Rick Perry: Ignorant of the Establishment Clause

Seriously?



The gist of it is that things are so screwed up that only sky daddy can fix them. Our sins are so bad that only He/She/It can take them away, and blah blah blah.

Yeah, I'll pass. But, please Governor. Please run for President. Just so everyone can see what a massive idiot you are.

What a Day!

Already we've got Mark Halperin going for the gold and calling the President "kind of a dick" on MSNBC's air. But then, as if the universe itself were trying to do bloggers and ironists a HUGE favor, I read this:

Chris Hansen, the host of NBC’s To Catch a Predator, was himself caught on camera with an apparent mistress in Florida. The sting was arranged by National Enquirer, and it shows Hansen, who is married with children, with Kristyn Caddell, a blonde television anchor 20 years his junior. He took her to a dinner at the Ritz-Carlton in Manalapan before spending the night at her apartment. The couple apparently met four months ago.

Oh, man.  So many directions to go with this one.  The irony is just...wow.  I suppose the only thing that could have made it better would have been if a disapproving, moralizing, middle-aged news anchor could have come up to the table and asked Mr. Hansen what he has to say for himself.  Or if his wife had been in another room watching the video and had come out to confront him.

And all of this the day after the President slapped down the Boehner/Cantor/McConnell cabal.  Shorter version: "I killed bin Laden, now let's make a freaking deal."  Shorter Boehner/Cantor/McConnell: "Take your deal and shove it."  And yet Mark Halperin thinks Obama's the one acting like a dick.  Oy.

Now, I fully appreciate that both of these stories aren't so much news as meta-news.  That is, they're stories about the people who make stories that matter.  But in this case, Halperin and Hansen have something in common, specifically, and I don't think this is just my opinion, they're both jerks.  Hansen was just begging for a fall after years of that disgusting television show that only got put out to pasture when it caused a guy to kill himself while the cameras rolled outside.*  Halperin, on the other hand, has always been an incredibly glib reporter (remember that he once said John Edwards thinks Obama is "kind of a pussy" so he has a history of just this sort of thing) and not a terribly good one to boot.

The way this day is going, maybe we'll get some karmic justice for Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity as well!  Who can tell?

*For more on that subject, I highly recommend this article by Esquire's Luke Dittrich.

Why we don't need more people owning guns

Idiots like this: Man uses shotgun to blast off painful wart.

Murphy, who told the court he found gun under a hedge, reportedly fortified himself with several pints of beer, stretched out his left hand, and aimed the gun's barrel.

Murphy told the Telegraph that the beer wasn't to blame for his shot taking off more of his finger than he intended. He places blame on the weapon's recoil.

Despite the inherent risk of using a gun when a scalpel would do, Murphy told the Yorkshire Post he was surprised by his disfigurement.

"I didn't expect to lose my finger as well when I shot it but the gun recoiled and that was it. The wart was gone and so was most of my finger. There was nothing left, so no chance to re-attach it."

But surely no one in Wisconsin would EVER combine beer (practically the state beverage) with firearms, right?

You stay classy, Timothy Dolan

The former Archbishop of Milwaukee and current Archbishop of New York is, to put it mildly, an idiot.  I'm sorry.  It might be seen as impolite or worse in some circles to call a man of the cloth names.*  But if the shoe doth fit, then verily must The Most Reverend** Archbishop wear it.  To wit, this is what he wrote on his blog on the website of the Archdiocese of New York regarding impending marriage equality in New York state:

Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in New York, in the United States of America – not in China or North Korea.  In those countries, government presumes daily to “redefine” rights, relationships, values, and natural law.  There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of “family” and “marriage” means.

But, please, not here!  Our country’s founding principles speak of rights given by God, not invented by government, and certain noble values – life, home, family, marriage, children, faith – that are protected, not re-defined, by a state presuming omnipotence.

Please, not here!  We cherish true freedom, not as the license to do whatever we want, but the liberty to do what we ought; we acknowledge that not every desire, urge, want, or chic cause is automatically a “right.”  And, what about other rights, like that of a child to be raised in a family with a mom and a dad?

