The Party of Whoopi Goldberg: The GOP & Rape Rape

Remember a couple of years ago when Whoopi Goldberg commented that what Roman Polanski did in the seventies wasn't "rape rape"? The outrage was almost universal, but nowhere was it so vehement than it was among "conservative" bloggers, who can be uncommonly stupid when they put their minds to it. it never ceases to amaze me that Republicans are more obsessed with narcissistic, degenerate Hollywood assholes than the narcissistic, degenerate Hollywood assholes themselves are.

As for me, I've always hated Whoopi Goldberg because she's painfully unfunny and sanctimonious, yet not as hot as Sarah Palin, who says equally stupid things more frequently than does the star of Sister Act 2.

Hopefully, the same Republican commentators have some of their rape-rape outrage reserves at the ready because it appears that Whoopi's point of view has found a powerful new ally in ... the GOP.

Rape is only really rape if it involves force. So says the new House Republican majority as it now moves to change abortion law.

For years, federal laws restricting the use of government funds to pay for abortions have included exemptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. (Another exemption covers pregnancies that could endanger the life of the woman.) But the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” a bill with 173 mostly Republican co-sponsors that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has dubbed a top priority in the new Congress, contains a provision that would rewrite the rules to limit drastically the definition of rape and incest in these cases.

With this legislation, which was introduced last week by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Republicans propose that the rape exemption be limited to “forcible rape.” This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion. (Smith’s spokesman did not respond to a call and an email requesting comment.)

Wow. This is classic, even for Republicans. To say that they have a double-standard on abortion would be charitable. They actually have a triple-standard on this issue, as I touched on last week in relation to gay marriage.

You see, the GOP abhors Roe v. Wade because they feel that abortion should be dealt with by the states (although, presumably not the way that Ronald Reagan did when he signed the most liberal abortion law in America as governor of California). The only problem is that they really don't feel that way, as evidenced by their 31 years of support for a "human life" amendment to the Constitution, which would explicitly prohibit the states from making any decision at all.

And for a party that supposed to support a small federal government, local control and freedom of the individual, you'd be surprised by the steps that they've taken where babies are concerned.
The Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 - more commonly know as the Laci Peterson law - made killing a pregnant woman a federal crime. Killing regular women is something Congress has been silent about, unless that woman is either a federal employee conducting her duties, is iced with a WMD, or killed in the course of a presumed interstate crime, like bank robbery or kidnapping. The Peterson Act was passed because a grand total of two states didn't have similar laws on the books.

I haven't done a detailed study of this, but I feel pretty safe in saying that abortion is the only medical procedure that has federal criminal statutes governing it, virtually all of which were introduced by Republicans. If you want to get your four-year-old granddaughter a clit ring, however, the feds are fine with that.

There's basically one "pro-life" position that I respect as intellectually consistent, regardless of how much I might personally disagree with it. That is that human life is sacred and abortion is always wrong, without exception. That's a pro-life position.

Most folks don't feel that way. They want to put any number of qualifiers on their support of life, usually by making exceptions for "rape, incest and the life of the mother." Well, that isn't a pro-life position because it demonstrably makes some lives less valuable than others. If you believe that a fetus is a human life with a soul, it hardly stands to reason that it would understand or approve of its own murder because of the circumstances of its conception. These people say that abortion is murder, but murder is okay sometimes. That undercuts the moral foundation of their argument just a little bit.

Republicans and their Tea Party puppets understand this. If nothing else, they're as good at parsing the meaning of words as Bill Clinton was. And that's why they're redefining rape.

You see, unless a woman gets the shit kicked out of her, federal law will no longer define her as being a victim of rape or incest. Just think of all the comfortable conversations this is going to lead to!

Girl: Hi, I was raped by my uncle and I think I need an abortion.

Soulless Bureaucrat: Are you sure that you were raped?

Girl: Yes. How could you ask that?

Soulless Bureaucrat: Well, I don't see a black eye or anything.

Girl: I was too afraid to fight back. He said that he'd hurt me ...

Soulless Bureaucrat: Then it wasn't rape under the revised federal statute. John Boehner says you were asking for it. Oddly, that's the only thing thing he hasn't cried about this week. You can try calling him, but he's almost certainly out having a smoke. Until then, go elsewhere to murder your baby, you hussy!*

Now, it seems to me that the Republicans who endlessly pissed and whined and fucking moaned about Whoopi Goldberg's comments about Roman Polanski could use some retroactive clarifying.

Was his victim raped only because she wasn't knocked up? Because the underlying premise of the proposed change in the law would suggest that she wouldn't have been raped unless he slammed her face into the edge of Jack Nicholson's jacuzzi. Was it really "rape rape"?

I only bring this up because I suspect that no fuckhead Republican blogger would address it otherwise.

*Editor's Note: I suspect that this post will be cited by a certain Liberal Part hack as an instance of my making "jokes about sexual assault on (my) web site" but this is only because said hack is a professional scumbag, a humourless asshole and was born to miss the fucking point.

He also fancies himself an observant Catholic that champions abortion even more than I do, which also makes him a monumental hypocrite. Not for nothing, but if you choose to be a part of the Church, they aren't wrong, you are! Their house, their fucking rules, son. That's why I haven't been a Catholic since I was 12 years old. Some people grow the fuck up.

Prisoners of History & Freedom's March

Unlike most observers and bloggers, I've spent the last several years afraid of widespread "democracy" protests in the Middle East. Because so many people are so ignorant of the history of the region, or just overly optimistic, they don't understand what the ramifications of what we're seeing today.

To be fair, President George Walker Bush didn't understand the ramifications of democracy, either. After the death of Yassir Arafat, Bush pushed for elections in the Palestinian Authority, over the objections of both Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and PA President Mahmood Abbas, who feared that Hamas was poised to win large majorities. Bush prevailed and, predictably, Hamas won large majorities. The same thing happened in Lebanon after the Syrians evacuated, and Hezbollah won the balance of power.

Democracy, especially in the Middle East, isn't all it's cracked up to be. Just look at Iraq, an artificial country with deep sectarian divides. Freedom unleashed those divides and they proceeded to kill as many or more innocent people as Saddam did. Let's assume that Iran became a true democracy tomorrow. There is absolutely no evidence that this would cause Tehran to end it's nuclear program or abandon its enmity toward Israel. Sure, there's a lot of wishful thinking to that effect, but no actual evidence.

The great Dr. Dawg, who I like and respect, wrote an eloquent, if slightly misleading article about the attitudes of people such as myself toward the recent protests in the Middle East.

I think it’s fair to observe that the commenter in question sums up rather well the conservative case against democracy.

The problem with democracy, of course, is that the people get to make choices, and not all of those choices are ones we would support ourselves. Indeed, they themselves might eventually regret the choices they made. The people, therefore, cannot be trusted—well, those people, anyway.

(...)

Hence the conflation of Iran with Egypt—those Muslim countries all look alike. The conservative viewpoint is clear: democracy is for smart white folks like us, not for swarthy crypto-jihadis waiting to burst forth and win elections and whatnot.

I was disappointed to see this rhetoric from Dawg, who is one of the more rational and thoughtful commentators on the left. While I'm sure that it does reflect some quarters of the right, I don't think it reflects a majority, or even a strong minority of conservative opinion. After all, the right couldn't have been more supportive of President Bush's "Democracy Agenda" and the 2009 Iranian protests. I disagreed strongly with it and I did so in public, but race, religion or ethnicity had nothing to do with that disagreement.

Democracy doesn't just flower overnight. Most Republicans who suggest that it does point to Japan after the Second World War, overlooking the fact that the Japanese were under military occupation for nearly a decade and that their democratic constitution was written for them by Douglas MacArthur.

The success or failure of a democratic experiment is almost wholly reliant on the historical circumstances under which it is carried. Egypt's recent history, like that of the entire Middle East, is ghastly and suggests that democracy can only produce more war, terrorism and hatred, not less.

After the war, the British adopted the monarchy as a figurehead government and trained and funded its secret police to destroy their enemies, among them, the then-moderate Muslim Brotherhood. After the 1952 revolution toppled the monarchy, the Soviets filled that role for Nasser. And then Sadat and Mubarak became the puppets of the Americans.

