Category Archives: Politics

Dave Mustaine Tries to Out-Nuge the Nuge

Posted on by
Reply

Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine seems to be crying out for at least as much attention as the country pays to Ted Nugent.

TMZ reports that Mustaine told the crowd at an August 7 concert, “Back in my country, my president … he’s trying to pass a gun ban, so he’s staging all of these murders, like the ‘Fast And Furious’ thing down at the border … Aurora, Colorado, all the people that were killed there … and now the beautiful people at the Sikh temple.”

(h/t) That might actually be more insane than anything Ted Nugent has ever said. It’s hard to say. I’ve always thought Mustaine came across as kind of a tool, but I do like his music marginally more than Nugent’s.

Share

Republican Homoeroticism

Posted on by
Reply

20120815-232838.jpgGreat quote from John Cole on the fawning, occasionally drooling commentary on Paul Ryan:

The greatest irony of this election may be that one of the most anti-gay bigots in the House, Paul Ryan, who has been and will continue to be one of the most virulently anti-gay congressmen, will be the source of some of the biggest mancrush reporting we’ve ever seen. This stuff challenges even the thoroughly embarrassing David Brooks “Fifty Shades of Gay” reporting regarding John Thune that made us all hysterical, and you can bet your sweet ass we’ll be hearing this shit until we beat down these sociopathic Galtian douchebags on November 6th. This may be the gayest election ever (not that there is anything wrong with that), now that David Gregory and the rest of the lot have two full haired American beauties to dazzle them with their high cheekbones and lean bodies and to tell them they and the rest of the country will get the fiscal spanking they so clearly lust for and desire.

Photo credit: ‘Paul Ryan – Stoaty Weasel’ by ufansius, via Tumblr.

Share

Another Shooting

Posted on by
Reply

Some guy walked into the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Family Research Council this morning and shot a security guard in the arm. He reportedly said something about the FRC first, although the FBI has not said exactly what. Reports indicate that the alleged shooter volunteered for a LGBT community center, and he was in possession of “Chick-fil-A materials.” The security guard, Leo Johnson, managed to disarm and subdue the shooter, and is expected to recover fully from his injury. Bravo to him for controlling the situation without escalating, and for generally being a badass. As of right now (8:00 p.m. CDT), law enforcement says that the shooter’s motives remain unclear.

LGBT organizations moved quickly to condemn the shooting:

We were saddened to hear news of the shooting this morning at the offices of the Family Research Council. Our hearts go out to the shooting victim, his family, and his co-workers.

The motivation and circumstances behind today’s tragedy are still unknown, but regardless of what emerges as the reason for this shooting, we utterly reject and condemn such violence.  We wish for a swift and complete recovery for the victim of this terrible incident.

Atheist organizations did likewise:

While we disagree with the Family Research Council on nearly every issue, the debate surrounding the role of religion in the public sphere should be fought with reason and logic, not guns. We absolutely condemn this sort of senseless violence.

It really should go without saying that shooting sprees and attempted shooting sprees are never, ever, ever, EVER, EVER justified. Somehow that message does not get through. A common refrain after most shootings is that it was unpredictable, or that the shooter was mentally ill, or that we can’t possibly know the motivations behind it. Here, the alleged shooter went after a decidedly right-wing target, a rather rare (though not at all unprecedented) occurrence. The Family Research Council really does not support LGBT rights. So, of course, people on the right now blame LGBT-supportive groups for the shooting. While many on the right were focused on the injured guard and were actually allowing the investigation to proceed, not everyone was so patient:

“Today’s attack is the clearest sign we’ve seen that labeling pro-marriage groups as ‘hateful’ must end,” Brian Brown, the president of the National Organization for Marriage, said in a statement.

