Photo: Muffett

Meg Whitman's multi million dollar campaign to buy the California governor's office keeps running the same repetitive ad where her creepy spokesperson likes to brag about the jobs she created at the consumer hostile EBay. Yet, Whitman's campaign keeps quiet about the job killing effects of the corporation she ran.

Job killing effects of EBay? Is that heresy?

Yeah, it's heretical. Heresy is fun and generally quite rational.

The first industry where EBay killed jobs is the news industry. EBay, along with Craig's List, Monster, and Dice, devastated one of the biggest revenue streams for newspapers: classified advertising. Not only were jobs lost in classified ad sales, the lost ad revenue cost a lot of jobs in the newsroom as well.

Then, there are small Internet stores and online presences of small businesses online that were choked out by EBay's marketing juggernaut. Most of these businesses treated customers much better than EBay did while Queen Meg ran it.

It would be interesting to see a detailed accounting of the net jobs effect of Meg Whitman's EBay.

 

Today, there was a tornado watch for NYC. WTF?

There were tornadoes and a microburst a couple of weeks ago here too. Of the 10-12 tornadoes in NYC since the 50s, four of them have happened in the past four years. Yesterday was the hottest day in recorded history in Los Angeles.

The weather keeps getting stranger and further out of normal ranges. Yet, most corporate media reporting fails to even mention Global Warming, which must be playing some roll in the odd weather here in the US and abroad.

Big Coal and Big Oil are major advertisers and auto companies are bigger advertisers. The people who are executives and corporate media owners are nutty rightists who don't give a rats butt about the planet or the unwashed masses who can't flee from the consequences of climate change.

The same pliant media that lied on behalf of British Petroleum, laughably parroting claims that microbes had eaten most of the spilled oil (which is at the Gulf bottom where one would expect it to be), is using Pravda style censorship on Global Warming. And, they wonder why people don't want to pay for their defective products.

 

Evil NewsCorp CEO and Major Shareholder Rupert Murdoch

Supporting the Greedy Oily Pedophiles GOP may not be your intention, but any time you watch any of Rupert Murdoch's networks, you are helping to finance the Republican Party.

There was some controversy after Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp (the company that owns the Fox Networks and a lot of other crap) gave $1 million to the Republican Governor's Association so they can support politicians who will cut your government services. You can get a much more exhaustive list of Murdoch's personal campaign contributions at Newsmeat, the overwhelming majority of which have gone to Republican candidates and PACS.

Then, there is the de facto campaign contribution Murdoch is giving to past GOP governor and potential GOP presidential candidate Sarah Palin by using her as a contributor on Faux News, despite the fact that she has no skills or qualifications for doing any kind of analysis on anything.

Then, when you add in the constant barrage of GOP campaigning done on Faux News and the New York Post, among other Murdoch propaganda venues, you can see that patronizing Murdoch's Newscorp and supporting the GOP are completely intertwined.

Also keep in mind that the New York Post is a money losing proposition which is subsidized by the Fox Network, among other Murdoch media junk generators. The Post may be a shitty NYC tabloid, but it also has a significant readership in New Jersey and Connecticut, where former WWE CEO is trying to buy a Senate seat.

Here are some of the other programs that are part of the House of Murdoch: Cops, Family Guy, Fringe, House, Kitchen Nightmares, Master Chef, and the execrable American Idol.

Photos: World Economic Forum

fimoculous

 

Sarah Palin was laughing and being totally obsequeous while Mt. Limbaugh did this. She isn't just stupid. She's evil.

News reports about an anti immigrant party getting its first seats in the Swedish parliament have reinforced a pattern I have observed elsewhere over the past few months. Groups of people marketed as outsiders are the foci of raging hate campaigns.

The groups are defined by racial, religious, or ethnic lines. Far right politicians almost always are leading the charge. The scapegoating takes place in wealthy countries devastated by the Great Recession. It is all so similar, whether the targets are African Americans or Latinos in the US, Roma in France, or Muslims throughout the West.