One thing that never changed was the foreign sponsorship of government terror and the regime's political enemies. Any organized, democratic opposition was jailed, tortured, murdered or exiled years ago, which was not only tolerated by the West, but funded by it as well. That leaves the dangerous radicals as the only organized alternative to the Mubarak regime.

The example of the Iranian Revolution is also instructive. The Revolution was actually a coalition between the Islamists and various Marxist groups. Within a year of the Shah's exile, the Mullahs simply had the democratic Marxists killed. Organization isn't just the most important thing in the aftermath of a revolution, it's the only thing.

Assuming that what's happening in Cairo and Alexandria is a democratic revolution, it almost certainly won't stay that way for very long. If, in fact, Mubarak's days are numbered, it is just as likely that the military will take over as it is that there will be "free and fair" elections, which democratic forces would almost certainly lose. That also assumes that elections would even occur.

Revolutions are an unpredictable business. In many ways, we - people who genuinely hope for stable and prosperous democracies in the Muslim world - are prisoners of our own history and our own past bad deeds. The same thing happened in Africa after decolonization. Free institutions were never built or smothered in their cribs and kleptocracies flourished for a half century, and that happened with our blessing. Kleptocrats like Mobuto, you see, better served our strategic interests than did the possibility of communism.

More important is the fact that radical groups have learned to become an attractive alternative to existing regimes. Hamas provided vital social services to the populace of Gaza that the Arafat government refused to. Hezbollah did the same thing in southern Lebanon, rebuilding Beirut after the 2008 war faster and more thoroughly than the United States has rebuilt New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

The worst possible scenario is a weak, ineffective democratic government that doesn't control the country. If that happens, Islamist elements will use the lack of internal security to attack Israel with impunity, knowing that Israel will respond against the Egyptian people. It is in no one's interest that we return to the bad old days before Camp David, when war was a regular feature of life in the region.

I'm sure that Dr. Dawg doesn't wish to see radical groups seize control of Egypt, nor do I think that he sees them as a truly democratic alternative. The only problem is that they are the only plausible alternative, at least they are right now. Dawg may well believe in a triumph of the human spirit, which heroically overcomes the high hurdles of history. I don't. I believe in what is likely in the immediate future, given the cards that history has dealt us.

Democracy might well flourish in Egypt and in the broader Middle East, but that will take years, if not decades. The Soviet Union did not immediately transition from Stalinism to democracy and it's unrealistic to think that it will happen in the Muslim world. That's not racist or anti-Islamic, it's just how history tends to work.

We could have embraced, nurtured and moderated democratic alternatives to the autocratic regimes of the Arab and Muslim world's during the Cold War. We didn't and we see the ramifications of that today. We're trapped with heinous and awful "allies" like the House of Saud because the alternatives are so much worse than we are.

We're all prisoners of history - you, me, Dawg, Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptian people - we might not like that history and do our best to hide from it, but it always catches up with us.

The Election About Nothing That Isn't Going To Happen

Most Canadian elections are about nothing, by which I mean that there's no single issue around which to frame a compelling narrative. Most of our elections hinge on questions such as, "Boy, the Liberals are corrupt motherfuckers, aren't they"? and "HIDDEN AGENDA!" This makes our elections awfully boring. At least in the U.S voters can marvel over how goddamned stupid everyone has become in the last forty years. Here, there's just a ghastly dullness that drives the populace into submission.

Of course, the depraved and soulless ghouls in the Parliamentary Press Bureau aren't much of a help. As Canada enters its seventh year of minority parliaments, they've been ratcheting up election fever about every fifteen seconds. This is because they're almost as wholly ignorant of the important issues the country faces as the fucking voters are. And you have to get up awfully early to be more ignorant than Canadian voters, although it often seems that American voters invented the rooster.

The Conservative government of Stephen Harper always wants an election. His only problem is that the Opposition hasn't been particularly accommodating. So frustrating was this that Harper had to break his own already unconstitutional fixed election date law in the fall of 2008, which resulted in ... another Tory minority.

Well, the Prime Minister is gearing up to table another budget that will essentially burn money that we don't have, so the cocksucker media is speculating about another "imminent election." By my count, this will be the 432nd "imminent election" that the press have declared since Harper was sworn in five years ago.

This time, the "issue" is supposed to be corporate tax cuts that the Conservatives want to pass and the Liberals want to spend on other nonsense that we can't afford. I don't know when this happened, but everyone in Canada seems to have picked up the American retard gene that makes conservatives think that tax cuts aren't spending and leads liberals to believe that new program spending when we're drowning in red ink is somehow wise.

My hero, the great Mike Brock at The Volunteer, has already addressed the stupidity of the corporate tax cuts. But I'd like to raise a point that he hasn't. Corporate tax cuts aren't going to create jobs in the absence of consumer demand, and that demand is notably lacking right now.

With consumers still either saving or paying off existing debt, any money that's thrown at companies in the way of tax cuts is just going to get shoved into their reserve capital. To suggest that said companies are going to use that money to hire people who will produce products that the public won't buy is moronic. Regardless of what the government does, the consumer has entered an austerity age and all the tax cuts in the world aren't going to change that.



I understand that Michael Ignatieff gave a howlingly stupid speech to his caucus the other day that suggested that he "wouldn't accept" the new Harper tax cuts. But we've all been to that dance before. I could list the number of things that Iggy wouldn't accept until he ultimately did but I'm very lazy and tired of repeating myself. The only time that he seriously suggested forcing an election, he dropped sixteen points nationally and disintegrated entirely in Toronto, which is one of the only places that the Liberal Party still exists in a numerically significant way.

Ignatieff's credibility, and that of his party, has been diminished to the point that there already is a coalition government, except that it's one between the Conservatives and the Liberals. And that ain't gonna change anytime soon, if only because there's no real coalition in the Liberal Party itself. Roughly half of today's living Grits would like to see Iggy killed rather than elected prime minister. Although he'll never admit it, I'd bet that a certain Liberal spin doctor is getting ready to vote Tory for the third time since Stephen Harper has been that party's leader.

There is simply no way that Michael Ignatieff risks the public humiliation of forcing an election that he could only win by accident under those circumstances. He's gotten pretty good at yelling, but to no effect. My opinion is that he'll quit or be deposed before he forces an election.

But let's assume for a second that he does force an election. Imagine the outrage of yet another election based on something as goddammed useless as corporate tax cuts. Boneheaded Tea Party Canadians (a contradiction in terms) will support Harper to the max because they know absolutely nothing about economics as the rest of the country punishes the Liberals for forcing an election that nobody wants over money that we don't have.

The simple fact is that it doesn't matter if there's a spring election. More importantly to my allegedly conservative friends, it doesn't matter if Michael Ignatieff wins it, which he won't. But even if he did, there would be absolutely no economic course correction. We'd just be spending shitloads of money that we don't have on different things. If you want that, you might as well vote for the NDP, which is at least honest about it.

As a country, we're well past the point where we need a party that says "Here's what we spend, here's what we take in, and here's what you idiots want. You do the fucking math." But you're never going to see that because the public is apathetic and stupid, and the politicians are increasingly running to be the homecoming king of the blogosphere, which isn't just apathetic and wrong, but stupid and whorish, to boot.

Do you want to turn a meaningless election into a consequential one? Send letters to Michael Ignatieff's office demanding that he defeat the budget. And when the writ is dropped, vote for anyone on the ballot that isn't a Conservative or a Liberal, particularly if you're a "small c" conservative.

I'd prefer that you vote for independents or small parties, but I don't necessarily care if you vote for the Bloc or the NDP. At this point, it doesn't really matter who the government is. What's important is sending a message, particularly to the Conservatives. And that message is "Get serious or die."

On Capital Punishment and Canada

Have you ever noticed that it's virtually impossible to get a good picture of yourself on your driver's license? Do you have a good time arguing with traffic cops or the tax department? Ever try to build a storage shed or a garage on your own property and found the bureaucracy to be pleasant and helpful with the project? If you have, you're a decided minority.

Now consider the fact that the people described above are the very folks who would be administering the death penalty were it ever returned to Canada.