That’s not going to happen. See, I happen to agree that people jumped the gun after the shootings in Tucson last year, even if many Republicans’ rhetoric made the argument plausible. If it was wrong to jump to conclusions then, it’s wrong now. Furthermore, the FRC is hateful, unless you believe that the precious religious fee-fees of one particular subset of the Christian faith are more important than the basic ability of LGBT individuals to live their own lives as their hearts and consciences dictate. I have neither the ability nor the desire to give the FRC the benefit of the doubt on its stances, and I can easily condemn the shooting without giving one iota of credence to their regressive, Bronze Age superstitions. (Note that I am disdainful of their policy positions. I have no hatred towards the actual people, but I do think they are wrong. Unlike sexual orientation, political opinions can change.)

And that’s really the thing: groups that stand in stark opposition to everything for which the FRC stands have unequivocally condemned today’s incident. I’m not aware of many other acts of violence of this type perpetrated against those who oppose LGBT rights, but here’s what I do know:

  • Approximately 1,296 hate crimes were perpetrated against LGBT individuals in 2007, including five murders, 242 aggravated assaults, and 448 simple assaults (via Human Rights Campaign, PDF file).
  • There were about 1,254 anti-LGBT hate crimes in 2009 (via CNN).
  • Between 2009 and 2010, the number of anti-LGBT hate crimes increased by thirteen percent, including twenty-seven murders (via USA Today). Based on CNN’s 2009 figures, that would be 1,417 incidents.

I am not suggesting that the FRC was behind any of these incidents, nor am I suggesting that the FRC’s rhetoric was what specifically inspired any of the assailants. There is similarly no reason to assume that today’s shooter was specifically motivated by any rhetoric of GLAAD, or the Southern Poverty Law Center, or any other group that advocates for the rights and basic humanity of LGBT individuals. Still, these LGBT rights groups have condemned today’s shootings. What has the FRC ever done for victims of anti-LGBT hate crimes? Not much. I don’t have statistics for 2008, but for 2007, 2009, and 2010, I count 3,967 statements of support to hate crime victims that the FRC owes, and then the FRC and its supporters can justifiably criticize its opponents’ rhetoric.

One final note: I assume Leo Johnson was armed, yet he managed to tackle the shooter, disarm him, and detain him until police arrived, apparently without ever using his own weapon. Again, bravo to him. I wish him a speedy recovery.

Share

Defense against tyranny

Posted on by
Reply

“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” –Not Thomas Jefferson (cf)

We are not supposed to talk about tragedies in anything other than the most treacly way for some undetermined period of time after they occur. I’m going to violate that unwritten rule of society today, because of something that happened yesterday, not too far from me. Some guy in College Station, Texas shot six people, killing two, before being killed by police gunfire. One of the deceased is a Brazos County constable named Brian Bachmann, who was reportedly serving eviction papers on the gunman when he opened fire from inside his house. The other victim was a 43 year-old “civilian bystander” named Chris Northcliff, who was the shooter’s landlord. You can look elsewhere for the shooter’s name. His family told the media that they knew it was just a matter of time before he snapped, but they never told authorities. He also loved guns a lot.

I am a vehement supporter of sane and reasonable gun rights. I’m not sure how many people actually want to ban all guns, but those people have zero chance of succeeding in today’s America, and that would be a terrible idea anyway. But people who advocate for unrestricted, or near-unrestricted, gun rights, have some issues to address. The right to bear arms is often cast in terms of the right to defend oneself, to defend one’s home, or as a defense against tyranny. It is entirely possible that the College Station shooter believed he was doing all three, or some combination thereof, in his possibly-warped mind (I’ll buy into this mental-health-treatment-not-gun-control argument when someone actually does something beyond talk about it). When you cast something as a struggle between liberty and tyranny, you cannot count on anyone interpreting “tyranny” the same way as you.

Police, in large part due to the First Rule of Policing, get rather wide discretion on the use of force in a specific situation. As the law currently stands, civilians do not. Whether or not this is fair is a debate that will likely rage on for years. What happened yesterday seems to be exactly what the more hardcore gun rights advocates, in promoting defense of self, home, and liberty, are talking about. It was also, by all accounts, an unspeakable crime and tragedy. See the problem?

