularly like this one. You suppose if Clinton didn’t have the evil BJ of all time “in mind” when he said he didn’t have sex with Monica, if he had just forgotten it for a moment, the folks at Powerlie would be okay with that, would have said that Clinton was, in that case, being entirely truthful?
Little Deacon pulls out all the stops with his second argument:
Second, as I understand it, the trustee could have sold the stock at any time without notifying Frist.
So, because the trustee might have sold that stock in the two week period since the letter, Frist is being completely truthful when he says he had “no idea” if he held the HCA stock or not. Likewise, because Frist didn’t know whether his house had burned down since he left for the office, he could also say he had “no idea” whether he owned a house or not.
“Mr. Mirengoff, it’s Time Magazine on hold. They want their award back.”
Jeff Seeks Dead People: The Story Continues
Posted by Clif on 09/25/05 at 5:45 pm Category: Lying Republicans
Federal estate tax opponent Jeff Sessions (R - Ala), has apparently abandoned his misbegotten quest to find dead millionaire victims of Hurricane Katrina. In a letter published today in the Huntsville Times, Sessions describes his unsuccessful quest:
I spent several days in the hurricane-devastated coastal towns of Alabama, meeting with my constituents. I saw firsthand the devastation to the small family-owned Alabama seafood businesses in Bayou La Batre and Coden. It would be unconscionable to smash the families of small business owners who die during this time when their businesses are destroyed.
Now Sessions is only talking about people who die after the hurricane, apparently having at last figured out that anybody subject to the estate tax would have had the money to get out of the path of the hurricane in the first place. (He hasn’t figured out, however, that people whose “businesses are destroyed” no longer have an estate large enough to be subject to the federal tax.)
Sessions may have stopped looking for millionaire corpses, but he hasn’t stopped saying loathsome things:
In recent days, my position on this issue has been unfairly characterized by Time magazine, which accused me of exploiting Hurricane Katrina in an effort to get the death tax repealed. On the contrary, I am seeking to push back against the pro-death tax crowd that is exploiting the tragedy of Katrina to keep the death tax on the books.
Right. Looking for millionaires killed by the hurricane in an effort to give a tax break to rich people wasn’t exploiting Katrina victims, but assuring that the federal government would have the money to compensate the losses of poor Katrina victims was. I suspect that the victims themselves might not feel this way.
Nor has stopping the quest for rich dead white guys stopped Sessions from lying about the estate tax:
At the very time a grieving family is trying to rebuild its business, the federal government shows up to levy a 47 percent tax on the very business that was destroyed.
This is, of course, a lie. The 47 percent rate doesn’t apply to the entire estate as Sessions says. Rather, it applies only to the amount in excess $1.5 million ($2 million starting in 2006). And, of course, if the business is “destroyed,” there isn’t going to be such an excess.
Alabama voters were stupid enough to elect Sessions in the first place, so the readers of the Huntsville Times may buy this hooey. The editors of that paper, however, don’t.
Why Dorothy Really Left Kansas
Posted by Clif on 09/25/05 at 10:51 am Category: Red States
The state of Kansas employs Rex Rosenberg, pictured left, to evaluate whether convicts are sexual predators. And since Rosenberg has been employed by Kansas, the number of diagnosed sexual predators has skyrocketed according to this article in today’s edition of the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World. Seventy-three percent of those evaluated by Rosenberg are diagnosed by him as sexual predators. Diagnosed predators are committed indefinitely to a state mental hospital upon their release from prison.
Although Rosenberg has a degree in clinical psychology from noted educational institution Hays State University, the article notes that Rosenberg has has a few additional and unusual qualifications. He believes in demons. He has a survey to determine whether someone is possessed by demons. If people are homosexual or aren’t professing Christians this is, according to the survey, a sign that thay may be possessed by demons:
The survey he developed has two parts. The first asks people to say whether they’ve had any of 96 experiences that, according to Rosenberg, can be signs of demonic influence. The list includes many things that could apply to sex offenders, such as, “tendency to commit violent acts,” “abnormal desire for sex” and “compulsive masturbation.” It also lists hearing voices, severe depression and inability to read the Bible.The second part lists behaviors and activities that can make people vulnerable to demons, such as fornication, adultery and holistic health practices such as meditation.
