Open thread.

Been busy lately, sorry about that. What's on your mind? Anything in particular that needs savaging? More shortly.

Can the Democrats please learn some snappy comebacks and putdowns?

Lame. Really lame.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last night: "If they make this rules change, Republicans will confirm yet again that they simply do not care if their leaders are ethical. If Republicans believe that an indicted member should be allowed to hold a top leadership position in the House of Representatives, their arrogance is astonishing."

How about:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last night: "So the Republicans are changing the rules again to protect yet another ethically corrupt GOP member? Gosh, what a surprise. Which one is it this time?"

Not really the way you want to start out.

Sept 15, 2004:

"The President's agenda that he has outlined for America is affordable, it's responsible and it's focused on meeting our highest priorities while reducing the deficit in half over the next five years."

Nov 18, 2004:

"The US Senate voted to raise the debt ceiling by 800 billion dollars to nearly 8.2 trillion dollars, allowing the US government to avoid the unwelcome prospect of running short of operating funds."

Not what you would call an auspicious beginning.

Republican position: rules are for losers.

A number of people have commented on the Republican proposal to reverse a House rule that says members indicted by state prosecutors can't remain in positions of leadership. Extracted from this piece over at DailyKos , the proposal is "a move designed to benefit Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) in case he is charged by a Texas grand jury that has indicted three of his political associates, GOP leaders said today".

Of course, the unintentional hilarity is where the rule came from in the first place:

House Republicans in 1993 -- trying to underscore the ethics problems of Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), then-chairman of the Ways and Means Committee -- adopted the rule that requires a party leader to surrender his or her post if indicted by any grand jury, federal or state.

Yes, the Repubs introduced the rule and forced it through when it benefited them. And now, not surprisingly, they're going to get rid of it when it doesn't work in their favour. But rather than be offended by this single example of Republican hypocrisy, you have to see it as part of the bigger picture, in which Republicans have simply decided that rules just don't apply to them, and any rules or laws that get in the way of their absolute and unopposable power have to be discarded.

Examples:

• Don't like the current elected distribution in your state, such as Texas or Colorado? Don't bother trying harder to win elections, like normal people would. Fuck, no, just unconstitutionally redistrict to wipe the opposition off the electoral map.
• Don't like the fact that it takes a majority of 60 in the Senate to block a filibuster? No problem. Piss on historical precedent by proposing a rule change that allows a simple majority to shut one down.
• Finally, don't like having to win elections the fair and honest way? Screw that, too. Just disenfrachise voters and rig voting machines.
  

Simply, the Republicans have finally decided that it's just too much work playing by the rules and following the laws. Why bother, when there's easier ways to get all this done?

The difference between red and blue.

There have been a lot of chuckles lately inspired by the red/blue maps of the United States, but we all know that these maps can't be taken seriously. Obviously, it makes no sense to colour a state red or blue when many of them were won by razor-thin margins in some cases, so the concept or a red or blue state (in most cases, at least) is clearly absurd.

Not so the concept of a red or blue person.

All you need to understand that is to read some of the coverage -- this article, for example -- of the apparent execution of a wounded Iraqi by a U.S. Marine:

... The first marine is heard repeating the same allegation that the wounded man, who lies motionless on the floor, is pretending.

The footage then shows the marine raising his rifle at one of the prisoners. The video provided to the networks then is blacked out, but a shot can be heard.

"He's dead now," one of the marine declares.

Numerous international commentators and human rights advocates are understandably offended and horrified by the apparent summary execution of a wounded man lying motionless on the ground. But it's the reaction of the right-wing media circus and its attack poodles that's truly stunning. From that same article:

In the United States, right-wing talk shows hailed the marines as heroes who were simply defending themselves against dangerous Iraqis.

"Our guys have been blown up by booby-trapped bodies," talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said.

"These are people who have been taking shots at American soldiers since we got there. These are the people that have links and ties to people who blew up 3,000 innocent Americans on Sept. 11."

Ignore, of course, drug addict Limbaugh's tired defense that Iraq had something to do with the attacks of 9/11. Limbaugh has been a serial, pathological liar for years so there's not much point even replying to that idiocy.

Just absorb the idea that there are people who actually walk among you, who look like regular human beings, who think it's a terrific idea to kill, in cold blood, a wounded, motionless person lying on the ground. And appreciate that there is a gulf between red and blue people that will never, ever, ever be bridged. There is no possibility for dialogue between these two groups, one a group of regular, caring individuals, the other a collection of -- what other way to describe them -- completely soulless monsters. What can one say to them that would have any meaning whatsoever?