Immigrant populations are especially convenient because they have less economic and political power to push back.

Scapegoating has long been a rather effective tactic used by power elites to maintain control, especially during bad economic times when people are angry. However, this is all so cookie cutter that it suggests some kind of coordination is involved between wealthy elites and rightist politicians, to their mutual benefit.

In any, case, we should not allow ourselves to be fooled by it.

I suppose it's a coincidence, but you never know for sure about these things.



You can hear Martin Gore singing Condemnation in this live concert. David Gahan usually sings it. (This is a true treat for real Depeche Mode fans.)




View Song Lyrics

 

(Hat Tip: Queer Isn't It)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

There are lots of corrupt people on the far right who have utter contempt of the loss of life on 911. Their lack of patriotism, integrity, and human decency knows no bounds.

 

I don't often talk about voting rights issues in this blog because there is so much other stuff going on, and it can get depressing. Mark Crispin Miller does an excellent job of discussing voting rights issues in his blog. He was one of the most vocal and effective voices in exposing the thefts of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.

However, I just voted with the new system, and it adds new problems to the old one. It uses optical scanners. It could be worse. We could be stuck with touch screen voting which is completely unreliable and unverifiable. However, it is just as easy to hack the optical scanner machines, so their counts are not particularly trustworthy. The optical scanner system at least results in paper ballots that could be hand counted. However, detecting fraud is not easy, and I don't know how difficult it is to get a hand recount.

There can be fraud in hand counted paper ballots too, but it is much more difficult to pull off, and hand recounts can catch some of it. Besides, we have been in a period of joblessness that has lasted over a decade. People need work. Hand counted paper ballots are the method of choice if you want the most reliable and trustworthy elections.

As if that isn't bad enough, there is another problem with voting that has nothing to do with the methods and machines. It has to do with write in voting. If a candidate in the primary doesn't have an opponent who managed to get on the ballot, there is no election at all, which means you can't write in anybody. Primaries where there is only one candidate are the ones where one would generally like to write somebody in the most.

This time, I would have loved to vote against rightist Phonycrats like Andrew Cuomo, Chuck Schumer, and my local congresscritter. Yet, I didn't have the opportunity. I'll have to wait for the general election and vote Green in those races. But, there is something deeply offensive to democracy that you can't vote for the candidate of your choice.

Hand counted paper ballots appear to be banned by federal law, when they should be absolutely mandatory...no exceptions. Write in voting should be available for all elective offices...no exceptions. Our democracy had flaws before the voting machines which have made matters much worse.

 

Her opponents would love to do this.


Kane tombstone Linda McMahon

The McMahons are so cruel to each other.


Raw is war 27/03/2000 part 1/9


Lots of people have wanted to do this to their bosses.


Stone Cold Stunning All the McMahons !
 

119 Banks Have Failed This Year
Banks are failing still, unless they are really big. The 119th US bank has failed this year. Horizon Bank is the 23rd bank to go belly up in Florida alone.

Most of the "too big to fail" banks would have fallen during the Great Recession if not for federal bailouts. Yet, the banksters, their bought politicians, and their bought pundits keep saying that government regulation would be bad and that middle class Americans aren't smart enough to have any say in how the banks in this country are run. Obviously, the banksters have no idea how to run stable banks and have little interest in even trying to do so.

Making fraudulent, predatory loans and then bundling them up in fraudulent instruments of financial speculation were common practices throughout the banking sector. Investments by legitimate businesses are still having trouble getting credit while the same banksters that blew their banks up and got huge bailouts are making unearned bonuses and excessive paychecks their main priorities.

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Citigroup Creates Jobs in China, Not US
From the Ed Shultz Show:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The American people bailed out Citigroup, yet they are not creating jobs here. They are just creating jobs in China. America is getting redlined by these banksters, while China gets investment financed by the US Treasury.

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More Bankster Fees From Bank of America and Wachovia
From McClatchy 9/3/10:

No more waived fees for using another bank's ATM. Higher monthly account charges. Fees for paper statements with images of canceled checks.