Our beliefs should not be viewed as discrimination against homosexual people.  The Church affirms the basic human rights of gay men and women, and the state has rightly changed many laws to offer these men and women hospital visitation rights, bereavement leave, death benefits, insurance benefits, and the like.  This is not about denying rights. It is about upholding a truth about the human  condition.  Marriage is not simply a mechanism for delivering benefits:  It is the union of a man and a woman in a loving, permanent, life-giving union to pro-create children.  Please don’t vote to change that.  If you do, you are claiming the power to change what is not into what is, simply because you say so.  This is false, it is wrong, and it defies logic and common sense.

North Korea?  What the hell is this man talking about?  Amy Davidson of The New Yorker explodes on the bit about a right to a mom and dad:

This is, speaking very charitably, a non-sequitur.  There are all sorts of reasons children are raised in families that don't include "a mom and a dad;" Dolan must know that.  Same-sex marriage isn't one of them.  Maybe Dolan believes that divorce, in any circumstance, violates a child’s rights; how about children adopted by gay parents—does he believe that their rights would be protected by lingering in foster care, bounced from non-home to non-home? Would he prefer that those born to gay or lesbian parents had never existed? If so, that is a pretty tangled position for a Catholic (or even for a writer of North Korean communiqués).  Does he think that children should be taken away from gay parents (or single widowed parents, for that matter) who have loved them all their lives to be given to any heterosexual, or even just heterogeneous, couple? And even if he agrees with all of that, what on earth does it have to do with same-sex marriage? Allowing two people who love each other to marry will not stop people who don’t love each other from separating, or from getting married in the first place. Neither marriage nor love is a scarce resource. And yet Dolan talks as though there were thieves in his house.

Dare I say it?  Amen.  Does Dolan not realize the pervasive and delicious irony of men of the cloth, (who are by definition virgins who don't know the first thing about marital love or child-rearing in practice) appointing themselves the arbiters of what is and is not acceptable with respect to marriage and raising children?  How in the world would Dolan know what is or is not good for marriages and children?  I'm pretty sure that chastity-bound clergy are the very last people on Earth whose counsel we should seek on such things.

Moreover, did you notice that Dolan dragged out the old chestnut natural law line about the purpose of marriage being the procreation of children?  Again, I would ask, how would he know?  But beyond making smartass remarks, I do have a serious point to make here: If the ultimate purpose of marriage is to have children, then a whole lot of people who are married now shouldn't have been allowed to get married at all, if you follow that logic.  I guess my wife and I shouldn't have bothered getting married, since it's been four years now and we have no children, and aren't planning on any at this time.  Would Dolan prefer that we'd just shacked up instead?  But what do you expect from a church where premarital sex is a sin, using birth control or a condom is a sin, having sex while married but not intending to get pregnant is a sin (apparently), and basically you're supposed to have one child per sexual encounter?  But don't you dare point out that the people making and enforcing these ridiculous standards of purity can't seem to keep themselves away from small children.  The chutzpah is unbelievable.

What of couples where children are an impossibility due to infertility or other reasons?  They cannot procreate children, and according to the natural law argument, cannot fulfill the ultimate purpose of marriage.  By the way, that would include my own parents, who, after being unable to have children, proceeded to do something truly wonderful and adopt my sister, my brother, and I over a span of 15 years.  I'm sure Dolan would be willing to amend his definition of marriage to include straight couples adopting children,*** but that's not what he wrote, because only by limiting marriage's purpose to the procreation of children can you explicitly write the definition of marriage to exclude gay people.  What nonsense.

The North Korea line still really bothers me, if only because Dolan seems completely blind to how headsplittingly ironic it is that someone implicitly invoking the "because God says so" argument would accuse the other side of being like North Korea.  I'm pretty sure the people in favor of gay marriage aren't appealing to the authority of a celestial Great Leader and his son, the Dear Leader.****  It couldn't possibly be that this cleric is just trying to associate gay marriage with North Korea in a transparent attempt to poison the well.

Maybe they should teach basic logic in seminary.  Add that to the list of required courses right after "Keeping Your Hands Off Children 101" and "Advanced Keeping Your Hands Off Children 220."