Rosenberg posted the survey on the internet in the late 90s with a preface that said the work was being censored by “those who scream tolerance and multiculturalism and diversity.” When, as a result of this site, he was temporarily removed from doing evaluations, Rosenberg said the decision was “bigoted, intolerant, anti-Christian.”
You can find Rosenberg’s “survey” on his site Bug Wing, which also has various links purporting to explain the Christian justification for building the strange vehicle pictured above with Rosenberg.
Frankly, if anyone needs to be committed, it should be Rosenberg and those who hired him.
Amazing Trust: It Once Was Blind But Now Can See!
Posted by Clif on 09/24/05 at 1:10 pm Category: Lying Republicans
Bill “The Cat Killer” Frist is a liar:
Frist, asked in a television interview in January 2003 whether he should sell his HCA stock, responded: “Well, I think really for our viewers it should be understood that I put this into a blind trust. So as far as I know, I own no HCA stock”Frist, referring to his trust and those of his family, also said in the interview, “I have no control. It is illegal right now for me to know what the composition of those trusts are. So I have no idea.”
Documents filed with the Senate showed that just two weeks before those comments, the trustee of the senator’s trust, M. Kirk Scobey Jr., wrote to Frist that HCA stock was contributed to the trust. It was valued at $15,000 and $50,000.
Frist’s office has offered no explanation for the Senator’s apparent whopper. Insiders, however, say that Frist is expected to claim that he had viewed a videotape of the trust in his office and had concluded that it was definitely blind.
Chickenhawk Enlists . . . in Smut Squadron
Posted by Clif on 09/23/05 at 8:08 am Category: Town Hall Watch, America's Worst Law Student
This week America’s Worst Law Student™ Ben Shapiro avoids cracking the law books by penning a new Clown Hall Column: “In Defense of Smut Squadrons.” The occasion for Ben’s column was an article in the Washington Post where some FBI agents made fun of the FBI’s new anti-porn squad. “Honestly,” said one agent, “most of the guys would have to recuse themselves.”
Hearing that FBI agents are watching porn rather than pornographers sends Ben spinning into a serious snit:
[These agents] find the anti-pornography crowd disturbing because they believe that policing pornography violates fundamental rights. This has become the dominant view in our society: As long as what I do doesn’t harm you personally, I have a right to do it. It’s a silly view . . . . Were we to truly recognize such a philosophy, we would have to legalize prostitution, drugs and suicide — as well as the murder of homeless drifters with no family or friends. After all, if someone kills a homeless drifter, how does that affect anyone else?
Uh, Ben, it might affect the homeless drifter just a little teensy bit, donchya think? (Oh, and here’s a note for the Red Cross: you really ought to put this guy on the list of things, like hamsters and weasels, which are not allowed in hurricane shelters. Otherwise the number of people going in might not match the number going out.)
Of course, this is all quite rich coming from Ben who defends his own chickenhawkery by invoking the principle “freedom of choice about behavior.” So you see in Ben’s world, everything is arranged just to suit Ben: he’s free to do what he wants and free to tell other people what they can and can’t do.
For more fun with Ben, go read what s.z. has to say at W o’C.
It Had To Happen Sooner or Later
Posted by Clif on 09/22/05 at 2:05 pm Category: White House, Katrina
Yesterday Our Glorious Leader made the inevitable connection while addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition:
It’s clear to me that Americans value human life, and value every person as important. And that stands in stark contrast, by the way, to the terrorists we have to deal with. You see, we look at the destruction caused by Katrina, and our hearts break. They’re the kind of people who look at Katrina and wish they had caused it. We’re in a war against these people. It’s a war on terror.
The White House should give a call to this tin-foil cap meterologist from Pocatello, Idaho who thinks that the Japanese mafia has a super-secret weathermaking machine that caused Hurricane Katrina.
So what’s the next linkage to Osama? The terrorists want to see Social Security go bankrupt? The terrorists wish that they could impose an estate tax on the wealthy? The terrorists look at stem cell research and wish that they could thaw out embryos too?