These are some of the changes coming to customers of Bank of America and Wachovia.

Bank of America will start telling customers next week that it's adjusting fees as part of an effort to standardize its practices nationwide. Wachovia has been making its own changes, the latest wrinkle from the Wells Fargo merger.

What the banksters don't tell you is that checking accounts are loans that we make to the banks at little or no interest in return for getting services, services which they often are now charging us for. This is a ripoff.

It gets worse. People using ATMs actually save the banksters money over human tellers. That's right. The banksters are charging people to do something that saves them money. Even if ATM usage didn't save the banks money and were merely a new service, the fees would be astronomically marked up. Sen. Tom Harkin has estimated that each ATM transaction costs banks $0.36 which is in line with other estimates I've read in recent years. Yet, fees these days generally range from $2-3.

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Meg Whitman Was On Goldman Sachs' Board of Directors
EBay isn't the only incredibly evil corporation that Meg Whitman has been involved with. She also was on the Board of Directors of the nefarious Goldman Sachs.



Level the Playing Field did a great video about this subject.

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Rahm Emanuel Was a Bankster
The Chicago Tribune ran a slideshow of "Ten Things You Didn't Know About Rahm Emanuel." One of them was particularly disturbing.

In three years after he left the Clinton administration, Emanuel made $16 million in investment banking, including at least $320,000 after he was appointed by President Bill Clinton to a 14-month stint on the board of mortgage giant Freddie Mac. The Tribune sought minutes of Freddie Mac's meetings from Emanuel's tenure, but the Obama administration denied the request, saying it was "commercial information" exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

This helps to explain why the Obama Administration has shown so much favoritism towards the banksters.

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Teabagger "Movement" Benefits Banksters, Not the Followers
In a brilliant Alternet piece, "5 Ways the Tea Party Agenda Screws Tea Party Supporters," Adel M Stan discusses how the political agenda being fed the teabaggers goes against their interests. One of them involves the banksters.

5. Opposition to Wall Street Reform and Financial Reform. Perhaps the most confounding aspect of the Tea Party agenda is its opposition to reform of Wall Street and banks. Even as Tea Party leaders and activists rail against the bailouts of U.S. automakers, and the minimal assistance offered homeowners with underwater mortgages, Tea Party leaders and those who follow them voice hostility toward any and all measures that would demand increased accountability from purveyors of financial instruments or the credit-card industry, like those contained in the financial reform bill passed by Congress in July (a bill that liberal critics regard as rather toothless).

In her speech to Tea Party supporters at the RightOnline conference, Michele Bachmann described the recently passed financial reform bill as nothing more than a punitive measure against Wall Street, when the real culprit in the nation's financial woes was the Housing and Community Redevelopment Act passed in 1977. Another particular object of scorn by the Tea Party set is the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection created by the bill.

Although the teabagger scam was originally developed by lobbyists and PR people for the HMOs and health insurers, it has gotten plenty of money from other wealthy interests. You can bet that the banksters are funding some of the teabagging, using money they got from the very same bailouts that the teabaggers hate.

Although the "financial reform" legislation was only a tiny step in the correct direction of real financial reform, fanatical opposition to it by the drooling knucklewalkers is a highly effective tool to be exploited by the banksters to create more pressure to avoid real reform.

 

Those of us who followed politics in the 90s, and especially those of us who are queer, remember what a pathological liar Bill Clinton was. One of the many lies Clinton told in the 1992 campaign is getting new life thanks to evil former EBay CEO, Meg Whitman, who is spending tens of millions dollars from her personal fortune to try to by the governorship in California.

In 1992, Clinton said that Jerry Brown had lied when he said that taxes went down in California. The State of California has proven that claim to be false. (LA Times 9/9/10)

A claim in a Meg Whitman television ad that state taxes went up when Democratic rival Jerry Brown was governor from 1975 to 1983 is false, according to the state Department of Finance.