One of the most perplexing things about people who describe themselves as "conservative" is that they constantly rail about the incompetence of the government and the "tyranny" it creates, yet they want to make it as easy as possible for cops and prosecutors to relieve the citizenry of their liberty and even their lives. It's almost as if these folks think that the criminal justice system (to say nothing of the military) is from some omnipotent and incorruptible NGO that is, to use Bill O'Reilly's boneheaded phrase, "looking out for the folks." Sort of like the United Way with a needle full of potassium chloride and a fully loaded sidearm.

Of course, these people are deluded. At a bare minimum, they're intellectually inconsistent to the point that it's difficult to believe anything they say. As these people endlessly rail about, say, eminent domain, they couldn't be more full-throated in their support of legal decisions such as the U.S Supreme Court's Herrera v. Collins, which held that evidence of actual innocence is not enough to support a habeas petition in a death penalty appeal.

Not only is that shocking and barbaric, it's hardly conservative in that it displays an almost irrational trust in the government's competence that can't really be rationalized by people who fear and despise other branches of the government, like the post office. In no other instance is trusting in the benevolence of the government considered a conservative value.

I've been supportive of capital punishment throughout my life. However, that support has been predicated on the idea that defendants have the maximum possible protections. If, as a conservative, you distrust the competence of the government, it follows that you would extend any and all benefits to someone facing it in the most serious and consequential way imaginable. It is my position that the government must be held to the highest possible standard in death qualified cases. If that means fewer executions rather than more, so be it. Yet, too many supposed conservatives want to make it difficult for the government to collect taxes, but easy for it to take a life.

I've also always made distinctions between the United States and Canada. The American Constitution limits the powers of the government in ways that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms simply does not. There was also, for a number of years, no evidence that an innocent person had been executed in the United States.

That's changed somewhat in the last twenty years. Decisions like Herrera make executions too easy. And I believe that the state of Texas wrongly executed Cameron Todd Willingham*, which makes his death manslaughter by government. All it takes is one innocent to die for popular support for the death penalty to evaporate, which is why Rick Perry has worked so hard to bury the Willingham case.

I have never in my adult life supported capital punishment in Canada for constitutional reasons. There are three sections of the Charter that make it impossible for me.

The first is Section 1, which states "The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."

Nobody has ever been able to explain to me what those "reasonable limits" are. More importantly, that said limits are "prescribed by law" suggests that the Charter is subservient to the law, rather than the law being answerable to the Charter. The courts have not yet interpreted that clause that way, but they very well could.

We then come to Section 11 (h), which says that "if finally acquitted of the offence, (the defendant shall) not to be tried for it again and, if finally found guilty and punished for the offence, not to be tried or punished for it again".

The word "finally" is key in that section. This is because it allows for the Crown to appeal an acquittal, even a jury acquittal. That is precisely what happened to Guy Paul Morin.

Mr. Morin was acquitted of the murder of Christine Jessop by a jury of his peers in 1986, only to see the government appeal and convict him at his second trial in 1992. His case was riddled with prosecutorial misconduct that went unpunished, and there was the not inconsequential matter of Morin's actual innocence. Guy Paul Morin was cleared by DNA evidence in 1995.

Then there's the granddaddy of constitutional monstrosities, Section 33 (1), more commonly known as "the notwithstanding clause." "Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter."

Section 2 consists of democratic rights, such as speech, assembly, religion and association. Sections 7 through 15 include all of the people's rights and protections before the criminal justice system. It is therefore possible that a provincial or federal government could proceed with an execution regardless of what the courts do, including a directive verdict of acquittal and a dismissal of all charges with prejudice.

Not that the courts have been all that helpful to criminal defendants in this country. In R v. Grant, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that illegally obtained evidence can be admitted into evidence because to do otherwise "would bring the administration of justice into disrepute." That of course presupposes that ignoring the constitutional protections of the citizenry against unlawful government intrusion doesn't itself bring the administration into disrepute.

Then there's the strange, sad and wholly enraging saga of Dr. Charles Smith. Dr. Smith's professional incompetence and desire to please the police - which led to his "'actively misled' his superiors, 'made false and misleading statements' in court and exaggerated his expertise in trials" - sent several provably innocent people to prison in child abuse and murder cases.

The Smith experience and the Morin case should call into question any faith in the entire infrastructure of the Canadian criminal justice system. Combined with the haphazard construction of the Charter, it should preclude support for the death penalty in this country. There is simply too much in the way of government incompetence and malfeasance for it to be properly administered here.

Predictably, none of that seems to bother Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who affirmed his personal support for capital punishment in a recent interview with the CBC.

PM: Capital punishment?

PMSH: I don't see the country wanting to do that. You know...

PM: You don't sound as firm as...

PMSH: Well, I personally think there are times where capital punishment is appropriate. But I've also committed that I'm not, you know, in the next Parliament I'm not... no plans to bring that issue forward.

That response is full of weasel words. Harper also had "no plans" to leave the National Citizens' Coalition to run for the Canadian Alliance leadership in 2002. But he did. And of course he's not going "to bring that issue forward" "in the next Parliament" because he has a minority government facing three left-of-center opposition parties that would humiliate him if he tried. Moreover, if he introduced legislation that was defeated, it would take the issue off of the table for another twenty years. He'd prefer to wait until he has his much dreamed about majority government. Or, more precisely, he'd like to use it as election wedge issue.

But Harper managed to reintroduce the issue to the public and whip everyone into a frenzy of palpable stupidity again. A poll released this week shows two-thirds of Canadians supporting a return of the death penalty, just as popular support for it is declining in the United States.

Popular opinion, however, is meaningless, for the most part. If a pollster asked, I'm sure that two-thirds of Canadians would support every day being Christmas. It's only when you point out the impracticality of everyone buying you that many presents that you begin to reconsider. Asking the question without pointing out Canada's malformed constitution or our history of sending a shockingly high number of innocent people to prison really tells you nothing.

On the other hand, numbers that high suggest that the issue is back and not returning anytime soon. Peter Mansbridge naively gave Harper a winning issue and Harper ran with it. The practical considerations and the possible negative consequences are irrelevant because nobody can explain them succinctly. For example, look how long it's taken me to explain my position in a way that doesn't make me look like a Marxist. Jack Layton won't be able to do it in a 30 second ad without making Harper's case for him, and Michael Ignatieff can't do it because Michael Ignatieff doesn't believe anything at all.

I'd actually admire Harper's cynicism if this wasn't so deadly serious.


* To learn more about the Willingham case, go here.

More Republican Hypocrisy

There are things that I care about, like balanced budgets and going to war. Those are things that I am extremely conservative about. Then there are things that I don't give a shit about, like abortion and gay marriage. Since those things aren't any concern of mine, I'm inclined to leave them to the individual. I suppose that this makes me a libertarian, at least on those issues.

Republicans and social conservatives generally, are something different. They're what you could charitably call lying motherfuckers. Listen to their rhetoric on, say, Roe v. Wade, for example. They say that there is no constitutional right to privacy unless Rush Limbaugh's pharmacist is somehow involved. Overturning Roe, they continue, would merely return the abortion question to the states for resolution.

When Republicans tell you this, you almost have to struggle to remind yourself that the GOP's platform has explicitly called for a "human life" amendment
to the Constitution, which would decidedly take the issue away from the states. And the human life amendment isn't new, it's been there since 1980.

Their stance on gay marriage is pretty much the same. They go out of their way to say that they don't hate fags, they just wish that gay marriage was decided by the people or their legislatures instead of unelected courts. Y'know, the way President Bush ended up in office!

But it's amazing what happens when the people or their legislatures look like they might be willing to allow gay marriage.

House conservatives say they will pursue legislation that would ban gay marriage in the nation’s capital.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC), told The Hill that he will push for a vote on the controversial issue in the 112th Congress. The RSC has 175 members.

“I think RSC will push for it, and I’m certainly strongly for it. I don’t know if we’ve made a decision if I’ll do it or let another member do it, but I’m 100 percent for it,” Jordan said.

In the last Congress, Jordan was the lead sponsor on the D.C. Defense of Marriage Act. The bill was introduced after the D.C. City Council and then-Mayor Adrian Fenty indicated they would recognize same-sex marriages.