I'm not sure what more can be said here. I'm only reminded of something Erich Hoffer once wrote:

"What monstrosities would walk the streets, were some peoples' faces as unfinished as their minds."

These are the red people. And they are a frightening group.

Just another revised map of post-election U.S.

OK, now we're getting somewhere.

Outrage overload.

Well, there's this. Then there's this. Now do you understand how I feel?

What this last election was really all about.

(Paraphrased, from a friend.)

The main mistake of the Democrats was to think that a disastrous war and an ailing economy would be the major concern of the electorate.

The Republicans, on the other hand, correctly saw that the voters' chief issue was to keep gay couples from having an abortion.

The Democratic Party -- slip-sliding into complete irrelevancy

John over at AmericaBlog has this choice piece, in which he describes a political up-and-comer:

...a teetotaling Mormon (one of the most anti-gay groups in the country). A former Capitol Hill cop. A staunch opponent of abortion. A co-sponsor of the constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning.

And just who is this fundamentalist, right-wing zealot, who would probably enjoy overturning Roe v. Wade and criminalizing flag burning? Why, bless my soul, it's none other than Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada, the new Senate minority leader. Of the Democrats. Yeah, those Democrats.

So horrifically sad, it's actually funny.

"CIA plans to purge its agency". "Sources say White House has ordered new chief to eliminate officers who were disloyal to Bush"

And did anyone not see this coming?

"WASHINGTON -- The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources."

Yes, when you're in a life-and-death, good-versus-evil, end-times, apocalyptic battle against the unspeakable evil and terror that is fundamentalism Islam, there's nothing that beats ... summarily dismissing numerous experienced intelligence experts and analysts who might actually be, you know, useful in some way.

ADDENDUM: Oh, yeah, this is going to work out really well.

Previously-legal provisional ballots now being rejected in Ohio.

This is great:

Are the provisional ballots in Ohio being thrown out? A new rule for counting provisional ballots in Cuyahoga County, Ohio was implemented on Tuesday, November 9 at approximately 2:30 in the afternoon, according to election observer Victoria Lovegren.

The new ruling in Cuyahoga County mandates that provisional ballots in yellow packets must be “Rejected” if there is no “date of birth” on the packet. The Free Press obtained copies of the original “Provisional Verification Procedure” from Cuyahoga County which stated “Date of birth is not mandatory and should not reject a provisional ballot.” The original procedure required the voter’s name, address and a signature that matched the signature in the county’s database.

Got that? A provisional ballot that was perfectly acceptable at the time it was filled out by a voter is now, retroactively, unacceptable. If you live in Ohio, there has got to be a way to use that kind of precedent elsewhere, to really screw someone over. Come on, use your imagination.

Just more damn animal blogging

In the beginning, there was cat blogging. Which begat more cat blogging. Which, somehow, inspired pudu blogging. Which, weirdly enough, veered off into orchid blogging. So, what the hell, one can rage against the machine for only so long before succumbing.

Yes, it's Friday badger blogging.

It would be funny if it weren't so disturbingly accurate.

Democrats, gearing up for 2008.

You want dissent? We got your dissent right here, buddy.

This is great. Those of you who remember Kent State might want to start feeling a bit nervous. The best part is the official excuse that the tanks were there because they got "stuck at a traffic light." It's not like this administration even tries to come up with believable lies anymore:

AP - Responding to criticism of two tanks firing indiscriminately and repeatedly on peaceful anti-war protestors, killing 137 and wounding over 500 more, the tank's commander said, "Well, uh, we were cleaning it, and it went off."

UPDATE: It's been mentioned to me that the vehicles in the pics aren't actually tanks, but armored personnel carriers. You can tell because tanks would be larger, with a bigger main gun, and would have been driven by Clint Eastwood or Donald Sutherland, demanding to know where the German gold was.

What I think of compromise.

No obvious reason for this post, it's just something I felt like writing about. For years, I've been really irked by folks who try to defend a typically stupid point of view by suggesting that, you know, if I really wanted to be fair and reasonable and open-minded, I should be prepared to "compromise". Meet them halfway, as it were, be a nice guy, be a sport. And bullshit like that.

The best example I have is when fundamentalist Christians (a.k.a. "morons") press for the inclusion of creation science or intelligent design in the public school system. When they run into the inevitable protests, they like to come off as the voices of reason, suggesting that it would be only fair to present both sides, to let students hear other alternatives. To compromise. All that time, I wished I had a snappy, devastating comeback, and a while back, I think I came up with one.