"Taxes went down, by this yardstick, yes," said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the department, who added that the figures are the result of an impartial, nonpartisan analysis of the data. "The data you have in front of you does not have an R suffix or a D suffix after them. The Department of Finance calculated these numbers in a consistent manner over Republican and Democratic administrations."

The Whitman campaign is refusing to stop running the ad which has been proven false. This is exactly what you would expect from an operation run by someone who used to be CEO of an incredibly evil corporation like EBay.

On the subject of Whitman, she has been too lazy to vote most of the time. Yet, she thinks she is entitled to be the next Governor of California.



 

I certainly have my views on some of the current controversies surrounding 911. However, living in NYC, blogging about them today seems inappropriate. Today, I've seen the pain in the faces of people who lost loved ones that day, and it makes you stop and think.

I lived in DC at the time of the attacks. For most people there, it was a day more of fear than loss. Most people in the District didn't know people who died in the Pentagon. People did experience a situation that certainly achieved what terrorists are trying to achieve, creating terror.

I remember the efforts of people to evacuate from downtown after the Towers fell. Walking past the cars stuck in traffic made me realize that it wouldn't be realistic to get most people out DC if there was a sudden need. People who lived in Virginia were the worst off, because the only reasonable evacuation routes with such a mass exodus were through Maryland. (The Potomac River is in the way.)

Washington is a city where speculation about politicians and world events rivals celebrity gossip. Most people are geographically close to power, yet have very little. So, it wasn't exactly shocking that people who felt powerless over the possibility of another terrorist attack would speculate about it...endlessly. It created a climate of fear that surpassed the rest of the country by far, with the possible exception of NYC.

I eventually realized that most peoples' views of what would be the terrorists' next target were based on how important those places were in the world view of the people doing the speculating. Trying to picture the world view of, much less empathize with, the terrorists was considered nearly treasonous by some people, as bizarre as that seems now. So, they just projected their world views onto the terrorists in bizarre and senseless ways.

The same thing worked for dates. We were always taught to be afraid in national holidays and Christian religious holidays. Jewish holidays were thrown in there sometimes too. No efforts was made by the authorities, or most people listening to them, to figure out what dates, if any, would be important to Islamic fundamentalists. (It was considered terroristic to even question if Islamic extremists were the ones who carried out the attacks.) So, people waited and speculated, waited and speculated, waited and speculated bizarrely for the next attack that they were sure was going to happen.

Many were convinced that the next attacks, yes attacks, would use "dirty bombs." Others were sure that chemical or biological weapons would be involved. The "Washington Consensus" on the streets was that we were all going to get hit, again, and again, and again.

Those attacks never came.

I remember that my own personal sense of helplessness was enhanced by the fact that we had an incompetent, illegitimate, and unelected regime whose leaders were not the slightest bit concerned with anyone other than themselves and the wealthy elites of this country. Considering who was running our government, there was no reason to trust it to protect me, especially after it had just failed to protect the country so spectacularly.

I live in NYC now. When I look back, I guess I am lucky. Being surrounded by baseless fear and frenzied speculation are nowhere near as bad losing friends or loved ones. 911 has been used as a political football by the right from the very day it happened. On most days, it is so important that more people are fighting back. Today, I'll reflect.

 

I would like to express my gratitude to Ben Quayle for making this headline possible and to Mock, Paper, Scissors for letting me know about it.

It turns out that the dippy Ben Quayle isn't just intellectually challenged. He's ethically challenged too. Here's a list of some of the lobbyists who have given money to Quayle's campaign, courtesy of That's My Congress.