In case I haven't made my case plain enough, I really, really don't think a bunch of repressed virgins in Roman collars are qualified to pass judgment on the sexual conduct of others, or to speak on matters of marriage and child-raising.  It's a category error.

*Although men of the cloth, it must be said, have been doing quite a bit to make sure they are called even worse names of late.  I'm pretty sure "pedophile" and "accessory to child rape" trump "idiot."  Just saying.

**Maybe it's the fact that I'm an atheist, but I do find it amusing that styles of address for Roman Catholic clergy get more absurd the higher up you go.  A priest is called "The Reverend Father."  Fine.  Bishops and Archbishops are referred to as "The Most Reverend," "Your Excellency," or "Your Grace."  Getting a little overblown there, but whatever.  Cardinals are "Your Eminence," which almost seems like a step down from "Excellency," but what do I know?  And finally, "His Holiness," is reserved for the Pope, which is really for the best, because at least that way the number of people on Earth who claim to be holy and infallible is only one more than the number who actually are.

***I suspect this is because straight people adopting children has become acceptable and even fashionable of late.  However, I have, on a few isolated occasions, been told by very devoutly religious people that my status as an adopted child means that, 1) my birth parents didn't love me, 2) my adoptive parents can't love me the same way that other people's parents love them (they wouldn't trouble themselves to explain why), and 3) God doesn't love me, because I'm essentially a bastard child, and it says in the Bible that blah blah blah.  My mental response to such blather usually rhymes with "chuck two," but ordinarily I just tell people that if such hideous thoughts are what their religion compels them to believe, perhaps for humanity's sake they ought to consider just what sort of God they're following.

****That line is ripped wholesale from Hitchens, I confess, and is entirely accurate.  Kim Jong Il (the Dear Leader) is not the true head of the North Korean state, but rather is only head of the party and the army.  His long-dead father, Kim Il-Sung (the Great Leader), is legally still the head of the state.  All songs and art must be in praise of the Dear Leader or the Great Leader.  Failure to pay homage is punished severely.  Does this sound familiar?

Republicans: Still not serious about the economy

Blocking the nomination of a Nobel Prize-winning economist for governor of the Federal Reserve until the nominee is forced to withdraw.  Classy.

"It is time for me to withdraw, as I plan to inform the White House," Diamond, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in an opinion piece published in the New York Times titled, "When a Nobel Prize isn't enough."

The top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, Richard Shelby, has criticized Diamond, saying he lacks monetary policy experience.

At a May 12 committee hearing, Shelby said Diamond "is not the right person for this job," citing his lack of "appropriate background or experience" and his support of "bailing out the big banks during the crisis" and additional stimulus measures.

Can we disqualify Shelby from sitting on the Banking Committee for being a massive idiot?  I'm not a huge fan of bank bailouts, but I'm pretty sure that if the big banks hadn't been saved, the economy would be a whole hell of a lot worse now than it is.  But isn't that always the case with the GOP?  Mitt Romney continues to say we shouldn't have saved Chrysler and GM.  He is effectively telling us that he would have been okay with literally millions of lost jobs that would never return, and the complete annihilation of the American auto industry, which dates back more than a century.  Who can take such stuff seriously?  Probably the same people who can take this seriously:

But at the May 12 hearing, Shelby contended that "we are a nation awash in talented and capable people. Surely the president can find another nominee with the level of experience and temperament necessary to garner bipartisan support."

Excuse me, Senator Shelby, but you just blocked the nomination of a guy with a fucking Nobel Prize in Economics.  America may be "awash in talented and capable people" but I don't think you find Nobel laureates on every street corner.

"It's a pity since Diamond's work on labor markets would be of importance to the committee," said Michael Gapen, a former Fed economist now at Barclays Capital. "This was a case of politics winning out over pragmatism." 

That's putting it mildly.  I would call it the Republicans realizing that the only way they can defeat this president is if the economy is still doing badly in 2012, and doing everything in their power to kill the recovery.  If their dog and pony show on raising the debt ceiling (which even the Ryan plan would require) doesn't prove that, I don't know what does.

You can lead a rapture believer to reason, but you can't make him accept it

Harold Camping, debunked crackpot rapture obsessive, is "flabbergasted" that he and his followers weren't lifted into paradise yesterday.