The next time someone suggests I should compromise on something as idiotic as, say, creation science, I'm just going to ask him to take out his wallet. Puzzled look, almost certainly. I'll ask him to remove all of the money, and count it. And after he does, I'll ask him to give all of it to me.

Needless to say, I don't expect to get it. I'll get an argument, why should he give me his money? He earned it, it's his, what makes me think I have any right to it? OK, I suggest, that's fair. In that case (you guessed it), let's compromise. Just give me half. That's fair, it's equal, I'm being open-minded in sharing, no? I'm compromising, damn it. What more can he ask for?

Of course, he'll still complain that that's ridiculous, that I don't deserve any of his money. Exactly. The notion of compromise in this situation is absurd, simply because my opponent has no obligation to accommodate me in any way. In short, there are situations where compromise is just foolish since one of the parties happens to be 100% in the right, and compromise just isn't warranted, even a little bit.

And that's the point you have to get across. One wonders how many people will be smart enough to appreciate it.

Hello, right wing government. Goodbye, womens' rights.

(I'll admit that this post will seem kind of hurried since, well, it was. Sometimes, good grammar takes a back seat to expediency.)

Just in case you had any thoughts of having a good day, you should check out this article over at DailyKos (and, of course, the original yahoo article over here):

For a year, Julee Lacey stopped in a CVS pharmacy near her home in a Fort Worth suburb to get refills of her birth-control pills. Then one day last March, the pharmacist refused to fill Lacey's prescription because she did not believe in birth control.

"I was shocked," says Lacey, 33, who was not able to get her prescription until the next day and missed taking one of her pills. "Their job is not to regulate what people take or do. It's just to fill the prescription that was ordered by my physician."

Some pharmacists, however, disagree and refuse on moral grounds to fill prescriptions for contraceptives. And states from Rhode Island to Washington have proposed laws that would protect such decisions.

Man, there is so much wrong with this story, it's hard to know where to start. First, the Yahoo article writes that:

"Mississippi enacted a sweeping statute that went into effect in July that allows health care providers, including pharmacists, to not participate in procedures that go against their conscience."

Now, that phrasing is wonderfully generic and all-encompassing, when we all know that it refers to one thing and one thing only: prescriptions for birth control or those related in any way to family planning. To talk about it as if it's just there to protect the delicate sensibilities of pharmacists from any of a myriad of potential scrips they might have to fill is rubbish -- this sort of thing is targeted at birth control and only birth control. It's just being gussied up to sound more universal, but no one should be fooled. I mean, do you really think any of these folks are going to balk at filling scrips for painkillers? Or erectile dysfunction drugs? I didn't think so. This kind of behaviour is aimed squarely at womens' rights, and no one should be allowed to tap dance around that.

The next issue is whether the pharmacist in question is taking a personal stand, or whether this is now store policy, or even nationwide chain policy. After all, in 1999, Wal-Mart stores simply decided not to carry the emergency contraceptive drug Preven. If that's what you're up against, well, you're pretty well shit out of luck. But, hey. It just gets worse.

A number of comments at DailyKos suggest that outraged consumers boycott such stores. Man, that is a bad idea at a number of different levels. In some cases, you can't just take your prescription to another pharmacy. In some cases, this may be the only convenient pharmacy within miles, and it's just not realistic to say, hey, vote with your wallet, go elsewhere.

The bigger problem with the idea of a boycott is that, philosophically, a boycott is used to focus attention on someone who is doing something within their rights, but it's such odious or unfair behaviour that you want to do something about it. To boycott such stores is to implicitly accept that they have the right to do this, and that's exactly what you shouldn't be doing. The consumer's position should be, instead, to demand that the store fulfill its moral, ethical (and legal?) obligation to fill any prescriptions that come its way, as members of the medical profession. A boycott is just enabling them to keep doing what they're doing, and that's not the way to deal with this. But there's a couple more things in that article that are intensely disturbing.

From the Yahoo article:

In the Madison case, pharmacist Neil Noesen, 30, after refusing to refill a birth-control prescription, did not transfer it to another pharmacist or return it to the woman. She was able to get her prescription refilled two days later at the same pharmacy, but she missed a pill because of the delay.

Now, pardon my French but, what the fucking hell?!?! The pharmacist took the scrip, refused to fill it, refused to give it to someone else to fill, and refused to give it back? That's not an act of conscience -- that's theft. Rather than complain, the consumer should have quietly walked out of the store, pulled out her cell phone, called the police and told them that someone had just stolen her prescription and she wanted to lay charges. And if she was still thinking clearly through the rage, she should have called the local media to tell them that there was going to be some good shit going down at the local drug store in about 20 minutes, and they might want to get a crew there tout de suite (that's French for "right fucking now").

