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Rick Santorum is a big dumb stupid turd


 
That’s how Republican Presidential contender Rick Santorum parsed the news about today’s gay rights victory in California on Twitter.

Predictably, the reaction was withering to say the least. A selection can be seen on Wonkette.

But getting spanked on Twitter is one thing. In the real world, tonight, Santorum’s Christionist bigotry will be rewarded by overwhelming victories in Missouri, Colorado and Minnesota by GOP voters!

About the nicest thing I can think of to say about Rick Santorum—besides “Hey, schnazzy sweater vest ya got there, honky!”—is ... absolutely nothing.

Below, Rick Santorum gets a not-so-warm reception in New Hampshire… and these are Republican college students booing him!
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.07.2012
10:08 pm
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Razing Arizona: Wicked witch of the West Jan Brewer is latest GOP gov to take on unions


 
It looks like Jan Brewer, the mean-looking, lemon-faced old lady who rules Arizona from deep within her scorpion-protected lair in the Grand Canyon—I always picture her as a super-villain from the sixties Batman TV series—has decided to take on organized labor in her state.

AZ Republicans have already deeply offended Hispanic voters, so why not go for broke pissing off the public worker unions too? That worked so well for Scott Walker and John Kasich…

From the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees’s petition:

To the lawmakers, governors, policy-wonks, and corporate backers who are dead set on destroying unions in America:

Your latest attempt to dismantle workers’ rights in Arizona will not go unnoticed.

Firefighters, police officers, nurses, school bus drivers, home health care workers, public servants and workers of all kinds will not stand by while you scapegoat us – the people who play by the rules and do our fair share – and take away our rights by abusing your power and forcing through your extreme anti-worker laws.

No way. That’s all. NO WAY. We will fight back wherever you attack us. Because when you attack workers you also attack the work we do. Work that matters to every single person in this country – taking care of your grandparents, picking up your trash, making sure your kids are drinking clean water, putting out your fires, and so much more.

And in the end, we will win because the American people are overwhelmingly with us – they are us.

Where you see public workers and unions as a nuisance to get rid of, we see a movement. We see a movement of public and private workers, of moms and dads, of grandparents and students. We are the middle class and we will remember your abuse of power each and every time that we vote. That’s our promise.

A fascinating political strategy, indeed! Another recipe for Republican ruin!

Jan Brewer you are like a character from a Grimm’s fairy tale! You’re straight out of Central Casting for an “evil Republican,” but you could’ve played Rosa Kleb, too!

Sign the petition.

6 Things You Should Know About Arizona’s Worse-Than-Wisconsin’s Attack on Public Workers (AlterNet)

Below, a funny anti-Brewer ad using Brewer’s own brain-fart during a televised debate (She won the election anyway):
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.06.2012
07:20 pm
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Why Conservatives and Liberals see the world differently


 
How absolutely grand it is to have a great American institution like Bill Moyers back on our television airways? After reading about Moyer’s reasons for returning to the public sphere—he feels compelled to re-enter the national conversation at what he believes to be a dark and critical juncture in American civic life—I had been greatly anticipating Moyers & Company. So far, the series has not disappointed, with a discussion on crony capitalism with Reagan’s budget director David Stockman and ace financial journalist Gretchen Morgenson, and a conversation on “winner-takes-all” politics with Yale professor Jacob Hacker and Berkeley’s Paul Pierson. We’ve only got him for two more years—Moyers will retire again when he turns 80—but it’s great to see him back conducting these meaty, intelligent and engaged conversations. Moyers & Company is among the very best programming that PBS has to offer.

On the most recent show, Moyers interviewed University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who many DM readers might be familiar with from his 2008 TED talk on the moral values that liberals and conservatives hold the most highly and how this influences their politics, and from his book The Happiness Hypothesis.

In his upcoming book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Professor Haidt aims to explain what it means when the other side “doesn’t get it” to both sides. He makes some terrifically good points during his interview with Moyers, especially when it comes to explaining how “group think” and “the hive mind” work on both extremes of the political spectrum in America (and in other countries, too).