Will College Station police now send SWAT teams to serve legal documents? It would not be unprecedented. Hopefully a revolution will not be started by gun-toting mouth breathers who can’t see past their own front door.

Share

The Lesbian Cyborg Atheist Who Ran for President

Posted on by
Reply

This election cycle seems to be an ever-widening circle of lies sliding along a downward spiral of deception into a morass of strained metaphors. So far, I’ve counted one possible untruth out of Harry Reid, and for Mitt Romney I stopped counting. BooMan captures the essence of why we should not feel bad for any hurt fee-fees Willard might be experiencing:

Mitt Romney isn’t really a Mormon. He’s an atheist who only went along with his father’s faith so he could duck the Vietnam draft. He didn’t actually try to convert anyone when he was in France either. In reality, he spent all his time in Monte Carlo gambling and buying high-end hookers. When his daddy found out what he was doing, he made him come home and marry his high school sweetheart. Actually, he only made him marry her after the second time she got pregnant. The first time, they got an abortion. Then Romney started using some of the mafia connections he had made in Marseilles to import heroin. By the time he became governor, they were flying it straight into a secret airport they set up in the Berkshires. When one of the pilots started to talk, Romney had him killed.

Now, if we started telling these stories to people, and a substantial percentage of the population started to actually believe these stories, and if congressmen humored and even encouraged the people who believed these stories, and if media figures talked about these stories, and if Congress actually had hearings about some of these stories, then Mitt Romney would know what it’s like to be treated like a Democrat.

(h/t DougJ at Balloon Juice)

Share

This Week in WTF, August 10, 2012

Posted on by
Reply

Oahu– Rep. Steve King (R-Idiocracy) found the microfiche of President Obama’s 1961 birth announcement in two Hawaiian newspapers. While he can’t deny the likely authenticity of these announcements, he also cannot rule out the possibility that he is insane (that is the only explanation I can think of for Rep. King’s subsequent wild-eyed speculation):

We went down into the Library of Congress and we found a microfiche there of two newspapers in Hawaii each of which had published the birth of Barack Obama. It would have been awfully hard to fraudulently file the birth notice of Barack Obama being born in Hawaii and get that into our public libraries and that microfiche they keep of all the newspapers published. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some other explanations on how they might’ve announced that by telegram from Kenya. The list goes on.

No word yet on whether he has considered the possibility of time travel. Or space aliens. Or improbable quantum fluctuations creating Barack Obama, fully formed, from a pile of aluminum recycling.

– Fox News doesn’t think our Olympic champions are being patriotic enough, because they don’t compete decked out from head to toe in American flag regalia or something. Our athletes should do it to show how America is exceptional, and also because other nations do it, but America is still exceptional, because shut up. (If you can make it through then entire almost-5-minute clip from Fox News in the linked article, you are made of stronger stuff than I.)

– Bryan Fischer compares kidnapping children from gay or lesbian parents to freeing slaves, thus failing at both American history and basic human decency. I wish I was making this story up.

Photo credit: ‘Oahu’ by Earth Sciences and Image Analysis, NASA-Johnson Space Center [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Share

A quick thought on privilege

Posted on by
Reply

(This was a comment a made on a Facebook thread centered around this article, to which someone added this video, which ended up bringing in race, religion, and LGBTQ issues–in other words, a normal Friday morning for me. I figured I’d cut and paste my comments here for an inexpensive blog update! This is all verbatim what I wrote, except that I corrected a few spelling and grammar errors inherent to the Facebook commenting format.)

