Stabenow vs. Kyl

This pretty much perfectly expresses the difference between liberals and conservatives.

rooting for kids to die

An illustrative story out of the Colorado State Senate:

Democrats were outraged Wednesday morning when Republican state Sen. Dave Schultheis said he planned to vote against a bill to require HIV tests for pregnant women because the disease “stems from sexual promiscuity” and he didn’t think the Legislature should “remove the negative consequences that take place from poor behavior and unacceptable behavior.” The Colorado Springs lawmaker then proceeded to cast the lone vote against SB-179, which passed 32-1 and moves on to the House.

I say "illustrative" because it reinforces a point I've argued before about a fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives on sex-related issues, and more specifically a point where we completely disagree not only on the means, but on the ends themselves, on what kind of a nation we want. We often talk about how "both sides want a prosperous/strong/happy/well-educated nation, we just disagree on how to get there," but that is not true of this issue.

It goes like this: Liberals see condoms/sex ed/birth control/vaccines as a way to keep their kids safer from death and teen pregnancy, while conservatives see death and teen pregnancy as a way to help keep their kids from having sex. Put another way, social conservatives do not like sex ed and free birth control and HPV vaccines and, in this case, HIV tests for pregnant women because at the end of the day they don't want sex to be safer. Liberals are willing to deal with kids having more sex if it means sex will be safer. Conservatives are willing to deal with more deaths and teenage pregnancies if it means more their kids are staying abstinent.

a story in pictures

Pretty stark.

Pope Benedict reinstates Holocaust-denying schismatic bishop

The new face of the Catholic Church, same as the old face of the Catholic Church. With every passing year, I become less impressed with the moral compass of Christ's vicar, the Pope.

Obama talks to Al-Arabiya

I would like to note, for the record, that this was a masterful stroke from the new president. If you're going to slip the dagger to an electorally weakened but still belligerent Ahmadinejad, while calming people down and getting the Middle East thinking about peace again, this is how you do it. And there's just nobody out there can do this kind of thing better than Barack Obama.

If nothing else, the fact that Bush dead-enders are livid with Obama for it probably means it was the right thing to do.

the best ad of the cycle

You are not prepared to tackle the feared Village People lobby, Roger Wicker. YOU ARE NOT PREPARED!

not just jokes to everybody

I'm sure you've all heard about the shooting in Knoxville by now, in which a crazed ultraconservative neoconfederate nutball took a shotgun and 76 rounds into a Unitarian Universalist chapel and started mowing people down during a children's musical. Turns out he had a couple of choice authors on his bookshelf: Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly. Neiwert reminds us that Chad Castagana, the crazy bastard who mailed fake anthrax letters to various famous liberals, was a Free Republic commenter who loved to read him some Michelle Malkin.

But hey, that joke about the liberal hunting license is a real knee slapper, am I right?

The Supremes ain't what they used to be

It's really more of a Weekly Standard, George W. Bush brand of conservatism than a Roberts Court brand, but still closer to the truth than it should be.

In other Onion news, this is the funniest s**t I've seen in months.

just a monkey in a suit

Fresh off FOX News' newest gaffe of referring to Michelle Obama, Barack's wife of 15 years, as a "baby momma," we have the newest and most brazen example yet of the kind of attack the darker corners of the Right have devised for Barack:

In case you were wondering, the banner at the top of the vendor website implies that the monkey's mouth is not open; that is its lips.

Sure, you could argue that it's only "the fringe" that has anything to do with this doll and other such filth (though is it really that much more offensive than the FOX News line? Is FOX News "fringe?"), but that doesn't matter because it proves a point about the common distinction people claim to make between dignified black people and "n****rs." To these people and everyone they represent, at the end of the day the Obamas will never be middle class enough or educated enough or intelligent enough or wealthy enough to become innocuous. They can never adopt the white manner of speaking completely enough, have enough white friends, or have enough white blood in their linage. Barack Obama may be precisely the kind of man that they could point to and say, "see, here's a black man that's rejected all that's depraved about black culture and made something of himself!," and Michelle may perfectly fit the bill for the poor black woman who "pulled herself up by her bootstraps," but when the chips are down and it's time to account, to these people they're just a couple of n****rs like everyone else on the South Side.

is it federalism, or corporatism?

I read a lot of stuff on politics. A lot of stuff on politics. So much goes on, though, that I regularly forget stuff that happened and rediscover it later, or find that I missed something entirely.