As you can see in this piece, Haidt’s research is fascinating indeed, but I found that some of his premises and conclusions were extremely unsatisfying. Some seemed downright counter-intuitive. Unhelpful. Don’t get me wrong, I think this entire interview is worthwhile, thought-provoking—even essential—viewing no matter which bit of the political spectrum you might fall on yourself, but the more or less false assumption that seems to be at the heart of Haidt’s work—that both sides have come to their positions through equally intellectually defensible routes—made my face scrunch up in in an expression that some might describe as a look of “liberal condescension.”

You could say that “Well, isn’t that just what he’s talking about? You’re a socialist, so of course you’d see it that way!” but even if that’s true, let me offer up Exhibit A in a lazy, half-hearted—yet utterly definitive—argument-ending rebuttal: Orly Taitz, WorldNetDaily and the whole birther phenomenon.

How is it “balanced” to give obviously unbalanced people the benefit of the doubt? What would even be the point of that exercise? What purpose would it serve to a social scientist? If someone’s political positions can’t be reconciled with actual facts, then their political opinions are absolutely worthless.

Try having a rational political discussion with a LaRouchie sometime! It can’t be done.

People who have difficulty grasping the complexity of the world they live in should not be seen as coming to the table as equals with people who are not as intellectually challenged! This seems self-evident, does it not? The birther phenomenon among Republican voters was never some fringe faction within the greater GOP. It still isn’t.

It would be a waste of time to try to catalog every instance of ill-informed right-wingers who can’t spell “moron,” vehemently protest policies that would actually benefit their own lives, and who think that every single word in the Bible is the infallible utterance of God himself, but at least in this interview (his book isn’t out yet) Haidt fails to demonstrate why stupidity, superstition and flagrant lies about established historical facts deserve intellectual parity alongside of opinions borne of widely accepted science, common sense and a commonly shared national history, as opposed to the made-up one the Reichwing subscribes to.

The age-old trusim of “There are two sides to every story and the truth is somewhere in the middle” is no longer the case when you’re having a “philosophical disagreement” with a Drudge Report reader or Fox News fan who lives in their own private Bizzaro World where there is no difference between facts and Rush Limbaugh’s opinon . Internet comments that invoke conspiracy theories about Frances Piven, ACORN, the Tides Foundation, George Soros, Saul Alinsky, Van Jones or that comically conflate “Socialism” with “National Socialism” are dead-giveaways of a stunted intelligence on the other end of the keyboard. Teabaggers who want to pressure school textbook publishers to remove any mention of the Founding Fathers being slaveholders or Christianists who argue that Creationism is as equally valid as Darwin’s evolutionary theories should not be in a position to influence policy and yet in many parts of the country this is exactly what is happening, to the detriment of the school systems, the intellectual growth of the students who will be ill-prepared for higher education, etc. Does Haidt truly feel that these people who deny history and science itself came to their positions honestly and rationally? And if he doesn’t feel that way, wouldn’t that admission require a caveat so huge as to at least partially invalidate much of his take-away?

I’m intrigued by what his research has found, I’m far less impressed by how he interprets it.

I get that Haidt’s thesis must be presented in a manner which bends over backwards not to appear partisan, but when it’s been shown that a statistically significant percentage of lower IQ children tend to gravitate towards political conservatism in adulthood (read “Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice” at Live Science) I feel like Haidt might missing the boat entirely: What if the REAL revelation at the heart of his research is that there’s an unbridgeable IQ stratification in America due to our shitty public schools, and the malign influence of the churches and talk radio/Fox News that may have already rendered this country basically ungovernable. (Jonathan Haidt regularly asks his audiences to raise their hands to indicate if they self-identify as “liberal” or “conservative” and notes that when he’s speaking to an audience of academics, that over 90% tend to call themselves “liberals”—is this merely a coincidence? I should think not!).

I respect what Haidt is attempting to do with his research, but ultimately, watching this, I saw so many flaws in his assumptions and methodology (at least as he explains it here, which I suspect is adequate) that I can’t help feeling that someone else is going to come along later and take up some of the more valid points of his work, discard the less impressive parts and get it right. He’s on to something in a big way, but I have deep reservations with much of what he concludes.