"I'm looking for answers," Camping said, adding that meant frequent prayer and consultations with friends.

"But now I have nothing else to say," he said, closing the door to his home. "I'll be back to work Monday and will say more then."

Camping's followers will surely be listening.

"I'm not as disappointed as everyone since I didn't fully believe him," said one, who asked to remain anonymous Sunday because he worried he would be shunned for admitting he was "upset" with Camping.

The middle-aged Oakland resident said he'd been listening to Camping since 1993, when he said the world would end in 1994.

That was strike one, the man said. And this is strike two. Even so, he said, that doesn't mean the message is wrong.

"I just know he's biblically sound," the man said. "I've never been one of these guys who think everything he says is true.

"I don't think I am going to stop listening to him," the man added, heaving a deep sigh before continuing: "I don't know, I gotta listen to him on Monday, see what he says on the radio."

What the hell is wrong with these people?  They guy clearly said Saturday would bring about the rapture and the beginning of the end of all things.  Nothing of the sort happened.  But this guy wants to hear what Harold Camping has to say this week, which I would assume will start with a very loud, "OOPS!"  What could Camping possibly say of value after he staked his entire reputation (not that he really had one to begin with) on a prophecy that has manifestly not come to pass?

There's just no convincing some people.  Their prophet of doom is embarrassed and yet they still want to hear what he has to say.  But the article gets better!

"I would encourage them not to lose their faith because they listened to a wolf in sheep's clothing, and Jesus said there would be wolves in sheep's clothing," said Jackie Alnor.

Alnor, a resident of Hayward who blogs about the rapture, said Camping had twisted the word of God by trying to predict the end. Only God knows when the world will end, she said.

"He's in big trouble with God," she said.

If that isn't bad enough, she said, Camping's false prophecy could have bigger impacts on religion.

"It's given people who hate Christianity an excuse to hate it even more," she said. "People can just paint with broad brush strokes."

I love the "I'm a true Christian, but you aren't" trope.  For a religion supposedly founded upon the teachings of a guy who warned in no uncertain terms about judging lest you be judged, a great many Christians sure do like them some judging.  And yes, those of us who aren't Christians will use the nutbags to show the fundamental absurdity of the religion.  When you base a religion on fantastical claims of the universe being created in seven days, talking snakes, people living inside whales, a messianic figure born of a virgin, executed, resurrected, and magically lifted into heaven, and a book that features a whole lot of killing and soothsayng, I'm pretty sure there's no real basis to say that Harold Camping is altogether that much more out there than the entire institution.

And what irritates me the most is the self-sustaining nature of the religion.  People criticize Christianity, and Christians refer to certain passages in the Bible that foretell of people criticizing their faith in order to say, "Look!  We're right!  It says so right there!"  Of course, the same argument protects the faith of Harold Camping as much as any other Christian, and then there's my problem: Why should I care what a bunch of illiterate inhabitants of the ancient Middle East, utterly ignorant of any of the discoveries of modern science, had to say about anything whatsoever?  Nothing they say could possibly have any application in the modern world unless the book is divinely inspired, meaning you have to presuppose the existence of God in order to accept the book.  Hence why those of us who see no evidence supporting the existence of any God at all don't accept the Bible or any other holy book as proof of anything useful.

If this whole phony rapture obsession teaches us anything, it should be to demonstrate, once again, the deep desire of the religious to see all things come to an end.  To quote Christopher Hitchens:

One of the very many connections between religious belief and the sinister, spoiled, selfish childhood of our species is the repressed desire to see everything smashed up and ruined and brought to naught.  This tantrum-need is coupled with two other sorts of "guilty joy," or, as the Germans say, schadenfreude.  First, one's own death is canceled - or perhaps repaid or compensated - by the obliteration of all others.  Second, it can always be egotistically hoped that one will be personally spared, gathered contentedly to the bosom of the mass exterminator, and from a safe place observe the sufferings of those less fortunate.  Tertullian, one of the many church fathers who found it difficult to give a persuasive account of paradise, was perhaps clever in going for the lowest possible common denominator and promising that one of the most intense pleasures of the afterlife would be endless contemplation of the tortures of the damned.  He spoke more truly than he knew in evoking the man-made character of faith.