This will be a condensed treatment of the concept of privilege, but here goes: I’m a white, heterosexual, educated, affluent, originally-raised-Episcopalian, reasonably attractive and healthy American male. In other words, I am about as high up on the privilege ladder as you can get. About the only “minority” status I have is that of atheist, and people who don’t know me can’t exactly tell that just from looking at me. If I may borrow Stephanie for a second, if I were to tell Stephanie that sexism does not exist in America because I have never experienced it, or because her own stories of encountering sexism just don’t make sense to me, Stephanie would be within her rights to give me an epic rhetorical beatdown. As a guy, I have privilege in this society to ignore some pretty pervasive sexism. If I don’t want to see it or deal with it, it can be invisible to me. The same can be true for me about LGBTQ issues (no one has yet complained that, by advertising my engagement on my FB page, I am rubbing my sexuality in their faces. LGBTQ people don’t get that kind of deference from the whole freaking world). Christians can claim “persecution” when in reality they are just having to share the public sphere with others. Guys can claim unfair advantages for women when women haven’t even achieved parity. My actual point, though, is about the “race card.” When a person of color “plays the race card,” it is pretty much assumed that the sole purpose is to be divisive or to distract from something else, and that is a load of crap. There is racism all around us all the time, but most white (or white-identified) people do not have to deal with it as a daily fact of life. Just one example: I drove by four police cars yesterday, and in two instances I was going about 5 miles over the speed limit, but no one pulled me over. I have never been pulled over without verifiable evidence of speeding or making an illegal right turn on red, and I have never had my car searched for drugs “just in case.” For many if not most people of color in America, though, the simple act of driving a car down the street requires taking on more risk than my privileged ass can comprehend. I’m not claiming any greater knowledge of the reality of life in America, just that I get that there is much of daily life for others that I do not “get.” Claiming that a context-free allegation of racism is playing the “race card” is a cowardly refusal to even consider that the person might be correct. Note also that privilege is not limited specifically to white heterosexual males. The default setting of society is “white heterosexual male,” so nearly anything that unthinkingly falls into one of those categories can have the effect of propping up privilege, without awareness of how it might hurt others.

None of this means that I don’t get to have a say in issues pertaining to other groups. It just means that I need to listen for a change. It is really amazing how little privileged people actually listen to people without their same privilege. Google “mansplaining” if you want to have a sad chuckle.

Share

This Week in WTF, August 3, 2012

Posted on by
Reply

Russia_stamp_no._1030_-_2012_Summer_Olympics_bid– Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron disses presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney:

“We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.”

– So does London Mayor Boris Johnson.

– Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA) likens the Obamacare contraception mandate to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. No really, this happened.

– A former Chick-fil-A employee is suing the company because of reasons:

Former Chick-fil-A employee Brenda Honeycutt is suing the company for gender discrimination, alleging that owner and operator of Duluth, Georgia’s Chick-fil-As, Jeff Howard, fired her so that she could be a “stay home mother” despite her “satisfactory-to-above-satisfactory employment history with the company.

“During the Plaintiff’s employment, Defendant Howard routinely made comments to the Plaintiff suggesting that as a mother she should stay home with her children,” the lawsuit states.

– A church in Mississippi, one of the states composing our allegedly post-racial nation, refused to marry a couple because they are black:

A black couple in Crystal Springs, Mississippi says that a predominantly white Baptist church refused to let them get married because of their race.

Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson told WLBT that the day before they were to be married, the pastor of First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs informed them the ceremony would have to be moved due to the reaction of some white church members — even though the couple had attended the church regularly.

“The church congregation had decided no black could be married at that church, and that if [the pastor] went on to marry her, then they would vote him out the church,” Charles Wilson explained.

We have to respect the delicate feelings of “some white church members,” amirite? I can’t wait to hear if there’s a non-discriminatory explanation.

– A small airplane towing a banner with a marriage proposal crashed in Rhode Island, after the pilot had to ditch. The pilot was found uninjured, after his apparently genius 8 year-old son helped the Coast Guard locate him. No word on whether the intended recipient of the proposal said yes.