Still, as I was saying before, this is some must-see TV. Most thinking people will find something of value here, for sure. If this is a topic that interests you, it’s a fascinating discussion.
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.06.2012
12:15 pm
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A subliminal message from Mitt Romney?
02.05.2012
05:34 pm
Topics:
Tags:

mitt_romney_money
 
Mitt Romney gets his message out.
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Newt skullfucks Mitt Romney (and Capitalism itself)


Mitt Romney: Disgusting human being


 
Via Democratic Underground
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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02.05.2012
05:34 pm
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Rick Santorum and the New Feminism(!)


 
[The title is not a joke, but you’ll have to bear with me…]

You’d think that as the parent of a child with a rare genetic disorder, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum would have deep empathy for a fellow parent of a child with a rare genetic disorder—or if he was a true Christian as he claims to be, even support universal healthcare for everyone’s children—but… NOPE!

Tuesday, speaking to a crowd of more than 400 people in Woodland Park, Colorado, Santorum told this woman that free market capitalism should set prices for drugs, whether she could afford it for her kid or not. Via Crooks and Liars:

“People have no problem paying $900 for an iPad,” the candidate explained. “But paying $900 for a drug they have a problem with — it keeps you alive. Why? Because you’ve been conditioned to think health care is something you can get without having to pay for it.”

The mother replied that she could not afford her son’s medication, Abilify, which can cost as much as $1 million a year without health insurance.

“Look, I want your son and everybody to have the opportunity to stay alive on much-needed drugs,” Santorum insisted. “But the bottom line is, we have to give companies the incentive to make those drugs. And if they don’t have the incentive to make those drugs, your son won’t be alive and lots of other people in this country won’t be alive.”

“He’s alive today because drug companies provide care,” the candidate continued. “And if they didn’t think they could make money providing that drug, that drug wouldn’t be here. I sympathize with these compassionate cases. … I want your son to stay alive on much-needed drugs. Fact is, we need companies to have incentives to make drugs. If they don’t have incentives, they won’t make those drugs. We either believe in markets or we don’t.”

How’s about when it comes to healthcare, we don’t believe that free markets are the way to go? It’s as if the thought that there might be ANY other way of doing it never even entered this asshole’s mind or like he was prevented from grokking it by some sort of alien brain structure Republicans have that rejects common sense.

It’s painful to watch, but at the heart of this exchange is something that I think more and more American women—including, yes, even some Christian, conservative women—are going to realize as this election cycle goes on: Republican policies are bad for America’s children.

They don’t want universal healthcare. They’ve got health insurance for their families, so fuck yours.

They don’t want to pay for public schools. Their kids go to private schools, so fuck yours.

How much more obvious can they get before even the most brain-damaged Fox News viewer finally picks up on the fact that this country is going to Hell in a handbasket if the GOP is allowed to gut spending on healthcare, education, infrastructure and social services any more than the cowardly Democrats have already allowed them to. It’s getting obvious that America is becoming a meaner, shittier place to live and raise a family. The Republicans don’t care about the environment, woman’s health matters, the unemployed… What won’t they attack?

Despite what this pious hypocrite seem to believe, where does it say in the Bible that Rick Santorum’s kids should have the best medical care money can buy, but your kids..? Uh, sorry Charlie, that’s just the way the fucking free market works.

There are winners and losers in life and in Capitalism, so buck up, America! It’s God’s will that your kid died, even if you don’t believe in God!

If you ask me, one of the greatest untapped political forces that this country could ever see would be a movement comprised of mothers who know in their hearts that this country is engaging in a race straight to the bottom when men like Rick Santorum have the loudest voices in our society. An informed mother’s movement that knows exactly who (they do have names, addresses and Social Security numbers, of course) were responsible for flushing the future of America’s children down the toilet, would be a deadly Leviathan to the Republican Party and scare the shit out of the goddamned Democrats, too.