Consider that the next time you hear someone telling you about the rapture and tribulation.  Keep it in mind when those who criticized Camping because he claimed to know the hour and the day tell you that, although they don't know when it will occur, someday God will summon the faithful to Heaven and leave the rest to suffer and die horribly for months and years until the coming Apocalypse.  Remember that people who believe such things (and not all Christians do) ultimately want you to die.

I, for one, will not have people who believe such things dictate to me that I am immoral because I do not believe in their God.

Ad Agency Gaffe of the Century

First Prize: Placing a United Airlines ad reading "You're going to like where we land" at Ground Zero.

The stupid.  It burns.

"We are taking immediate steps to remove them and apologize for the error," a United spokesman said.

I should certainly hope so.

Not a bright idea

Planting a bomb in Dublin right before the Queen visits - really stupid move.  I'm pretty sure if the thing had gone off anywhere in the vicinity of Her Majesty, the RAF would be carpet bombing the Emerald Isle as we speak.

If you want the Brits to go away, and I'm not unsympathetic to the complaints of the Irish (even though the awful history of the IRA hasn't done them any favors), I'm quite certain that attempting to assassinate the monarch isn't going to make your case stronger.

Rashard Mendenhall is a monumental idiot

Yet another reason sports teams really ought to consider banning Twitter.

"What kind of person celebrates death?" he wrote. "It's amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We've only heard one side..."

Let me help you there, Rashard.  When I was sixteen years old, I sat in a classroom and watched in horror as three thousand of my fellow Americans and human beings were vaporized by lunatics who thought they were doing God's bidding.  Maybe you missed it.  But this guy was their leader, and we've heard him speak on video and audio tape several times patting himself on the back for his efficacious slaughtering of innocents and promising to continue doing so.  I'm pretty damn sure we heard his side.

And now he's heard ours.

In other words, Rashard Mendenhall, sit down and shut up.

Oh, and my Packers totally kicked your ass in the Super Bowl.

"Pussy-footing"

Sarah Palin is, as if there was any doubt, officially demented:

Show photo as warning to others seeking America's destruction.  No pussy-footing around, no politicking, no drama;it's part of the mission.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, "Better to be thought a fool than to tweet and remove all doubt."

I'm pretty sure Sarah Palin has no idea what it is that DevGru (Development Group, the proper name for Seal Team Six) actually does, because in no way would it be appropriate to describe their missions as "pussy-footing."  Ordering the SEALs to go in and kill bin Laden is describable in a great number of ways, but I don't think Palin's description fits.

I know it's asking way too much of Sarah Palin's foreign policy understanding ("I can see Russia from my house!") to ask her to grasp why millions of people around the world, including several allied nations, might be incredibly offended by a picture of Osama bin Laden with his brain blown out.  Is it that hard to imagine how quickly posters and signs featuring such an image could be made for jihadists to rally around their new martyr?

Anything that makes President Obama look bad, she's in favor.  As if we didn't know that already.

A Brief History of Birtherism

I somehow missed David Weigel's article over at Slate on Wednesday tracking the history and evolution of birtherism.  He has serious reservations about the president's decision to engage the issue:

President Obama did not end the "birther" movement today. Hours after the president released his long-form birth certificate—years after releasing the short-form one that proved he was a citizen—the issue had already evolved. Republicans who'd been on the hook demanding proof of his citizenship wondered why it took so long. People with too much time on their hands—in other words, the majority of people surfing the Internet for this kind of stuff—were combing the document for proof of forgery.

So Obama did not end birtherism. He did end one era of conspiracy theories about him—the fifth era, by my count. And maybe all he did was make sure the sixth era got started with as loud and embarrassing a bang as possible. If you understand how this started, and who played the biggest roles in elevating it, maybe you can also understand why it's not going to end.