Well, I learned something today in the context of the Crazy Train trying to burnish his "populist helper of the poor" cred against former community organizer and civil rights attorney Barack Obama. I never knew that John McCain voted to abolish the federal minimum wage.

worst people in the world

From ThinkProgress:

Opening his radio show with funeral music yesterday, Fox News host John Gibson callously mocked the death of actor Heath Ledger, calling him a “weirdo” with a “serious drug problem.”

Playing an audio clip of the iconic quote, “I wish I knew how to quit you” from Ledger’s gay romance movie Brokeback Mountain, Gibson disdainfully quipped, “Well, he found out how to quit you.” Laughing, Gibson then played another clip from Brokeback Mountain in which Ledger said, “We’re dead,” followed by his own, mocking “We’re dead” before playing the clip again.

What did Ledger do to deserve this? Is it just because he played a gay cowboy?

Gibson represents a certain mindset that you see commonly with these movement conservative, scorched earth fanatics. Their ability to empathize with another person is dependent entirely on whether that person is "one of us" or "the other side." And it takes almost nothing to make you persona non grata to these brownshirts; all Heath Ledger did was play a gay guy in a movie and develop an addiction to sleeping pills to become a "weirdo" with "a serious drug problem" whose untimely death merits only derisive laughter.

Thankfully, it's not a pan-conservative phenomenon, however. Joe Scarborough of "Morning Joe," a former Republican congressman during the Gingrich years, heard this clip, and apparently it blew his mind. He goes on and on for 5 or 10 minutes about the "stunning" inappropriateness of these comments.

And in other news, another radio care bear, Michael Savage, is quickly losing his advertisers. A campaign by Brave New Films to shame Savage's sponsors into pulling their ads from his show has gotten 4 of his 10 advertisers to drop him, and another (GEICO Insurance) is expected to follow suit. Some choice Savage-isms highlighted by Brave New Films:

"90 percent of the people on the Nobel Committee are into child pornography and molestation, according to the latest scientific studies"

Savage advocating "kill[ing] 100 million" Muslims

Savage on immigrant students' hunger strike: "[L]et them fast until they starve to death. ... Go make a bomb where you came from"

Citing more sex-change operations, increased lesbian fertility clinics, Savage said of 9-11: "That was God speaking"

On MLK Day, Savage called civil rights a "racket" designed to steal "white males' birthright"

To "save the United States," lawmakers should institute "outright ban on Muslim immigration" and on "the construction of mosques"

U.S. Senate "more vicious and more histrionic than ever, specifically because women have been injected into" it

"Jimmy Carter is like Hitler"

"Burn the Mexican Flag!"

Savage on the tsunami: "I wouldn't call it a tragedy. ... We shouldn't be spending a nickel on this"

There's something wrong with these people psychologically. They're emotionally broken. How damaged to you have to be to say these things, to laugh over and over at the death of a young, talented actor, or to advocate the indiscriminate slaughter of 100 million people? This is the kind of behavior we're used to seeing in junior high kids who lack a fully developed sense of empathy, but it's pretty stunning to see gray-haired old men display such inhumanity.

And they're spokesmen for a whole "movement."

Judi Giuliani: worst. candidate's wife. ever.

Oh my God! From a Salon breakdown of the candidates' spouses:

Judi Giuliani, wife of Rudy Giuliani: Judi is Giuliani's third wife, the woman he left second wife Donna Hanover for in a televised news conference. She sits at the front row of fashion shows, had a secret marriage she only came forward with when her husband announced his nomination, which was around the same time the couple announced that she would sit in on cabinet meetings were he elected. It has been reported that while her husband was still mayor of New York, if aides referred to her as "Judi" instead of "Judith," she would bawl them out. She buys extra seats on planes for her Louis Vuitton handbag. She has inspired an open rift between the candidate and his children: Andrew, who helpfully explained to reporters that he is estranged from his dad because "a problem exists between me and his wife," and Caroline, a Harvard student who demonstrated the froideur earlier this year by admitting on her MySpace page that she was supporting Barack Obama. But it is the fact that Judi Giuliani once held a job in which she demonstrated medical equipment on puppy dogs who often died after or during the demonstrations that really kicks her up a notch and puts her head and shoulders above the rest of the pack.

And to think, Republicans used to bitch about how disagreeable first lady Hillary Clinton was!