I’m a man, so forgive me for saying so, but I do feel strongly that right now is an appropriate historical moment and opportunity to redefine and expand upon the definition of what “Feminism” means for a new century’s evolutionary needs. I’m not saying that motherhood per se would be the necessary requirement, but I am suggesting that it might be the right time for a “new” kind of woman’s movement, not exactly Lysistrata but something along those lines.

Imagine, if you will, how a female politician would have answered that woman’s question in Colorado on Tuesday. This country would be a lot better off if more smart, progressive women would start running for state, local and national elections, because idiots like Rick Santorum are never going to change anything for the better, as he ably demonstrated in the way he answered this question. He should be ashamed to admit to such thoughts in public and yet this bozo thinks he should be elected President saying them aloud with a microphone in front of his face! It’s astonishing how misguided this chump is.
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.02.2012
04:40 pm
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‘Anal-obsessed’ anti-gay activist scolds Oprah, ‘Madea’ and ‘Big Momma’ for promoting ‘perversion’


“If what you got is common sense, hell, I don’t want none!”

If you enjoy radio shows where supposedly straight men discuss buttsecks, then “Peter LaBarbera’s Americans For Truth About Homosexuality Radio Hour” program is the show for you! On a recent installment, LaBarbera welcomed fellow anti-gay activist, North Carolina Pastor Patrick Wooden.

According to Right Wing Watch, Wooden:

“[...] responded to critics over his comments that he has an “anal obsession.” Wooden has claimed that gay men have to “wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels” when they are older as a result of shoving cellphones, baseball bats and animals in their anus. Wooden told LaBarbera that anal obsession is “the very basis of homosexuality” and he simply wants to tell gay men to “get it together, let the Lord deliver you and let God give you a woman, a wife, where you can enjoy the pleasures of a wife” and stop “participating in these perversive, sexual acts”

From the interview:

Wooden: Now it is amazing that you and I are called men who have the obsession with the anus, right? Anal obsession, is that what she said? Is that not the very basis of homosexuality? We’re not homosexuals. What we’re saying is, we’re saying to men, ‘hey, let’s get it together, let the Lord deliver you and let God give you a woman, a wife, where you can enjoy the pleasures of a wife.’ Now you’re talking about a case of the pot calling the kettle black, we have no anal-obsession, but we are armed with the truth about the damage that people are doing to their rectums and anuses as a result of participating in these perversive, sexual acts.

After going off on a tangent about Tyler Perry, Flip WIlson and Ru Paul, Wooden is asked about Oprah Winfrey:

LaBarbera: Now let’s go to a black liberal, Oprah, I wanted to get you to comment. I saw one of her final episodes before she went off the air, now she’s on her own network, she ended it and she had this appeal on homosexuality. When I looked in her eyes, I saw somebody who had become a hardened supporter of so-called same-sex so-called marriage, she has evolved, she has rejected her Christian upbringing, whatever Christian upbringing she had Patrick, she was a hardcore supporter of homosexuality and I wonder how that happened. Do you think that’s just a factor of swimming in that Hollywood environment?

Wooden: I think it is; I think it is a factor of swimming. I think and this is just my opinion I’ve never talked to Oprah in my life, I think it is part of the price that she had to pay in order to build her empire. I would say to her if I had the chance, hey Oprah what has a man or a woman profited if they gain the world and lose their souls, if they gain the world and lose themselves?

As the Firesign Theatree once said, “A stiff idiot is the worst kind!” I’d imagine that if Pastor Wooden actually had a chance to voice his anal obsessions to Oprah, she’d probably just react the way most normal people would, by telling him to go fuck himself. and mind his own business.

Listen to excerpts from the show on Right Wing Watch.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.02.2012
02:01 pm
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TN bistro refuses service to anti-gay Republican: ‘He’s gone from being stupid to being dangerous’


 
In recent days, you may have heard of Senator Stacey Campfield, the woefully stupid Republican legislator from Knoxville, TN’s District 7, who is behind the bill nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill (SB49), which will block any and all discussion of the topic of homosexuality in grades kindergarten through eight in Tennessee schools. Campfield has a history of idiocy when it comes to statements on the LGBT community. He once even likened homosexuality to bestiality. He certainly reflects poorly on the citizens of Knoxville who voted him into office.