- Jane Abraham, wife of the CEO of the Abraham Group, a Washington D.C. lobbying firm.
- Ken Adelman, who lists himself as an “analyst” for the lobbying firm DCI Group, which serves clients such as the Exxon Mobil, the US Telecommunications Association, and American Task Force Argentina.
- Robert Akin, a lobbyist for Pinnacle West Capital
- Denise Balzano, who works for the lobbying firm Balzano Associaties, which represents Raytheon, a military contractor
- Charles Black, who works as a lobbyist for the Prime Policy Group, which lobbies for AT&T, General Dynamics, and the Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association
- Judy Black, who works as a lobbyist for Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, representing the interests of companies including Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation, Genworth Financial, Global Crossing, Johnson & Johnson, the Mobile Medical International Corp, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, and Timet-Titanium Metals Corporation
- James Bodner, who lobbies through the Cohen Group for AEA Technology, as well as William Cohen of the same lobbying firm
- Michael Dean, a lobbyist who works for the National Cable & Telecommunications
- Daniel Fisher, who works for the lobbying firm Akin Gump
- Bill Graves, a lobbyist for the American Trucking Association
- C. Boyden Gray, a lobbyist with Gray & Schmitz who represents Constellation Energy
- J. Steven Hart, a lobbyist with Williams and Jensen who has clients including the American Chemistry Council, the American Council of Life Insurers, Bloomberg LP, Brickstreet Mutual Insurance Company, the Managed Funds Association, Pension Financial Services, Pfizer Inc, R & J Properties, Sunoco, US Enrichment Corporation, the US Israel Science & Technology Foundation, the Vanguard Group, and Visa
- Debra Hardy Havens, a lobbyist with Capitol Associates
- William Lamond, an executive with the lobbying firm Ogilvy Government Relations
- Alison McSlarrow, a lobbyist who represented Fannie Mae, and Hartford Insurance in the years before the financial meltdown.
- Kyle McSlarrow, a lobbyist with the National Cable & Telecommunications Association
- Daniel Murphy, a lobbyist working for BGR Holding, representing Broward Health, Clarian Health Partners, the Housing Finance Alliance, the Kurdistan Regional Government, Lanmark Technology, and the Mortgage Insurance Companies of America
- Don Nickles, a lobbyist for the Nickles Group, with clients including
- Clifford Riccio, a lobbyist with the National Cable & Telecommunications Association
- David Rivkin, a lobbyist who has worked for Baker & Hostetler on behalf of Federated Investors Incorporated
- Warren Rudman, a lobbyist with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, representing the International Telecoms Satellite Organization
- Constance Tipton, a lobbyist with the International Dairy Foods Association
- John Vardaman, who works for the lobbying firm Williams and Connolly

Remember when Ben's daddy, Mr. Potatoe Head, nattered on about "family values"? It turns out that Quayle Family Values include being a corrupt politician and commenting on porno sites. I have no problem with the latter, except that Ben Quayle pretends to be something he is not.

It gets even better. Muckety reports the following.

In Arizona, Ben Quayle, son of former Vice President Dan Quayle, won a GOP primary for Congress despite several advertising trip-ups. (A campaign mailer promoting family values neglected to mention that the two little girls in the photo were not his. Quayle and his wife have no children.

An organization dedicated to electing queer political candidates is actually "honoring" Nancy Pelosi, who gay baited her way into Congress in 1986 against openly gay Harry Britt, who was the early frontrunner to become the first openly queer member of Congress to be out before being elected. Does this sound surreal? It's real. (Washington Blade 9/9/10)

The Victory Fund is set to award Pelosi with the organization’s 2010 Gay & Lesbian Leadershup Award for her “leadership on issues important to LGBT Americans” and for how she “continues to challenge official Washington to realize and embrace the fair-mindedness of their fellow Americans,” according to a promo for the event.

Nancy Pelosi has never challenged "official Washington to realize and embrace the fair-mindedness of their fellow Americans." That's completely fictional. She is an obstinate part of official Washington who needs to be challenged on queer issues.

It gets worse. Remember how Nancy Pelosi sabotaged ENDA in the last congress? Remember her taking gender identity out to attack trans queers and to give corporate lawyers a loophole to screw over cis queers? Remember how she riddled ENDA with a multitude of other loopholes to make almost completely unenforceable?