The last time I checked, Ohio wasn't a part of the District of Columbia and, but for a quirk in the Constitution that gives its residents taxation without representation, Congress isn't usually considered "local control" by anyone.

The fact of the matter is that a duly elected democratic body seems prepared to legalize gay marriage and a shitload of fucking Republicans are poised to overrule that prerogative for no other reason than they can and they think Jesus wants them to or something. But let's not pretend that these people have any principles, okay. I think we can pretty safely say now that they don't.

And it's getting harder to argue that their position is about anything more intellectually sophisticated than being personally creeped out by queers. On the other hand, there might be something else motivating them. Given the conduct of several members of their conference in recent years, Republicans might just want to stop gay marriage because gay promiscuity has been working out pretty well for them.

Link lovingly stolen from FrumForum

Empty Praise With Mitt Romney

David Letterman once described former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney perfectly. "He looks like the American president in a Canadian movie", Letterman quipped.

The man is so improbably coiffed and handsome that it's almost impossible to take him seriously. Worse still, he acts like the American president in a Canadian movie, politically expedient to the point of immorality, Romney has never met a principle that he knew that he wouldn't someday betray. He's the walking embodiment of every negative stereotype in American politics.

And in large part, that's why he's going to be the next Republican nominee for president. Today's GOP is living in a mystical fairy tale world of willful ignorance and wishful thinking. So long as you tell the Republican faithful and their Tea Party lapdogs what they think they want to hear - that everything is the fault of the "progressives" and that they, the "water carriers", are the living embodiment of American exceptionalism - you will have their momentary loyalty.

I say "momentary" because their principles seem to change almost as frequently as Romney's. It wasn't that long ago, after all, that your average Tea Partier was four-square behind the Republican big government "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush. Even after February of 2009, when Bush's name became a dirty word in the GOP, the former president was still overcome with adulation when his book was released.

The hypocrisy and historical revisionism of the Tea Party can be best explained by the very moment that give birth to it, the famous Santelli rant. Rick Santelli, a former scumbag hedge fund manager, cum CNBC sycophant of the financially powerful went on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade and decried the subsidization of the "loser's mortgages". The irony of this coming just four months after the the very same traders and bankers that surrounded Santelli and cheered him on nearly blew up the world ... and were saved from starving to death by a massive federal bailout was lost on everyone.

Most ordinary and moral people would have been, at a minimum, embarrassed for Santelli and socially shunned him for the rest of his natural life. The Tea Partiers and their Republican patrons instead built a populist political movement around him and his devious double standards. If you want to understand the Tea Party, go no further than the Santelli rant and the physical backdrop in which it took place.

There's also the fetishization of Ronald Reagan, a man who wouldn't have recognized the Tea Partiers as anything other than an perplexing distraction. Of course, Reagan had dealt with their ilk before, the John Birch Society, but he had managed to avoid their fate, which coincided with the catastrophic defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Because of his political skills, combined with the fact that he almost never called anyone out by name, Reagan managed to be all things to all people, especially self-described "conservatives."

The Tea Party legions whose lonely eyes constantly wander to the crypt of the 40th president in Simi Valley don't remember - or choose to forget - that the conservative wing of the Republican Party was infuriated to the point of disgust with Reagan by the time he left office in 1989. They felt that he had sold out the United States to the Soviets with the INF Treaty and left the country with unforgivable amounts of debt. His rhetoric aside, the federal government was spending even more money when he left office than when he entered it. At the time, conservatives saw Reagan as a willing dupe of Tip O'Neill.




Of course, that's not the Ronald Reagan that Mitt Romney chose to memorialize yesterday in USA Today. As is Romney's wont, he wrote a shopping list of platitudes and listed quotes that say nothing at all about the man or his presidency. They do, however, contribute to the formidable personality cult that has been built around President Reagan since the mid-90s.

America entered the Reagan era as one kind of country and exited it another. His mixture of extraordinary personal and political qualities made it possible. One must begin with his sunny disposition: cheerful conservatism in flesh and blood. The Gipper's irrepressible high spirits tapped into something deeply rooted in the country: optimism, faith in America itself.

I'm not even sure what that means in concrete, definable terms, but it sure sounds pretty. Governor Romney must feel like a putz being an independent during the Reagan era and vowing not to return to it as recently as 1994.

Reagan came to occupy the White House in a moment of national crisis, not altogether dissimilar from the one we face today. Abroad, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had brought the Cold War to the boiling point. Islamic radicals in Iran humiliated our country in a 444-day hostage drama.

At home, the misery index — the sum total of unemployment and inflation — had reached a post-war high. Jimmy Carter, shivering in the under-heated White House, was complaining about American "malaise."

Reagan would have none of this. His policies, foreign and domestic, reflected his optimistic spirit. He confronted the Kremlin frontally. He initiated a military buildup that outmatched the USSR, challenged it in Afghanistan, and launched the Strategic Defense Initiative that is now vital to our defense.

Reagan's words were even more significant. He rang the bell of freedom and gave courage to brave souls resisting one of the great tyrannies of modern times — the "evil empire," he was not afraid to call it. Reagan was quick to see what many experts could not: that the Soviet system was faltering. "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" is what he boldly demanded during a visit to Berlin. In short order, the wall came tumbling down. The Cold War was over and America had won.

If I wrote meandering, patronizing, ahistorical gibberish like that for a major newspaper, I'd probably die of embarrassment rather than think that it qualified me to occupy the Oval Office.

The Reagan defense buildup was important, but not as important as Romney and the Tea Partiers think, and for different reasons. First, any halfway serious student of history knows that Reagan did not end the Cold War. The policies that brought victory were propagated and put into practice by Harry Truman.

If you read George F. Kennan's 1946 "long telegram" and his 1947 "X" article in Foreign Affairs titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", you know that it was established long before the Reagan Administration that containment of the Soviet Union would allow the internal contradictions of communism to eventually bankrupt the system without war. In fact, the largest and most consequential build-up of American military capability didn't occur under Reagan, it happened under Truman and Eisenhower. We also now know that the Soviet economy went into its irreversible death spiral in the late 1970s, when Jimmy Carter was president.

Reagan's defense spending was important, in that it may have accelerated the implosion of the Soviet Union. But the question that should be asked is "at what cost?" Combined with his tax cuts, and in the absence of domestic spending cuts that Reagan never seriously sought, Reagan's defense spending brought about an age where truly awesome peacetime deficits became commonplace. Prior to the 1980s, you never heard a Republican say that "deficits don't matter" which has since become Republican orthodoxy ... at least when Republicans are in power.

President Reagan also made a strategic miscalculation in believing that Soviet imperialism was a consequence of communism, rather than inherent in the Russian character. We're seeing evidence of that today, just twenty years after the disintegration of European Marxism. Yet Romney and even the most fevered of pro-defense Tea Partiers is suggesting anything that would challenge emerging Russian expansionism, preferring instead to confront sideshows like the Iranian nuclear program.

Here at home, Reagan saw a federal government that had become, like a diseased heart, enlarged and sclerotic. Paving a path trod today by the Tea Party, he sharply cut taxes to restore economic growth. He took painful measures to rein in double-digit inflation. He fought to cut federal spending. He sought to restore our Founding Fathers' vision of American greatness and limited government.

It's noteworthy that the governor spends so little of his time on Reagan's domestic programs because that's where he was truly consequential.

The single most disastrous development of the Reagan years was that he "fought to cut federal spending" for about ten minutes in the early spring of 1981. When he lost that battle, he proceeded with the largest tax cuts in American history to that time and massively increased defense spending anyway. Once that was set in motion, astronomical deficits became unavoidable and routine.

The "painful measures to rein in double-digit inflation" that Romney refers to was a deliberate recession that caused even higher unemployment than the United States faces today, created entirely by Reagan and Paul Volcker. That was the single most courageous decision of the Reagan years. The recession that finally broke inflation was just as responsible for the economic growth of the 1980s as the tax cuts, and very probably more so.

