No Time for Trivia

Seriously.  Stay in your hole and never come out.  Our collective memory, bad as it is, isn’t that far gone.

The only positive purpose to GW Bush’s life is to serve as a warning to others.  Oh, and to give the pro-choice crowd a poster boy.

“Miss me yet?”

Yeah, like I miss my bleeding ulcer.

Congratulations Saints!  The Super Bowl victory could not have gone to a more deserving team and city.  I am fighting some body bug and could only make it till half time due to the meds I’m taking.  I did not see all the commercials, but the ones I did see were a tribute to what advertisers think of Americans.  In other words, not much.  Here is a review of the violent acts from all of the commercials:

The only one I saw that was remotely funny was with the kid protecting his mom and his chips.  As to the rest…yawn. 

Go Saints!  Go away Madison Avenue.

The president went into the lion’s den at the GOP retreat in Maryland and handled their questions with aplomb and ease as he demonstrated a thorough grasp of the details of many issues.  Obama delivered his dissection of the GOP’s assaults with no teleprompter and in the opinion of everybody, including Republicans, he held his own and in fact won the contest big.   In her key-note speech to the We’re-proud-we’re-ignorant crowd in Nashville last week, Sarah Palin threw out some smarmy negative comment about President Obama being “A guy with a teleprompter.”  Then she went to some softball Q & A session where she had to resort to crib notes on her hand to not appear to be what she is.  Vacuous, shallow, ignorant, ill-informed and an empty suit.

Here is a look at her trying to answer a simple question but failing as she needs to resort to crib notes written on her hand:

And here is a picture of those notes that she needed to answer what must have been a prearranged question:

Look at them Sarah!  Look at them:

And this is the pride of the GOP?

President Obama fielded a wide range of questions at the GOP retreat in Maryland in what could be termed a “hostile crowd.”  He did not need to write notes on his hand and proved he is more than just “a guy with a teleprompter.”

The thing is….the Tea Party crowd has this thing about “elites.”  Palin threw some barbed comments about those elites in her speech.  We saw what we get with a president who couldn’t spell elite (even though he certainly was).  This lauding a lack of curiosity and honoring of ignorance is harmless until that incurious and ignorant person is at the helm of our country.  I don’t know anyone would want the neurosurgeon that graduated due to his daddy’s money and was drunk and absent through most of their education working on them when they need a brain surgeon.  I don’t know why a segment of America would want a person to lead their nation that thinks being able to see a part of Russia from their state gives them foreign policy experience, or that can’t answer a simple three-part question that they have gone over before an interview.  But that is the thing about these Tea Party people.  They wallow in ignorance, and walk away fat and happy on the empty calories of pap and pabulum topped with buzzwords and clichés.

And Sarah Palin gives them all of that in a nice outfit and big hair.

Pander away Palin.  Pander away. 

First off, go with the easy applause lines.  Say you’re proud to be an American about five times in a minute, ask if the crowd loves their freedom (NO!  We hate it!  You Frickin Nitwit!) thank every body who served in the military and throw in a Happy Birthday Ronald Reagan.  Then follow up with mindless babbling and demonizing of the left, paint the Tea Party as a grass roots movement instead of a corporate manufactured astroturf and then blah, blah, blah. 

If you can stand it, here is part one.  You can follow the You Tube links to the other parts.  Here she is in all her vacuousness, The Sarah:

Smarmy, snarky and trying to be folksy I only ask that she be the Republican candidate in 2012 for president.  If the Dems can’t beat her they deserve to lose.

The Christian group Family Policy Council in Florida was enraged that a judge allowed the adoption of a 1-year-old boy to a lesbian couple.  The FPC sent out an alert to their members with the picture on the left above insinuating that was the couple that was adopting the boy.  What a surprise that good Christians would lie and manipulate the feelings of their brethren to gain an advantage.  The couple on the right in the pictures above were in fact the two that adopted this boy.

The Orlando Sentinel reports on the sordid and mean spirited tactics of this Christian “family” group.

Religious Right Selfishly Turns Boy Into Pawn In Gay-Adoption Battle

The judge’s ruling said exactly what most people would want to hear in an adoption case.

It said that the 1-year-old boy who had been living with his foster parents was “happy and thriving” — and that a permanent adoption made perfect sense.

It should be a simple story with a happy ending.

Except it is not.

That judge’s ruling — which focused solely on the child’s well-being — enraged some on the religious right.

Why? Because the little boy’s adoptive parents are gay.

So now those who profit from division are pouncing.

Hmmm… those who profit from division are pouncing.  Conservatives?  Christians?  Ah, Conservative Christians.  And what a surprise that is.  Not.

They aren’t the people who have cared for this little boy, who have nursed his wounds and tucked him in at night. In fact, they haven’t done a thing for him.

They haven’t consulted the experts — everyone from a child psychologist to a Guardian ad Litem — who say the parents provide precisely the loving environment that this child needs.