Is the Victory Fund so completely out of touch with reality that they haven't noticed that Pelosi has done everything in her power to block ENDA, the most important LGBT civil rights issue, from even getting a vote in the House during this session? Do they know and just don't give a flying fuck?

The "Victory Fund," like the Champagne Fund, and what passes for GLAAD these days, are completely uninterested in the queer civil rights movement or any middle class or poor queer. All they care about are wealthy donors who are solely interested in getting their pictures taken with powerful and influential figures.

Fortunately, there are grassroots activists who are still fighting back against vicious bigots like Nancy Pelosi.

The LGBT organization responsible for acts of civil disobedience across the country is considering taking action against U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during her appearance this month at a Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund fundraiser.

Robin McGehee, co-founder of GetEQUAL, said activists affiliated with the organization are weighing the possibility of action directed toward the speaker at the Victory Fund’s Gay & Lesbian Leadership Awards, which is scheduled for Sept. 29 at the Mayflower Hotel in D.C.

If I get a fundraising letter from the so called "Victory Fund," I won't burn it. That would be bad for the environment. I'll recycle it instead.

Photo: SanFranAnnie

 

Klan Brewer made up comments about "headless bodies" in the Arizona desert that turned out to be false. When reporters asked her about it after her infamous debate earlier this month, she is ducking rather clumsily. Brewer isn't as funny as Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, or Linda McMahon, but she is certainly fodder for a few giggles here and there.



I wonder how much longer the drooling knucklewalkers in the GOP will continue to talk her up as a potential future president.

 

Glenn Beck at a CPAC Hatefest - Photo: Gage Skidmore

Stating some facts will piss a lot of people off. One of them is that Mormons are not Christians.

An evangelical Christian recently pissed off a lot of Mormons by saying the following:

I do not think Mormonism is an orthodox Christian faith, with a small O. I think perhaps the most charitable way for an evangelical Christian to look at Mormonism is to look at Mormonism as the fourth Abrahamic faith.

There's nothing "charitable" about it. Mormonism is just as much of an Abrahamic faith as the other three. However, it is not Christian.

Let's look at some of the things Mormons believe.

1) Wearing magic underpants will protect them from harm.

2) Jesus existed before there were people on the Earth, and he got in a big spiritual battle with Lucifer back then. Black peoples' ancestors' souls were the punished souls of spirits that stayed out of it. White peoples' ancestors' souls fought on the side of Jesus.

3) Joseph Smith was a prophet.

4) A heterosexual male Mormon with a wife and otherwise in good standing will become a god over his own planet. (Quite the ego boost.)

5) God lives on a planet in a nearby solar system.

6) Mormons can convert people after they are dead. (That's why, by the way, they have so much genealogy information.)

You don't have to have an IQ over 150 to figure out that these beliefs are completely incompatible with Christianity. Yet, in 2008, 52% of Americans got it wrong and thought that Mormonism is a Christian religion. This is as factually inaccurate as saying that Obama is a Muslim or that the Moon is made of cheese.

Now that we have established the fact that Glenn Beck, like all Mormons, is not a Christian, we should ask why he keeps nattering on about being Christian and making claims about the Christianity of people he disagrees with.

I just received a DNC fundraising letter with a phony baloney "2010 Presidential Survey." It's just a scam to get people to open fundraising envelopes and give them money.

Admitedly, I shouldn't have opened it, but I found something disturbing in this "survey." In one of the questions, the DNC asks people to prioritize 15 major issues. Global Warming and queer issues don't even make the list. In fact, they don't even make the survey at all. The Employee Free Choice Act and other labor issues are conspicuously absent, as is the right of women to have abortions. State/Church separation is AWOL too.

This is symbolic of a Democratic Party leadership which is completely contemptuous of the concerns of Democrats, even in its intraparty communications. They aren't just governing like Republicans. They are talking more and more like Republicans every day.

It's no wonder the Democrats are headed towards getting their butts kicked badly this November. They deserve it. Unfortunately, Republicans who also deserve to get their butts kicked seriously will benefit from it.