The sad thing is that Romney and the Tea Partiers hide from the actual history of the Reagan era in downplaying the importance of the Reagan-Volcker recession and embrace the most fiscally irresponsible and counter-productive aspects of his presidency. To this day they fail understand that tax cuts are still spending from a budgetary perspective. Large tax cuts have never paid for themselves when coupled with large increases in discretionary military spending, and it has been tried three times in the last half century.

They also ignore that Reagan tacitly understood this, having raised taxes six times subsequent to the '81 tax cuts, including a doubling of the payroll tax. By the time Ronald Reagan left office, the federal government had reclaimed fully half of the 1981 tax cut. The President had a unique opportunity to reform entitlements but refused to. Thus, he created an economic boom that was overshadowed by an empire of debt.

There are no shortage of lessons that can be learned from Reagan, both his successes and his failures. Romney, the GOP and the Tea Party aren't learning any of them, preferring instead to prop up a personality cult that was never fully grounded in reality. In not learning from history, they're dooming themselves to repeat it at a time when America can least afford to do so.

The worst part is that Mitt Romney himself doesn't believe any of his own nonsense. Romney was 47 years old when he ran for the Senate in 1994 and actively distanced himself from the Reagan legacy. He was 55 when he became governor and carried himself as a moderate Northeastern Republican. It was only when he decided to run for president at the age of 61 that he reevaluated everything he ever believed and decided that he was wrong.

That doesn't make him a Reagan Republican as much as it proves that he's either an opportunistic whore or mentally ill.

"As An Angel Hits The Ground"

Too often, heroism is measured by how someone faces adversity and triumphs. I think that's wrong. Heroism is more properly the Provence of those who face impossible odds, knowing that they probably won't prevail. That's an important thing to remember in life. Not everybody is going to be a winner all the time, but it's the struggle that matters. President Theodore Roosevelt spoke of it eloquently in his "Man in the Arena" speech, which was delivered on April 23, 1910.

The then former president and future Bull Moose Party presidential nominee declared that "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Carolin Ebert, whom I first wrote about in the early months of this blog, strived more valiantly than most. She strived to do the deeds and knew the great enthusiasms in ways that the 26th president of the United States might not have appreciated, but he would have recognized her great daring and admired her for it.

Long story short, Sexy Cora, as she was widely known, injured her throat in a cocksucking contest. She tried breaking a world record by blowing 200 guys, but was forced to stop after a mere 75. Yes, she failed while daring greatly, so her place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Despite falling short in the face of adversity, Carolin never stopped striving to be what TR called the "Doer of deeds." Knowing that her 34F funbags were less than truly spectacular, she went under the knife for the sixth time to increase them to a 34G. It might have been a simple dream, but it was a daring and marvellous one nonetheless.

Tragically, Carolin Ebert - Sexy Cora - once again fell short and died of complications arising from her boob job last Thursday. She was only 23 years old.

Sexy Cora might be fallen, but let us never say that she is forgotten. Her spirit, her endurance, and yes, her innate bravery to do the great things should serve as a reminder to us all about what the human spirit can overcome. Sexy Cora was not a critic. She was in the arena, always. Let her be remembered for that and let us hope that her memory inspires us, particularly those too young to have known her while she was alive.

I probably won't remember her that way. I'll remember her as a cute German who wounded her windpipe chowing down on the hog. But I'm old, broken, bitter and I'm probably going to die soon, anyway. You should take different lessons from her story than I do.

How About Some Campaign Finance Reform?

Jean Chretien was a mean old bastard when you crossed him. If he thought that you were looking to end his career, as his finance minister Paul Martin was, he would tear the temple down around him, Samson-like, and ensure that if he wasn't running the show, nobody could.

After it became clear that his days as Liberal leader and Prime Minister of Canada were nearing an end, Monsieur Chretien began railing endlessly about the corruption of our electoral system. Because he's such a helpful cat, he pushed through a reform bill that banned corporate and union donation and instituted a cash-per-vote government subsidy for each of the five major parties.

Of course, that was easy for Chretien to do when it became clear that he wouldn't be running again. You see, the Grits were a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bay Street banks. That's where most of their campaign money came from. The Tories, on the other hand, had long before mastered the art of small, grass-roots fundraising in a way that the Liberals could never hope to seriously challenge. That left Martin, who had spent years undercutting Chretien, suddenly in charge of a party that couldn't raise money. Chretien single-handedly made the Liberal leadership not worth having.

I've never belonged to a political party for the simple reason that I've never found one that doesn't drive me up a fucking wall. Also, Canadians don't register to vote with a partisan affiliation, you actually have to go out and actively join a party, paying dues all the way. Since there's only a minimal chance of my getting laid that way, I can't be bothered.

I've voted for minor parties or independents in every federal or provincial election since 2002. If I was American, I would have registered as a Republican from 1988 through the 2000 primaries, at which point I would have switched to independent. So I really don't have a dog in this fight.

What I resent is campaign finance laws in their totality. Yes, I know that they were drafted to stop things like bribery from occurring, but that overlooks the fact that bribery was already against the law. Ultimately, the people are responsible for the governments they elect, and as long as they insist on electing James Michael Curley from jail, or practically anyone in Louisiana, New Jersey or Quebec, all of the laws in the world aren't going to change anything. The law is essentially a pacifier to make stupid people feel better about themselves and a way for politicians not to have to work very hard.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made a big spectacle about ending Chretien's vote subsidy over the last couple of years. Indeed, the stillborn Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition was a direct response to it. Harper still brings up killing the subsidy from time to time, if only because it causes Michael Ignatieff to stutter with impotent rage.

A Globe and Mail article from yesterday, however, puts the lie to Harper's "principled stand". Terminating the Chretien subsidy would do almost nothing to stop the flow of public money into Canadian elections. It certainly wouldn't go as far as I would.

The allowance makes up a large chunk of every party’s finances, but not all of it. Including donations their various riding associations received, the Conservatives raised about $22.6-million in 2009, compared to about $12.5-million that the Liberals raised. The NDP was able to draw in about $5.1-million in donations, the Greens about $1.5-million and the Bloc about $1.4-million.

The Conservatives are in the best position financially because they do the best job raising money. In 2009 they had over 100,000 donors to their national headquarters, and in total raised about $4.33 per vote earned in the 2008 general election. This compares favourably to the Liberal average of $3.42 raised per vote and $2.01 for the NDP. The Bloc comes out on the bottom, raising about $0.99 per vote.

But a fine-tuned fundraising machine is not without its costs to the taxpayer. A donation of $400 or less to a political party or riding association results in a tax credit of $300, or 75 per cent, more than twice the credit given to donations to charitable organizations. According to the Department of Finance, the cost of the tax credit in 2009 was an estimated $20-million. Assuming the credit is doled out in a proportion similar to the share of money raised by each party, that equates to a cost of $10.5-million on donations given to the Conservative Party, $5.8-million on donations to the Liberals, $2.4-million on donations to the NDP, and $700,000 and $600,000 on donations to the Greens and Bloc Québécois, respectively.

If it were up to me - and these things really should be - the political donation tax credit would be immediately discontinued. It is little more than a welfare program for political parties and does nothing to prevent fraud, corruption and bribery, as the Sponsorship Scandal demonstrated pretty clearly.

As I noted earlier, I haven't voted for, or given money, to a major party candidate since 2000. Why then are my tax dollars essentially subsidizing the donations of people I see as my blood enemies, particularly when candidates and parties that I support receive nothing at all? Indeed, why am I subsidizing anybody's political preferences?

Even if you assume that this massive giveaway of public money to political hacks "keeps elections clean", there is absolutely no moral justification for the tax credit to politicians being nearly double that of charitable contributions.

The parties, although the overwhelming majority of their money comes from the public treasury , still fancy themselves private institutions that are allowed to create and enforce their own rules and charters and are compelled to provide only the minimal amount of transparency.

If Harper was even halfway honest, he would end that by discontinuing all public support for the parties or introduce legislation forcing them to live with the same disclosure requirements that registered charities do. That means that everybody's salary and expenses would be disclosed, from the janitor right up to the president. If the party is paying for a candidate or MP's clothes or diction lessons, that would be immediately disclosed, too. The same goes for legal fees. You could actually line those bastards up against a way and find out where every penny is going.