All these critics know is that they don’t want gay people to have the same rights as straight people.

So they want him separated from the parents who love him.

I would say that same mentality is at work with the anti-abortion crowd.  They don’t care for the well being of an expectant mother, nor the conditions an unwanted child might be raised in.  They just want their way.

“Arrogant judicial activism” was how the finger-waggers at Orlando’s Florida Family Policy Council described the ruling in an alert it sent out to its members last week.

And to make their point about just how frightening this ruling was, the Policy Council included a photograph of the couple — a strange and androgynous-looking duo, one with bleached skin and both with mullet haircuts. The couple look so odd (you literally can’t tell whether they are male or female) that one might wonder how any judge could place a young child with such a disturbing-looking duo.

Facts.  Fundamentalist Christians never let them get in the way of their fear mongering and posturing.

Except the judge didn’t.

The abnormal-looking couple that the Policy Council chose to illustrate this story is not the same couple granted the right to adopt the child.

No, the two-woman couple awarded custody of the 1-year-old — South Florida trade-show executive Vanessa Alenier and her partner, Melanie Leon — look more like J.Crew models: all-American with catalogue clothes and smiles.

The picture that the Policy Council chose was a grotesque caricature.

These are the dirty tactics of Christianity’s far-right warriors.

Well, at least they didn’t go and blow up this couple’s home.  I wonder what the baby Jebus has to say about these good Christian’s tactics and ethics?

These extremists wage their campaigns of intolerance based on deception and misrepresentation.

Which sums up Christianity but I digress.

Once you start substituting facts for demagoguery, those who profit from trying to use religion as a wedge are left with little more than fear-mongering … and fake pictures.

The Family Policy Council says the child is being used as “a political pawn.”

And they are right about that.

Only, it’s not the two women who love and care for this little boy who are using him that way.

Mean spirited and fanatical.  A dangerous mix.  It is good to see that the antics of this group did not affect the decision of judge in awarding the boy to this couple.  This is just another example of how hypocritical and deceitful these fundamentalist groups can be.  Just as they try to use deceit to get their creation myths to replace the science of evolution in school.   Disregarding what should be good Christian policies of truth and honesty, their philosophy is that the ends justify the means.  And these are the people who want us to move towards a theocracy and replace the Constitution with the bible?

No thank you.

Oh, and one more thing.  Even though the couple at the top left were not the ones that were actually the adoptive parents and meant to be a caricature of a lesbian couple….even if they were the real couple and had met all the criteria and truly cared for this child so what?  They look different?  If normal looking parents were a requirement for birth I daresay the population of this country would be diminished significantly.

Forget the history of Nixon and his Plumbers!  This is a conspiracy by Acorn!  Those damned socialist, Marxist will stop at nothing to destroy the truth….

The book.  That is what I hope they throw at these clowns.

Hopefully they will be given ample time in prison to allow their bruises to heal.

As I watch the coverage of the Tea Party convention in Nashville, I am struck by the lengths that the spokesmen being interviewed go to take the crazy edge off of their movement.  Also, I am stuck by how incompetent and negligent the media are for not detailing the corporate roots of this astroturf group.  The Tea Partiers are painted as a grass roots response to….I am not sure of what except anger the white guys lost….when in fact they were created by and promoted by right-wing groups and given their own propaganda network with Fox News and talk radio.

The amount of coverage of this group appears to legitimize them far beyond their worth.  At the core of the Tea Party is racism, beliefs in patently untrue “facts” such as Obama is not a U.S. citizen, that he is a socialist, a Muslim and so forth.  I would venture that the vast majority of the Tea Party group have these core beliefs.  Also, their acronym, Taxed Enough Already fails to take into account that unless they are very wealthy, they all got tax breaks since Obama has been in office.  I have yet to hear them be confronted by that fact by any media representative.

Also, the Tea Party members suffer from pride in ignorance and take lack of knowledge as a badge of honor.  Their attraction to Sarah Palin is proof positive of this.  Also,  there are no moderates speaking at this affair.   You have the former Republican Congressman and racist Tom Tancredo who at the conference railed against “the cult of multiculturism”  and asserted that Obama was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.”  Obviously he misses the good old Jim Crowe days.  Then there is a lecture given by Tea Party co-chair Ana Puig on, “Correlations Between the Current Administration and Marxist Dictators of Latin America.”  And there is one of the biggest propagators of lies and disinformation that the Tea Party members take as gospel, Joseph Farah of Newsmax.com.    Most of his rants sound better in their original German.  Here is a blurb from his February 5 blog at WorldNetDaily  (go there for a wild ride on the crazy train):

I have a dream.

My dream is that IF Barack Obama even seeks re-election as president in 2012, he won’t be able to go to any city, any town, any hamlet in America without seeing signs that ask, “Where’s the birth certificate?”

It’s a simple question.