Weigel's conclusion is that Obama has shown himself willing to engage with buffoons like Trump, meaning the conspiracy theorists will keep coming now that they know they have a soft target.  I sort of agree with that.  It probably would have been better to keep being dismissive of birthers, rather than to give them any sort of credence.  As the last few days of innumerable (debunked) attempts to prove the birth certificate a forgery, the people who subscribe to birtherism continue to do so in the face of all evidence to the contrary for a very simple reason: because it suits them.  If yesterday's scrap between yours truly and Dad29 proved nothing else (apart from the implacable differences between the two of us), it is that birtherism is just a tool for those who just want to hurt the president (guilt by association with negative ideas works too), whether they believe it or not.*  In fact, those people are very willing to shrink from explicit birtherism, if only to look more "reasonable."  Fred Dooley's email to Zach W. of Blogging Blue is a great case in point.

The fact of the matter is that there simply is no evidence whatsoever that could convince them, because disproving one set of claims just gives rise to a claim that the evidence is forged, or else the conspiracy theorists move on to new and different theories.  The 9/11 Truth movement is a perfect analog.  Either way, it is belief in a conspiracy because it fulfills the needs of the believer, even if the believer has to change justifications in order to continue his or her belief.  What's the point of engaging with yahoos who can't be persuaded anyway?

Trump, trumped

Sullivan has the scoop.  China may be "raping our country" according to the walking bad hair day, but that doesn't stop him from having his brand of shirts manufactured there.

And Jon Stewart was on fire last night, mocking Trump's ridiculous celebration over President Obama showing his long form birth certificate and essentially telling The Donald to STFU.  Personally, I wouldn't have given any credence to Trump's rantings, but if we get humor like this, then I guess it's okay.

The Daily Show - Believe It or Believe It - Obama Releases Long-Form Birth Certificate
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

About that birth certificate

Allow me to drop some knowledge on you.  Meet United States Code Title 8, Section 1401:

The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth:

[...]

(g) a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years[.]

The President's mother was an American citizen who had very clearly spent more than five years physically present in the United States.  In other words, Barack Obama could have been born on Neptune and he would still be a natural born citizen of the United States under the jus sanguinis (bloodright), as opposed to the jus soli (right of soil, i.e., place of birth).  It simply does not matter where he was born, so even a presupposition that his birth certificate is fake and that he wasn't born in the United States doesn't get birthers racists anywhere.  Unless they now wish to claim that his mother wasn't his mother.  Which wouldn't surprise me.  How long can it be before they're demanding DNA samples?

If the 9/11 Truthers have proved anything, it's that no lie is too big and no conspiracy too elaborate for the creative imaginations of credulous idiots.

POSTSCRIPT: I realize some may see it as a cheap shot to link to Dad29 using the words "credulous idiots" and making an analogy to the 9/11 Truth movement hoax.  But I think I can adequately defend myself by pointing out that truth is always a defense, and by citing the doctrine of "if the shoe doth fit, verily must thou wear it."  To believe that the birth certificate is a forgery also requires that the newspaper announcement was likewise a fake, with the only conceivable aim of the conspiracy being the sure and certain knowledge almost fifty years in advance that this baby was going to be elected President of the United States (this at a time - 1961 - when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had not yet been enacted) and so he'd better damn well be a US citizen.  I think "credulous idiot" is actually a pretty charitable description of someone who is stupid enough to believe that such a thing is not just possible, but more likely than the possibility that President Obama was born in Hawaii to an American mother and a Kenyan father in 1961.  A less charitable description might be that such conspiracy theorists are either racists, charlatans, or in desperate need of mental help.  And still wrong, as 8 USC 1401 demonstrates.

UPDATE: Dad29 has edited his post to add:

(Let me make something perfectly clear. I don't give a flying $%^&*&& about Obozo's citizenship. I DO care, Very Much, that Obozo's residence, beginning January 2013, is anyplace BUT the White House. Hawaii's nice that time of year, I hear.)

Simply put, this is nonsense. People who don't give a flying whatever (and it's so nice to see bloggers who are afraid of magical four letter words like "fuck") about the president's citizenship do not post things about Xeroxes and link to so-and-so's "questions about the long form."  Dad doth protest way, way too much.


UPDATE 2: Dad29 is all class:

I happen to find the topic interesting, bozo.

I'm sort of flattered, actually.  Usually when someone responds to reasoned argument with name-calling, it's an admission that they have no reasonable response.  Or just no reason.