I would go even further than that in addressing the role of lobbyists in the parties and in elections. There wouldn't be one. No registered lobbyist would be allowed to work (including in an unpaid role) for a political party at any time. If they truly wanted to participate, they would be barred from lobbying government at any level for a period of twenty years. Elected MP's and their parliamentary staffs would be prohibited from lobbying for life. If you want to do something about "the appearance of wrongdoing", there's no better place to start than with lobbyists.

People would still have the "right to petition their government" but they would no longer be able to play both sides of the fence. Few things undermine public confidence in their democracy quite like political hacks and senior bureaucrats getting rich as a direct result of their political or public service, and as long as the parties thrive with public money, that can and should be stopped.

My preference would be to end all public subsidization of private political groups. They can raise their money the same way everybody else does, by earning it and paying taxes on it. After all, the Criminal Code of Canada already addresses the things that campaign finance laws are supposed to prevent. If the parties are completely private entities, then lobbyists could do whatever they wanted within them, however, they could still be dealt with in the government and the public service.

Let's look back for a moment to President Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 campaign, It as funded by a very small group of bankers and industrialists because there were no campaign finance laws on the books at the time. TR gladly took their money, won in a landslide, .... and promptly screwed his patrons directly into the ground with anti-trust laws. At the same time, people like Curley were still going to prison for fraud, although they were often reelected from the hoosegow. The point is that the system worked just fine prior to federal campaign finance oversight.

Look at Barack Obama's campaign of three years ago. He broke his promise to take federal matching money and the spending limits that come with it. This allowed him to outspend John McCain by a margin of nearly ten to one. But it doesn't follow that this made his general election "privately funded." No, each and every one of Obama's donations were tax deductible by their contributors, which essentially means that they were subsidized. The Democratic National Convention in Denver also received a shit-ton in public subsidies as well. Obama and the Democrats paid absolutely no price for evading the limits of the federal matching funds system.

Having said that, I'm far more open to the idea publicly financed elections than I used to be. It wouldn't be my first preference, but there is something to recommend it. Public financing would forever destroy the illusion that political parties are purely private entities and their rules and charters could be regulated in a way that would better reflect the wishes of the voting public. We would also know exactly how much money they're taking in and where every penny of it was going. If public financing was combined with meaningful lobbying reform, you could theoretically accomplish a great deal.

If you went down a public financing road, I would insist on every candidate getting an equal amount to campaign with. The late Tooker Gomberg and Enza "Supermodel" Anderson would get exactly as much money as Stephen Harper does. Doing otherwise just rewards incumbency and perpetuates the same problems we have now. Sure, giving fringe candidates tens of thousands of dollars might be a giant waste of money, but it's hard to say that the system we have now isn't. I can't honestly say that a drag queen is any more laughably irrelevant or ridiculous than, say, Michael Ignatieff or Stephen Harper.

The fact is that politics in North America is already almost completely publicly funded. but the parties remain able to hide behind the facade that they're completely private institutions as they raid the public treasury through the tax code. I would much prefer yanking all of their public support - every last dime of it. But if they insist on maintaining their welfare lucre, they should be regulated even more strongly than charities are. After all, charities don't often wind up writing the laws that the rest of us have to abide by and political parties do.

Let's not kid ourselves into thinking that Harper is even halfway serious about meaningful political financing reform. He merely wants to eliminate the only thing that makes the Liberals even marginally competitive. The Harper Conservatives aren't about to do anything that would effect the tax breaks to their donors, which they would if they weren't as insanely wrong-headed and corrupt as everybody else in the system.

Harper is using this to destroy the Liberals, which I'm actually fine with. I believe that they'll be a smouldering ruin within the next 20 years anyway, so anything that speeds that along is fine by me. But I'm not going to pretend that he isn't doing anything that's not to his primary and solitary benefit. He's every bit as sleazy as Chretien was, he's just better at it.

Too Stupid To Succeed

I've spent the last two and a half years learning about the financial crisis that the United States created to make life interesting and I think I know a fair bit about it. That being the case, I always chuckle about the Republican meme in the blogosphere and the media that it was caused by things like Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act because it's ignorant horseshit.

I'll grant you that those things didn't help any, but they certainly weren't the cause of the Great Collapse of Aught-Eight. The housing market itself fell apart sometime in the late spring or the early summer of 2007, yet the banking sector didn't take it in the nuts until nearly a year afterward. More importantly, housing is traditionally a lagging indicator of financial trouble. I'm not aware of it ever directly leading to doomsday before.

In fact, there are few modern bubbles that have wrought the kind of destruction that the housing bubble did when it burst. The stock and tech bubbles burst, were a pain in the ass for about a year, and everything went back to normal. So you can't even argue that the housing bubble or the bad loans therein caused this disaster.

That's because the banks did it, specifically through over-leveraging themselves and playing with credit default swaps, even though they didn't know what they were, what they did, or how they worked. History teaches us that greed and stupid is a disastrous combination, but MBAs were never particularly celebrated historians. Most bankers can't tell you what happened six weeks ago, let alone eighty years ago.

But Republicans, who have made ignorance to something to be congratulated, continue to blame Fannie, Freddie and and the CRA because they were created by liberals. Oh, and they would very much like it if the banks would contribute to their campaigns. Sure, most of those jerk-offs - even the ones who voted for it - continue to rail against the bailouts, but they really don't mean it. And the ones who voted against them are too dangerously dumb to believe about anything.

It therefore stands to reason that the banks now want to become Fannie and Freddie. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

As the Obama administration prepares a report on the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, some of the nation’s largest banks are offering a few suggestions.

Wells Fargo and some other large banks would like private companies, perhaps even themselves, to become the new housing finance giants helping to bundle individual mortgages into securities — that would be stamped with a government guarantee.

The banks have presented their ideas publicly through trade groups. Housing industry consultants and people familiar with recent meetings at the Treasury Department say these banks view the government’s overhaul of the mortgage market as a potential profit opportunity. Treasury officials have met with executives from several institutions, including Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, according to a public listing of the meetings.

The administration’s report, to be released later this month, is expected to be sweeping and could address basic questions like whether a government guarantee is needed at all for middle-class homeowners. While other arms of the government are dedicated to making loans available to lower-income borrowers, Fannie and Freddie have helped lower rates for the bulk of homeowners. Some Republicans are trying to narrow this broad role, and on Thursday, several conservative researchers released a proposal on how to do so. But banks, for their part, have told the administration that removing the guarantee would wipe out the widespread availability of the 30-year mortgage, fundamentally reshaping the American housing market. Though some other countries do not promote long mortgages, some analysts warn that such a change would be devastating to the market here. At firms like Goldman, analysts are predicting that a government guarantee on a broad swath of mortgage securities will survive in some form.

Great!

I don't want to belabor the history here, but it's important to remember that the banks fucked around with the housing market and nearly destroyed the global economy, necessitating what will turn out to be trillions of dollars in direct bailouts, loans and guarantees from the American taxpayer. In the wake of that disaster, they gave themselves jaw-dropping bonuses and spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying against even minimal government regulation of how they do business.

And all of that was absent any direct federal guarantee. Can you imagine what they'll do with one? It's notable that these incompetent ghouls still don't know if they own the mortgages that they continue to foreclose on.

On the other hand, this should prove to be an interesting test to see how serious the Tea Party is about practically everything. It's a virtual certainty that the banks will be even more wrongheaded and reckless with a government guarantee that they were without one. But they sure do seem to be fans of big business, which is why their political masters so rarely cross them.

Are these people going to stand for the creation of several entirely private Fannie and Freddies that all carry the explicit risk of moral hazard? I'm betting that they will.

Dumbest. Motherfucker. Ever.

My regular readers might have noticed that stupidity usually amuses me. Encountering the ignorant almost always stimulates my intellectual curiosity. The average idiot makes me wonder if they were born with an extra chromosome or if they actually worked at understanding so little about the world around them.

Sean Hannity isn't your average idiot. The man is stunningly stupid. He's one of those guys that actually looks stupid. Whenever I see him, I automatically see Jay Leno after severe head trauma. Though, to be fair to Hannity, he's actually funny, albeit unintentionally.