 

Christine O'Donnell, like the rest of the teabaggers, certainly fits this definition of "jerkoff" from the Urban Dictionary (#3):

Someone who is a complete dickhead and is a complete and total loser. Someone who has just completely and utterly screwed up your day, just by sight, and no one can fix it.

I would add an element of uselessness to the definition to get at what I think of for the nonliteral definition of the term. Anyway, O'Donnell is the teabagging candidate for Deleware Senate seat up this year. In the 90s, this brilliant person made the following statement on an MTV show about sex. (Huffington Post 9/2/10)

The Delaware Republican, who is challenging Rep. Mike Castle in the state's Senate primary and has earned the financial backing of a portion of the Tea Party movement, made an appearance in the MTV series "Sex In The 90s." Entitled "The Safest Sex Of All," the episode was ostensibly geared towards understanding the importance of abstinence. But O'Donnell's guidance went a bit further. Masturbation, she argued, is not a moral substitute for sex. "The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can't masturbate without lust."

"The reason that you don't tell [people] that masturbation is the answer to AIDS and all these other problems that come with sex outside of marriage is because again it is not addressing the issue," she extrapolated. "You're just gonna create somebody who is, I was gonna say, toying with his sexuality. Pardon the pun."

Like a lot of people who are running on behalf of the Astroturf teabagger "movement," O'Donnell's right fringe views are not limited to economics.

This teabagger has been making the news for her gay baiting campaign tactics. Her former campaign staffers have spread claims that her Republican primary opponent is gay and having an affair behind his wife's back without any evidence. She has gone out of her way to publicize these rumors in a nondenial denial. This shows that the teabaggers are indeed heterosexist, thinking that saying someone is LGBT shows that they are somehow bad people and unfit for public service.

I'd say "jerk this" to O'Donnell, but I really am gay and don't have sex with women.

Photo: naama

Illustration: ddogbreath

 

The WWE under Linda McMahon certainly did feature roided out muscleheads.



 

The people shouting "war criminal" are absolutely correct. (Hat Tip: Let Freedom Rain)



Americans have plenty of reasons to hate Tony Blair too. His lies and Bush butt kissing played an instrumental role in getting us into Iraq and keeping us there.

Blair was at a book signing event. I've heard that his book is sellilng a lot of copies. I wonder if rich rightist are buying copies by the thousands. Most rightist books that get on the US bestseller lists do so because of this kind of bulk buying.

 

Klan Brewer's fanatical obsession with her white supremacist agenda certainly has gotten a lot of attention. Lately, her stupidity is in the spotlight. But, what about her heterosexism?

Brewer's bigotry against us started before she went on her notorious racism binge. (From Change.org's Gay Rights section)

But long before Brewer was running over the rights of people of color and huffing and puffing about immigration, she was also targeting Arizona's gay and lesbian population. Right after taking over for former Governor Napolitano, Brewer signed legislation that dismantled a domestic partnership program in Arizona that allowed state employees to extend benefits to their domestic partners, as well as their children. She did this by switching up the word "dependent," so that it meant only those spouses or children that were products of straight folks (or, in other words, "traditional marriage").

The move drew outrage from many around the state, including folks from the University of Arizona, which were dramatically impacted by Brewer's decision to redefine family. Liz Sawyer, an employee at the school and a spokesperson for a staff group, OUTReach, that works on behalf of LGBT rights, called Brewer's move "deplorable" and "tragic." After all, this was a callous move by Brewer to swipe benefits away from men, women and children.

The queer community, the Obama Administration, and Arizona all would have been better off if Janet Napolitano hadn't been appointed to run Homeland Security, allowing Klan Brewer to slide into the governor's mansion.

Now, the peace movement has faced the fact that it cannot rely on the Obama Administration to stop the wars. At the same time, our economy is still in terrible shape, though it no longer is in free fall like it was in 2008.