Yeah.  It is a simple question that has been answered.  Keep kicking that horse though.  Sarah Palin, for a modest fee of $100,000, will give the key note speech to the drooling herd of conservative zombies.  Sarah….nom,nom, nom…..I am sure she will detail how quitting her post as governor to go on a book tour serves her state and country so well.  A few “You betchas” and some totally hollow and clichéd buzz words and phrases and the crowd will be crying for Sarah in 2012 with all the strength their bleating hearts can muster, sheeple that they are.

The Tea Party convention in Nashville, while trying to keep the birthers and other crazies out of the picture have only shown  by their speakers,  that no matter what they say, they are a far right group of angry white people whose selective sense of outrage at big government and big government spending was kept in check for eight years under GW Bush and only rises to intolerable levels now that damned socialist, Marxist, Muslim black guy is in office.  Try as they might to paint themselves as mainstream, their true colors of far right ideology bleeds through the canvas.

And what is left of this “grass roots” movement is a picture of anger, ignorance and attachment to lies and disinformation.  Somebody get a lawn mower.

It is difficult to debate willfully ignorant people.  Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.  Reasoning with the right wing is like reasoning with a rock at times.  The gullibility of self-identified Republicans is staggering.  Yet, as Benjamin Franklin once said, “Force shits on reason’s back.”  Unfortunately, these misinformed and proudly ignorant sheeple are what the progressive side of politics is battling.

Politico reports:

Poll: Majority of Republicans Believe Obama Is a ‘Socialist’

A new poll of self-identified Republicans released Tuesday shows a large slice of the GOP believes President Barack Obama is a “socialist” who was not born in this country, should be impeached, wants the terrorists to win and only won the 2008 election because ACORN “stole” it for him.

No, really.  This is what the reasonable side of America is up against.  The Tea Party is full of obnoxiously ignorant and proud of it types that believe every absurd and defamatory accusation against this president that their sources feed them.  Newsmax, Fox, The Washington Times, the echo chamber of talk radio and so forth are the fountains of ignorance from which these people drink.

Can we please give these morons their own country?  Texas would be a nice place.  Surround them on all sides with reasonable Americans, let them inbreed themselves to extinction and then use the land as a big wildlife preserve.

Fifty-one percent of those polled believe sex education should not be taught in schools; 77 percent want creationism taught in schools; 31 percent want contraception outlawed; and 34 percent believe birth control is “abortion.”

 

For  those that don’t know, Wurlitzer is a company that makes juke boxes as well as other products.  It is also a term used to describe the spin machine of the right wing.  Eric Alterman does a great job of explaining how this system works in his What Liberal Media?  The Truth About Bias and the News.  There have been other media studies that show how the GOP manufactures stories and uses their considerable echo chamber to create a reality out of nothing.  Here Barney Frank breaks it down with a classic example of how this technique works:

Dick Cheney was very good at this technique.  He would use one of his aides to leak something to the New York Times or other publication, they would run a story and then he would cite them as a source proving whatever lie he was trying to sell.

Old tricks that still work.  The GOP takes advantage of the fact that very few people have the time or resources to investigate the media.   They keep naming the tunes and their Wurlitzer keeps spinnin’ away.

Again.

Parents Found Guilty of Neglecting Ill Son

- An Oregon couple was found guilty Tuesday of criminally negligent homicide for praying over their ill son instead of seeking medical help.

The jury returned the verdict on the second day of deliberations in the trial of Jeff and Marci Beagley, both members of the Followers of Christ Church in Oregon City. Church members gasped as Judge Steven Maurer read the verdicts.

Gasp!  Jebus didn’t come down and save these two nitwits!  Just like he didn’t come down and save their son.  Medicine would have done that.  A catheter would have done that.  I wonder how they feel knowing now that a catheter is more powerful than their God?

The couple, who remain free on bail, is scheduled for sentencing on Feb. 18. Because neither has a prior conviction, state sentencing guidelines call for 16 to 18 months in prison.

Prosecutors said the Beagleys had a duty as parents to provide medical care for their 16-year-old son, Neil, who died in 2008 of complications from a urinary tract blockage.

How does one just sit there and watch their child die and do nothing?  Oh yes, they prayed.  But then I repeat myself.

The Followers of Christ shuns conventional medicine in favor of faith healing. The church has been in Oregon City since early in the 20th century. Its members, by their own description and that of others, keep to themselves.

State authorities have found that an unusual number of children whose families belonged to the Followers of Christ had died at an early age, leading to a 1999 state law that limits faith healing as a defense in such deaths. The trial of the Beagleys was the second major test of the new law.

Satan’s work!  The law is Satan’s work!  I am sure the outcome of this trial will only cause these people to pray harder.  I doubt if reason will ever enter their thinking framework.  Maybe this will cause some of the parents to seek doctors for their sick children but I fear the ignorance is hardwired by their religion into them.

Until the next case….