Look, I get that everybody on TV reads a TelePrompTer. But in most circumstances the people doing the reading are merely reciting previously held beliefs in a concise way that's easily understandable on television. That doesn't seem to be true of Hannity, who doesn't know what he believes, so he just spouts off whatever the Republican National Committee tells him on a given morning.

However, what the dumb prick said earlier this week is truly awesome, even for him.

Sean Hannity is really not having any of this price increase in crude oil coming from the powers-that-be at OPEC. Particularly incensed at Kuwait, the Fox News host criticized that nation’s oil minister Friday night for “lecturing us” and suggested that the United States “has every right to go in there and, frankly, take all their oil.”

Hannity, who was discussing the crude oil situation with his “Great American Panel,” expressed outrage at the proposed price increases in oil, especially those coming from Kuwait. “This country would not exist for us, and the oil minister is out there lecturing us,” he criticized. Then he turned to Iraq, wondering why they aren’t “paying us back with oil” for the American military’s toppling of Saddam Hussein. “Why didn’t they pay for their own liberation?”

As neither country, to Hannity, had paid their dues, he felt that “we have every right to go in there and, frankly, take all their oil and make them pay for their liberation,” especially when “they’re gouging us” despite being nations of abundant wealth. The panel seemed to agree with Hannity on the egregious pricing of crude oil and the way it hurts America, but did not express the same approval of importing Iraqi or Kuwaiti oil without asking for permission, on the moral premise that the U.S. military liberated both nations.

Ye fucking gods, it's been a long time since I've seen four people get together and decide to be so extraordinarily wrong about something so basic. Watching that not only made me giddy, it got me almost sexually aroused.

Hannity fancies himself a capitalist and a lover of the free market. However, like most Republicans and an increasing number of Americans, he doesn't appear to understand it very well. Few people get as balls out angry as Republicans when capitalism doesn't work out they way they want it to.

Here's all you need to know about capitalism. Consider it the shortest economics class you'll ever take. Something is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it. If demand for a good or service increases without a concurrent increase in supply, the price goes up. That's how the market works. If you're a Republican reading this, you're welcome.

Oil is a commodity that is in high demand, since it is almost impossible to maintain a modern society without it. The price has gone up dramatically in recent years because there are more modern societies than there used to be. China and India come to mind. Oil is finite and the number of people who want to be soccer moms is not.

America's gleeful fiscal self-destruction over the last decade also has a great deal to do with the price of oil. Because the U.S dollar is the world's reserve currency, oil is bought and sold with dollars. The only problem is that the value of the Yankee greenback dropped by over a third during the Bush Administration, and there's no evidence that it is going anywhere but down. Another tenant of the market is that a currency that is worth less is never going to buy more. I hate that I have to explain this to readers as bright as mine, but I recognize that Republicans might be reading, too.

Let's review, shall we? International demand for oil has gone up dramatically in the last decade. Production has not kept up with that demand. The currency with which oil is traded is worth a great deal less than it used to be. What in the fuck do you expect is going to happen to the price of oil? Mr. Hannity's ridiculous jibber-jabber aside, that is not "another tax on the American people", that's capitalism.

What's Hannity's solution? The military, which might be the craziest thing I've ever heard. The American military has been overstretched to the point that it was giving waivers to high school drop-outs, convicted felons and retards because it had to a fight a war against a tactic. What do you suppose is going to happen when it's used to maintain brisk business at gas stations in fucking Boise?

Then there are the foreign policy ramifications of Sean's fuckheaded musings. The United States has been respected and admired precisely because it doesn't have a history of fighting aggressive wars of conquest over natural resources. That will no longer be true if the kids at Fox News get their way. And if the mightiest military in human history is unequal to the task of putting down superstitious retards from the seventh century in the suburbs of Kabul, how do you think it'll do against the countries of OPEC?

The idea that the United States needs to paid in oil for liberating people is less than silly. It's actually mercenary. But since Hannity brought it up, let's look at the facts in Iraq.

Iraq is an unnatural country created from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and it consists of people who very much enjoy killing one another. It has always been held together and kept away from total anarchy by tyrants who repressed the natural instincts of the populace. When the United States "liberated" Iraq from that tyranny, it also liberated it from the things that kept it who and somewhat orderly.

If you want to the recent history and future of Iraq, look at Yugoslavia. Democracy rendered the country and created the conditions for a genocide. Because of the perceived humiliation of the Sunnis and the rampant nationalism of the Kurds, there is no reason to believe that democracy is going to do anything other than accelerate the disintegration of Iraq. Within the next ten years, you're likely to see something a lot like Joe Biden's and Les Gelb's 2007 partition proposal or total anarchy.

But what were the more immediate consequences of Iraq's "liberation"? About 100,000 dead and four million refugees. The country's Christian population has been, for all intents and purposes, liquidated. Eight years later, Iraq still doesn't have an infrastructure worthy of the name. And Sean Hannity wants the Iraqi people to pay him for that? Shit, if that's an argument for anything, it's Baghdad resuming its WMD program as quickly as it possibly can!

It's also important to remember that Iraqis tend to have much longer memories than Americans do. Your average Iraqi probably remembers that the United States was quite pleased with Saddam Hussein until he got to be a nuisance. When Saddam attacked the town of Halabja with mustard gas and nerve agent, the United States issued the weakest protest imaginable. When he used chemical weapons against Iran, the Americans didn't protest at all.

Moreover, the "liberation" of Iraq wasn't achieved for its own sake. It was a product of an ultimately silly foreign policy aim, preventing Iraq from giving WMD to terrorists. It was hardly the selfless act that Hannity now pretends that it was. And it certainly isn't something that he should expect a fucking tip for.

Look, I really don't give a shit what Sean Hannity thinks. I believe that television would be better off if he was locked in a Vietnamese tiger cage and starved to death. But this isn't the first time that I've felt compelled to have this debate. That was about three years ago, when Democratic liberal Carl Levin suggested doing exactly the same thing. It was stupid then and it's stupid now.

The scary thing is that more Americans might start thinking that there's something to this horseshit. And that's not going to end well.

Nadya Suleman Is Going To Make It After All!

If you look like Angelina Jolie after an unfortunate accident, have nice big tits and can't pay the bills because squirting out babies if your hobby, shooting porn seems like a perfectly natural decision to make. As a matter of fact, I think you should probably consider pornography as a career even if you only just have the nice big tits. Who am I kidding? You should do porn if you have little knockers, too. I'm too magnanimous to discriminate.

It don't think I'm shocking any of you out there by pointing out that times are tough. The American economy is heading into what I believe is a death spiral and losing one's home isn't exactly uncommon. If you take my reputation as a world-renowned economic forecaster as seriously as you should, you know that every American adult will be hawking a fuck-tape of their own within 18 months.

Having said that, after having fourteen children in a relatively short time (by which I mean the average human lifespan), Nadya Suleman's cooter probably looks as sexually inviting as a hobo's battered old suitcase, something that wouldn't seem out of place in a Steinbeck novel. I'm also assuming that she doesn't give head or take it in the dumper because she's insane. And there's a little voice in the back of my head that keeps telling me that probably doesn't shave, like all the best girls do.

Given the utter disintegration of the human condition, none of those things actually precludes you from entering the wonderful world of professional smut. There's always the fetish market. Did you know that there's no shortage of men who will pay top dollar to see a celebrity look-alike with big cans and a smashed cunt whip a grown man dressed as a baby? Now you do! No need to thank me.

It should go without saying that I'm far too classy to pay good money for something like that. After all, I can download it for free from a torrent site. Besides, I need to save the money for when Octomom starts doing "Crush" porn.

If you ever wondered why I keep blogging after nearly eight years, now you know. I want you to love current events as much as I do!


For more and equally disturbing still photos of Octo's introduction to infantilism, go no further than The Superficial.

Pity The GOP, Pray For Their Safety

If you haven't been paying attention to recent American history, you wouldn't have known that the Republican Party won seven of the ten presidential elections between 1968 and 2004. Two Republicans won 49 of the 50 states in the Union. Of the Democrats that actually were elected since 1948, the GOP successfully kept all but one of them from a second term. They held Congress for 12 uninterrupted years and regained the House last year in the shortest turnaround since the 1950s.