Campfield was interviewed by Michelangelo Signorile of Huffington Gay Voices, on his SiriusXM radio show, “OutQ” and said some dumb, dumb things. Very unhelpful, silly and very unintelligent things.

Gems like:

“Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community — it was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall.”

“My understanding is that it is virtually — not completely, but virtually — impossible to contract AIDS through heterosexual sex…very rarely [transmitted].”

The thing is, Stacey Campfield is one of those people who is too dumb to know how dumb he is. He needs other people to explain that to him.

As writer Sean Braisted put it on the progressive blog Nashville 21:

“Stacey Campfield has made it a mission in his life to make life harder for those who don’t fit his own personal view of ‘normal’.”

But there has been a pushback against this bigot, as Braisted reported, started when a Knoxville restaurant called The Bistro at the Bijou refused Campfield service on Sunday.

The customer clearly ISN’T always right. Congratulations to owner Martha Boggs who ejected this shithead from her establishment (which is on South GAY Street, btw! What was Campfield doing there in the first place? Looking for a new boyfriend, maybe? Doesn’t he know that you can catch “the AIDS” from the bread sticks!?!)

Boggs told the Metro Pulse:

“I didn’t want his hate in my restaurant. I told him he wasn’t welcome here. ... I feel like he’s gone from being stupid to being dangerous, and I wanted to stand up to him.”

Bravo! I’d have have done the exact same thing in her shoes (or else pissed in his soup?). Round of applause for Martha Boggs!

The Bistro at the Bijou also posted a Facebook message that read, “I hope that Stacy Campfield now knows what if feels like to be unfairly discrimanted against.”

More from Nashville 21:

Stacey Campfield has blogged about his experience and says that he left the restaurant because “she started to yell and call me names again so I figured it was better to just leave.”  He also adds this nugget:

“Some people have told me my civil rights were violated under the 1964 civil rights act in that a person can not be denied service based on their religious beliefs. (I am catholic and the catholic church does not support the act of homosexuality)”

Ummm…no. According to the EEOC, “Social, political, or economic philosophies, as well as mere personal preferences, are not “religious” beliefs protected by Title VII.” While Title II covers restaurants, its safe to say that the same definition of “religion” would apply there as well. Arguably the belief that “homosexuality is a sin” is a religious belief, but saying that AIDS resulted from people having sex with monkeys, or passing laws that prohibit the discussion of the concept of same-sex relationships, does not fall under that classification.

There’s nothing in that legislation that prohibits discrimination against fucking assholes either. Sorry Stacey!

Below, Martha Boggs talks about the Stacey Campfield incident, saying she thinks Campfield is a “bully” and that “he needed to be stood up to.”
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.31.2012
11:55 am
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Newt Gingrich’s PRO-medical marijuana letter to the editor, 1982


 
Well, well, well… Look who was PRO-medical marijuana—actually went out on a limb for it—way back before he wanted to behead people and cut off their hands for possessing it…

Here’s what Newt Gingrich wrote to the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1982:

Legal Status of Marijuana

To the Editor:

The American Medical Association’s Council on Scientific Affairs should be commended for its report, “Marijuana: Its Health Hazards and Therapeutic Potential” (1981;246:1823). Not only does the report outline evidence of marijuana’s potential harms, but it distinguishes this concern from the legitimate issue of marijuana’s important medical benefits. All too often the hysteria that attends public debate over marijuana’s social abuse compromises a clear appreciation for this critical distinction.

Since 1978, 32 states have abandoned the federal prohibition to recognize legislatively marijuana’s important medical properties. Federal law, however, continues to define marijuana as a drug “with no accepted medical use,” and federal agencies continue to prohibit physician-patient access to marijuana. This outdated federal prohibition is corrupting the intent of the state laws and depriving thousands of glaucoma and cancer patients of the medical care promised them by their state legislatures.