– A puppeteer on a Christian-themed children’s show in Florida is arrested for conspiracy to kidnap children and, uh, other stuff. It sounds like police have evidence of some pretty heinous stuff, but it is not clear exactly what he actually did regarding the kidnapping conspiracy charge, versus what he just talked about doing. Technically, “extensive Internet chats about eating children” are not illegal in and of themselves without taking a furher step……you know, I don’t really want to talk about this.

– Some Breitbartian named John Nolte thinks that a new Skittles ad promotes bestiality or something. In other words don’t chase your Chick-fil-A sandwich with Skittles. Or Oreos. I’ll have to get back to you on which candies and cookies have the Almighty’s stamp of approval.

Photo credit: ‘Russia stamp no. 1030 – 2012 Summer Olympics bid’ by Russian Post/Beltyukov V., painter [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Share

The saddest meme in Republican history

Posted on by
2

The other day, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed that an unnamed Bain investor told him that Mitt Romney won’t release any more tax returns because that would demonstrate that he did not pay taxes for ten years. We don’t know who actually said that, so it is possible that Senator Reid is making it up. Politicians certainly lie through their teeth all the time–well, Mitt Romney does. I’m sure others do as well.

In response to this, people on the right could have just pointed out that Reid has not provided any evidence for his assertion besides his say-so, which would have gotten the point across that he made an unsupported (albeit plausible) accusation. But that would have been sensible, and this is the American right wing we’re talking about here.

First, they point out that Harry Reid will not release his own tax returns, which is irrelevant because Harry Reid is not running for president.

Not content to leave it at that, someone creates a Twitter hashtag suggesting (facetiously, one hopes) that Harry Reid is a pederast. I assume the intention was to demonstrate the impact of unfounded accusations, not to look like a group of schoolchildren who just learned a big word. The meme yielded gems such as this:

 

 


It’s always just hilarious when a person using “pederasty” as a cheap device for a lame attempt at satire uses words like “disgusting” to describe the other person. It is difficult to fully explain how an allegation made as part of an ongoing controversy over an unprecedentedly tight-lipped presidential candidate’s financial history is different from completely made-up accusations of pederasty by a bunch of Tweeters. Honestly, before yesterday it never would have occurred to me that such a distinction would be necessary. If you haven’t already figured out the distinction, there is no hope for your intellectual development beyond its current state, or you are currently under the age of six.

Share

Batman, Fascism, and Absurd Occupy Wall Street Caricatures

Posted on by
2

586px-Batman_(truck)I just saw The Dark Knight Rises (as in the start time of the movie was just over three four hours ago) and many thoughts are bouncing through my head. I reserve the right to augment/amend my commentary at a later date. Two warnings before I start:

1. There will be spoilers. Stop reading right now if you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want it spoiled.

2. If you are the sort of person who prefers not to think about movies too much, or is the sort of person to respond to any negative criticism with something like “Jeez, it’s just a movie!!!” you should stop reading now, too, because you’ll only waste your time. I recommend that you instead check out the blog “Indifferent Cats in Amateur Porn” (NSFW, obviously.)

If you are still reading, I will assume that you have read the above disclaimers, and that you not only are interested in what I have to say, but find it more interesting, somehow, than pictures of cats next to ordinary people’s non-airbrushed junk. So here goes:

Dear sweet Flying Spaghetti Monster, is this movie pro-fascist or what?

I should explain, lest my use of the word “fascist” send you into a tizzy. Certain words have been largely stripped of all meaning by modern political discourse. For example, “socialism” has some very specific economic and political meanings, but tends to mean “stuff that Obama does” to many people. People who lack an understanding of both history and irony claim that he is both socialist and fascist. The Dark Knight Rises, viewed at least one way, is just plain fascist, and I use the meaning of the term applied by Noah Brand in his article “The Dark Knight Rises is a Pro-Fascist Movie”: Continue reading →

Share