But the biggest assholes in all of this are the folks in charge at the American Pharmacists Association:

The American Pharmacists Association, with 50,000 members, has a policy that says druggists can refuse to fill prescriptions if they object on moral grounds, but they must make arrangements so a patient can still get the pills. Yet some pharmacists have refused to hand the prescription to another druggist to fill.

Now, you have to wonder, what complete dickheads at the APA decided that it would be a good idea to let its members opt out of filling prescriptions that are placed in front of them? When did this happen? And how did they justify it? Not to make this an overly black and white situation but, really, what's the problem with the APA having taken a stand and said, "If you're a licensed pharmacist, you fill the scrip. Period. Or you find a new job. End of discussion." To have accepted this opt-out idea is the height of idiocy. What the hell were they thinking?

And, in the end, what can the consumer do? A good question. I've always been a big fan of fighting fire with fire, so here's my suitably demented suggestion. If a local pharmacist makes it a statement of conscience that she can't fill certain scrips, then it's only fair that outraged consumers make it a similar statement of conscience that they can no longer deal with that pharmacist. If you run a service station, well, gosh, it's just against your conscience to sell her gas. Or service her car. You run a grocery store? Darn, but you just can't see your way clear to selling her any groceries. Bummer but, you know, you gotta follow your conscience. You a teacher? Well, crap, but your conscience just won't allow you to teach her kid any more.

You want mean, nasty and vindictive? I gotcher mean, nasty and vindictive right here. It's long past time to play nice when this kind of shit happens. Like the saying goes, when you're going to a knife fight, you take a knife. And if you want to get even nastier, I can do that too.

Bloggers and webmasters can start a local, statewide or even national "hit list" of offending pharmacists, so that everyone knows who they can, well, shun. (By "hit list", I of course don't mean hit as in actual physical violence. I just mean a list of jerks whose lives you can make thoroughly miserable totally within the bounds of the law. Oh, yes, I can be a real asshole at times. It's part of my charm.)

Anyway, that's my $0.02. Your turn.

ADDENDUM: As another example of someone's conscience getting in the way of their official duties, some of you might remember this story of the Chicago police officer who, because of his Catholic beliefs, refused to accept assignments to police protests at abortion clinics. Now, this is an even more egregious and outrageous example of dereliction of duty. Here, you have a public employee, being paid with taxpayer dollars, deciding just which taxpayers deserve his protection.

The legal outcome of that case is here, and it's kind of annoying. The officer was offered the chance to move to another district, but he refused. I don't think he should have been given that opportunity. He should have either accepted what showed up on the daily duty roster, or his sorry ass should have been fired. Frankly, I'm fed up with this "reasonable accommodation of religious beliefs" bullshit. If you're a public employee, you do your job as it's handed to you, or you find another job. But, hey, that's just me.

ADDENDUM 2: If you want to read more about this type of idiocy, what you should be searching for is the phrase "conscience clause", perhaps along with "American Pharmacists Association" if you specifically wanted to keep reading about the pharmacist controversy. As one example that should set you to grinding your teeth, you can read this piece, in which a Denton, Texas pharmacist refused to fill a morning-after pill prescription for a woman who had just been raped. Mercifully, his employer, Eckerd Drugs, fired his worthless, bigoted ass within a week. But if more states enact conscience clauses, this is just the sort of thing you should expect to see more of.

Sometimes, people get pissed off for a reason.

Like this.

John Kerry: still without a clue.

From this piece in the Washington Post:

Democrat John F. Kerry plans to use his Senate seat and long lists of supporters to remain a major voice in American politics despite losing the presidential race last Tuesday, and he is assessing the feasibility of trying again in 2008, friends and aides said yesterday.

Mother of God, what will it take for Kerry to figure out that he just ain't the man for this job? He lost to George W. McRetard, for crying out loud. Let it go, John. One sign of maturity is to recognize when you get your ass handed to you, and move on. It's someone else's turn next time. Maybe someone who actually has a real reason to run for the position.

Wingnut logic 101

From this article, we have newly-elected Republican senator and complete loon Tom Coburn:

"Why do you think we see the rationalisation for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That's a gay agenda."

Um ... abortion being part of the gay agenda? How exactly does that work again?

Pretentious Christian comic relief.

The original pic. And after John got through with some photographic touchups.