On Sept 16, 1981, Representative Stewart McKinney and I introduced legislation designed to end bureaucratic interference in the use of marijuana as a medicant. We believe licensed physicians are competent to employ marijuana, and patients have a right to obtain marijuana legally, under medical supervision, from a regulated source. The medical prohibition does not prevent seriously ill patients from employing marijuana; it simply deprives them of medical supervision and access to a regulated medical substance. Physicians are often forced to choose between their ethical responsibilities to the patient and their legal liabilities to federal bureaucrats.

Representative McKinney and I hope the Council will take a close and careful look at this issue. Federal policies do not reflect a factual or balanced assessment of marijuana’s use as a medicant. The Council, by thoroughly investigating the available materials, might well discover that its own assessment of marijuana’s therapeutic value has, in the past, been more than slightly shaded by federal policies that are less than neutral

Newt Gingrich
House of Representatives
Washington, DC

Fourteen years later, as House Speaker, this same hypocritical piece-of-shit would introduce the Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996, which called for executing any person caught importing just an ounce or two of high-grade marijuana (“100 usual doses” is how it was written in the legislation, which obviously didn’t pass).

What’s more, when challenged about his own admitted use of marijuana in the past, Gingrich had this to say to Wall Street Journal reporter Hilary Stout:

“That was a sign we were alive and in graduate school in that era. See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral. Now, it is illegal AND immoral. The law didn’t change, only the morality… That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t.”

“Okay for thee, but not for me,” sez rich, well-fed white guy. Thanks for the succinct explanation, mean old man!

Now, if you’re looking to make sense of this stuff don’t even try. He’s a Republican, ‘nuff said.

Here’s what Gingrich said at a fundraiser for fellow Georgia GOP pol Rep. Charlie Norwood in 1995:

“If you import a commercial quantity of illegal drugs, it is because you have made the personal decision that you are prepared to get rich by destroying our children. I have made the decision that I love our children enough that we will kill you if you do this.”

“I have decided”???

Imagine this asshole being allowed to decide anything of importance!

Gingrich, unable to help himself, continued:

“The first time we execute 27 or 30 or 35 people at one time, and they go around Colombia and France and Thailand and Mexico, and they say, ‘Hi, would you like to carry some drugs into the U.S.?’ the price of carrying drugs will have gone up dramatically.”

Ethan Nadlemann, the executive director of Drug Policy Action, a bipartisan advocacy group for ending the drug war called Gingrich “basically a nightmare” when it comes to drug policy issues. “For a guy who’s supposed to be an intellectual and intelligent, the quality of the argumentation on his part is embarrassing.”

As one wag quipped on the topic of Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996 at The People’s Forum:

Fortunately didn’t pass. His other proposed acts, the Serial Adultery Death Penalty Act and the Congressional Influence Peddling Death Penalty Act, unfortunately failed as well. And he reportedly killed the Fat Loudmouth Pandering Pseudo-Intellectual Death Penalty Act before it could be introduced.

Republicans whine and Republicans bitch/Our rich are too poor and our poor are too rich.

Below, Newt Gingrich shooting his big mouth off about the drug war and how the US should emulate Singapore(!) on The O’Reilly Factor as “Papa Bear” nods with approval.
 

 
Thank you Mr. Michael Backes of Sacramento, CA!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.26.2012
07:01 pm
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Is Glenn Beck trying to co-opt Anonymous???


 
Floundering for relevancy from his outpost in media Siberia, former big-time tee-vee celebrity Glenn Beck is baiting Anonymous with a completely stupid new parody video. At least I think this is what passes for “parody” in conservative circles? Maybe not…

As one YouTube comment noted:

“Hey Glen Beck, you are an evil piece of shit. You are fighting to silence the people. You are fighting to suppress knowledge. You are fighting to perpetuate the status quo. The people will not be silenced. We will not be subdued by your propaganda. We will not bow to the corrupt and unapologetic government officials who seek to control us through fear and unconstitutional actions.”

Or as another person quipped:

“Dude just painted a big red target on his ass.”

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.25.2012
04:28 pm
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Shit Republicans Say About Black People


 
Caught on tape: Bachmann, Santorum, Gingrich and Mitten’s greatest “shit.”
 

 
Via Jezebel

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.25.2012
03:20 pm
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