If you were focused on other things, I guess that you could be forgiven for overlooking the fact that Republicans are a persecuted minority. In fact, they're violently persecuted and are made to fear for their safety. Some might actually be looking for a better life overseas as I write this. No serious person can overlook the possibility that there could soon be no domestic subscribers to The Weekly Standard.

This is news to a lot of folks. It was only last week that I learned that suburban and rural WASPs could be subjected to an ancient blood libel, and that's only because Sarah Palin told me so. And she's pretty reliable on these things, not having a reputation for hysterical hyperbole or misstatement of fact.

That being said, you can imagine my shock when I learned in The Washington Times yesterday that the problem is much more serious than even Governor Palin suggests it is.

Mrs. Palin is well within her rights to feel persecuted. Since the Saturday
bloodbath, members of the liberal commentariat have spoken in a unified voice,
charging her and other conservatives with being indirectly or somehow directly
responsible for the lunatic actions of accused gunman Jared Loughner. Typical of
blood libel, the attack against Mrs. Palin is a false charge intended to
generate anger made by people with a political agenda. They have made these
claims boldly without evidence and without censure or consequence.

This is simply the latest round of an ongoing pogrom against conservative thinkers.
The last two years have seen a proliferation of similar baseless charges of
racism, sexism, bigotry, Islamophobia and inciting violence against those on the
right who have presented ideas at odds with the establishment's liberal
orthodoxy. Columnist Paul Krugman took advantage of the murders to tar
conservative icon Rush Limbaugh and Fox News superstar Glenn Beck as
"hate-mongers." It's this sort of reflexive and dastardly mudslinging that
drowns out reasoned discussion of public-policy alternatives and poisons the
well of political debate in America.

A pogrom? Holy shit, I had no idea that things were that bad! Worse still, it's an ongoing pogrom! Has anybody alerted the International Red Cross? Does Sally Struthers know about this? Those people might need food!

Somewhere out there is a tiny Republican village, no more than a hamlet, really. And in the darkness on the edge of town The New York Times, The Washington Post and National Public Radio are donning their Cossack garb and preparing for slaughter. The huts of the GOP will be burned and their inhabitants will be beaten to death with ax handles as they flee.

Won't you please help?

Getcher Cool Apps!

About a year ago, I bought myself an iPod Touch for my birthday. No one else would because they obviously don't love me. It's a pretty neat device, although I've found that the headphone jack is going on it and I have no idea how to fix it. But I still get to listen to dozens of Kevin Smith podcasts, so I'm happy.

Because I don't have access to WiFi at home or at work, I only recently started playing around with the apps that are available for the Touch recently. And this is because my lovely girlfriend has WiFi.

There's all kinds of neat shit that you can find in the iTunes store, or on the personal blogs of app developers. In the store, I found apps for a number of news services (Fox, NBC, CBC, The Globe & Mail, etc).

One thing that I didn't see in my (admittedly brief) quest was a lot of government stuff, which you may have surmised I'm sort of into. Their apps tend to be department by department, which is cumbersome and annoying if you don't want too much stuff on your machine. Also, I'm too lazy to go through that much crap on the off chance that I'll find something cool to entertain you all with.

That changed when a friend of mine pointed me in the direction of this guy. He's developed apps that gather the RSS feeds of entire governments, such as Canada, the U.S and the European Union. It's all nice and central, perfect for lazy geeks like me. Let's say that you like going out for dinner in Toronto and you're paranoid. Well, Mike has created an app that lets you look up the inspection status of every restaurant in the city. There's even a bible app that uses Wikipedia.

Since I know dick about how any of this stuff works, I sent an e-mail to the developer letting him know that I'd be highlighting his work here. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments and I'm sure that Mike will check in and be pleased to answer them.

No, they're not free apps, but for a buck, they're pretty reasonably priced. If you're so inclined, check them out.

FDR, Facebook & Having It Both Ways

Political blogs are getting to be more of a pain in the ass to read and less and less fun to actually write. One of my favorite bloggers, Dennis the Peasant, just quit because, in his words, "lots of those folks can't write, are remarkably uninformed, and quite a few are just plain stupid." That's not something that you can argue with without looking plenty stupid yourself.

I'd guess that very few bloggers would know a principle if it reached up and touched their junk. Pick almost any political blog from either side of the divide. Go back in their archives about three years. You'll almost certainly notice that things that were horrible then are more than okay now. And things that were okay then are signs of tyranny today.

I chose the phrase "reached up and touched your junk" at the beginning of the last paragraph for a reason. In 2006 every GOP asshole blogger was fine with illegal (at the time) warrantless wiretapping. Now they're outraged by patdowns at the fucking airport. I wonder what could have changed so many minds about something as fundamental as national security so quickly ....

I actually like IMAO. Sure, they toe the constantly shifting and powerfully dumb GOP line, but that blog is well-written and funny, which is increasingly rare. I don't want this post to be construed as an attack on IMAO in the way that I routinely attack Red State or anything that has the name Brietbart on it.

But Frank J. had a line in this morning's Random Thoughts that I want to explore a little bit. I think the attitude behind the remark explains a lot about the double standard employed by Sarah Palin and her fans. The line was "Every time FDR gave a speech, I don’t remember it getting compared to what some woman posted on Facebook."

That stood out to me because Palin and her allies go out of their way to get people to compare her favorably to the President of the United States. The fact that a good number of Americans do is, in my asshole opinion, a sign that Americans are doomed. When push comes to shove, the woman's a moron.

But God help you if you point that point that out in public. Then you'll be subjected to tirades about unfairness and sexism that Republicans routinely mocked as recently as the summer of 2008. Remember all of the Hillary Clinton jokes that came from the right? I do, and some of them were really funny. If you were to mention that Michael Steele was almost comically ineffectual as RNC Chairman, someone like Dan Rheil would accuse you of racism.

Too many alleged "conservatives" are now actually competitive with liberals in the great game of identity politics, and Sarah Palin is their showpiece affirmative action case. The only difference is that liberals are dumb enough to believe their own horseshit, whereas conservatives are just cynical motherfuckers.

When it suits the purposes of Palin and her supporters, she's just "some woman." But if you treat her like some woman, presumably one who should be locked in the fucking cellar and ignored, you're clearly sexist because she's just as capable of being president as anyone.

Howard Stern went on a priceless Palin tear yesterday morning, mentioning her retarded feud with David Letterman. As you might remember Letterman told an admittedly bad joke where he misidentified one of Governor Palin's daughters for another. She responded by actually living on TV for three fucking weeks decrying the unfairness of it all. More annoying was the fact that every chucklehead blogger on the goddamned planet echoed her insipid talking points for just as long.

On the other hand, Sarah can run around the country calling people Marxists that want to destroy America and placing crosshairs over the districts of politicians that she names. But when something went wrong - and I've said that blaming her for it was unfair, wrong and stupid - she puts out an eight minute video comparing herself to tens of millions of Jews that were murdered because it was thought that they were murdering Christian babies and poisoning wells.

And if you have the balls to call her on that, then you're just nitpicking. There is simply no winning with this woman or her dopey fans. Six people were murdered and more than a dozen were wounded and, in the end, it's still all about Sarah. She, and Republicans generally, actually seem to believe that she was damaged as grievously as the people that were shot were.

No Frank, this isn't just "some woman" with a goddamned Facebook page. Sarah Palin fancies herself capable, qualified and willing to serve as the president of the United States. She compares herself constantly with the incumbent and regularly implies that she's just like Reagan.

In his last press conference as president, Dwight Eisenhower was asked if he thought that he had been treated fairly by the press. Ike grinned and said "I don't see what a reporter can do to a president, do you?" Ronald Reagan's attitude was the same. He'd chuckle and dismiss the media in the most jovial way imaginable. There's none of that in Palin.

Well, you know what? There's a big, bad world out there and it's chock full of awful people. And if a hypothetical President Palin can't deal with snide comments from MSNBC or The New York Times without releasing a hysterical video or resigning her office, I shudder to think of what the Iranians or North Koreans are going to do to her and, by extension, America.

And no, there is no Department of Law that she can run to run to every time somebody says something mean about her.