Here's a great video from the Veterans for Peace conference, shot by the Punk Patriot, where a peace activist from CODEPINK connects the dots between our wars and the financial and social costs the American people are paying at home. (Hat Tip: Bruce Gagnon)



There is another connection between the wars and what ails our country: corporations corrupting our political system. (I originally had the Freudian typo, "poolitical system.") The efforts to keep us at war are supported by corporate interests who buy the politicians with big money campaign contributions. Under the oligarchic Citizens United ruling, those corporations now can run their own political ads. Media owned by huge corporations and advertised on by more huge corporations (the latter also applies to NPR) propagandize ruthlessly on behalf of the bloodshed, regardless of the economic devastation and loss of lives caused by these wars.

And, the vast majority of Christian churches side with these corrupt wars, engaging in a Christian jihad against Islam abroad, a jihad which is being extended to attacks on mosque construction here at home. These same churches, with corrupt and greedy leaders, oppose Wall St. regulation and taxes for the rich because the preachers want to keep speculating on church funds they have bilked from their congregations. They attack government spending on the poor at home because poor people are good excuses for church fundraising, almost none of which actually goes to helping the poor. Yes, there are a few honest preachers who don't do this, but the are, by far, the exception to the rule.

This isn't limited to Christianity or the United States. The mullah's in Iran who assault democracy and freedom there, as the Christian preachers want to do here, also are robbing their country blind. Their Revolutionary Guard have gotten themselves neck deep in corporate interests there. Religion, oligarchy, oppression, and violence have been common combos throughout world history. It doesn't really matter which country, faith, or time in history.

Corportions, churches, lies, corruption, and war are part of a vicious cycle which is destroying the country.

 

Bigotry often is based on stupidity. "I have really did" publish this blog posting.



Brewer is such a ridiculous person that she was bound to be the target of satire. People are having fun with her already on YouTube.



 

The teabaggers like babbling about the Constitution and what the founders believed, yet they get it wrong a lot of the time. They like ranting about America being a "Christian Nation," even though anyone familiar with the Constitution or American history would know otherwise.

The First Amendment explicitly forbids the establishment of religion.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Note that the First Amendment says Congress can't make a law respecting the "establishment of religion." It does not say "establishment of a particular religion" or even "establishment of religion." The latter two are common lies told by Christian religious extremists who don't like the wall of separation between church and state mandated by the text of the First Amendment. So, they just lie about what it actually says.

Logic is often considered evil by the rightist teabaggers. Yet, the rest of us would point out that it isn't logical to think that founders who wrote and ratified the First Amendment would see our country as a "Christian nation." But, that doesn't keep the teabaggers from lying and saying it was the original intent.

One of our nation's first treaties was the Treaty of Tripoli. The main significance of the treaty to our lives today can be found in one part.

ARTICLE 11.

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

This treaty was signed by President John Adams after being ratified by the US Senate. It should be noted that Adams is quite trendy on the right these days, but most of his conservative admirers know nothing about the Treaty of Tripoli (or much else).

Even worse for those who want to believe that America was founded as a Christian Nation was this part of his statement at signing the treaty. (bolding mine)

Now be it known, That I John Adams, President of the United States of America, having seen and considered the said Treaty do, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, accept, ratify, and confirm the same, and every clause and article thereof. And to the End that the said Treaty may be observed and performed with good Faith on the part of the United States, I have ordered the premises to be made public; And I do hereby enjoin and require all persons bearing office civil or military within the United States, and all other citizens or inhabitants thereof, faithfully to observe and fulfill the said Treaty and every clause and article thereof.

Atheists, agnostics, and non Christian religious leaders are sick and tired of this nonsense about America being a Christian nation. You teabaggers need to stop spewing this bullshit.

Why is an Astroturf scam like Teabagger Inc. pushing these lies about the Constitution and the founders? The rich bastards and corporate leaders behind the scam want to keep people too busy ranting on about religious hatreds to notice how we are being robbed by the very interests behind all the nonsense being fed the drooling knucklewalkers who have been suckered by the con job.

Photos: naama

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