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Apparently Oklahoma governor Brad Henry (D-ipshit) isn't satisfied with how difficult it already is for one of his female constituents to assert control over her reproductive rights.
The governor of Oklahoma is considering tough new abortion bills that would allow doctors to withhold test results showing foetal defects and require women to answer intrusive questions.
The results of the questionnaires would be posted online.
Women would also be required to have a vaginal ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the embryo or foetus in a third bill passed by the legislature on Monday
Back in October President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard Act which added "perceived or actual sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability" to the 1969 federal hate crimes law. While some saw this as a long overdue addition to our legal code, others saw this as a trampling of free speech. I mean sure, this only is for violent acts of murder, assault, intimidation, and terrorism, but what about those who fear that this might affect them or their churches ability to bash an demonize gays? The law says that isn't going to happen, but can't people just whine about it anyway as some sort of flimsy pretext for stripping protection for gays from state law? Sure they can.
Such was the case in Oklahoma, where they didn't buy into this notion that gays are people too, so they set off to seriously de-gay their hate crimes laws. HOW DARE YOU REFER TO THEM AS OKLAHOMO! So they decided to write a bill that tried to severely hamstring those rights under state law and not allow state or local authorities to report or share hate crimes information with the feds pertaining to Title 18 U.S. Code Section 245. That's where the problem began.
Protections for sexual orientation and gender identity are actually under Section 249. ... Section 245 of the Code refers to race and religious protections. Therefore, Oklahoma actually passed a statute allowing state law enforcement officials to keep information about crimes motivated by race or religion out of the hands of federal authorities.
“The bill in its current form doesn’t take away rights from gays and lesbians,” Oklahoma State Senate Minority Leader Andrew Rice explained. “It takes away rights for religion and race.”
I'm sure the race protections being stripped out was just a happy accident, but they'll be hopping mad about religious persecution being stripped out. That's what this whole thing was pretending to be about in the first place. First they try to knock out protections for violence against gays based on "uhhhh.... religion and stuff" (caution: legal terminology), but end up stripping hate crime protection from religion. It's almost as if God was trying to tell them something about hate and using religious cover as a pretext for bigotry. Or He was at least trying to make a point about the general stupidity of state lawmakers and reading comprehension levels in Oklahoma.
Well done Oklahoma, we do love a good petard self-hoisting. Quit while you're ahead, otherwise you'll have legalized murder by the end of the week.
Out of all the elected Tea Party cranks, one of my favorites has to be Iowa's Steve King. He hasn't met a Democratic idea he can't shriek about hysterically and in his spare time he talks extensively about how he sympathizes with terrorists who commit terrorist acts on American soil. Good man, lofty man.
Events like yesterday's final Tea Party rally against the socialist health care bill is an event tailor made for a man like King. Dozens of people waving signs about communism and socialism without understanding what either is can have their fears stoked by a man who doesn't understand the terms either, and as a bonus doesn't understand recent world history and trivializes rule under fascist regimes. It's a fetid petri dish of blinkered stupidity. Which is of course why King used the platform to argue for a new American Revolution.
Speaking to the Huffington Post shortly after his speech, King declared that a peaceful uprising, a la the successful overthrowing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia on the streets of Prague in 1989 "would be fine with me."
"Fill this city up, fill this city, jam this place full so that they can't get in, they can't get out and they will have to capitulate to the will of the American people," he said.
"So this is just like Prague under communist rule?" the Huffington Post asked.
"Oh yeah, it is very, very close," King replied. "It is the nationalization of our liberty and the federal government taking our liberty over. So there are a lot of similarities there."
Yeah, the federal government is taking our liberty over.
So if we have any Czech readers, first I'd like to say thanks for Jaromir Jagr, we appreciated him. Secondly, yes he is trying to compare the passage of a health reform bill that would give us health care coverage that isn't as good as theirs or their neighbors to a 1968 Soviet invasion, "Normalization" policies, the arrests of hundreds of thousands of dissidents over the years, the forced emigration of nearly half a million people out of the country, and living under decades of Communist rule. If your country ever deigned to find out who a low level idiot like Steve King was, I'm sure your papers today would feature headlines like "American half-wit trivializes our entire history".
But yes the time for revolution is at hand. No longer must the people suffer the indignities on having the government try to make health care better, more accessable, and more affordable for them. No longer will the people have to stand for our elected leaders trying to make it so that insurance comapnies can't fuck them over as hard as they used to. No longer will the jackbooted armies of communism march through our streets chanting "Would you like marginally better health care?" No longer will our people have to suffer under an attempt to pass legislation that is morally, ethically, spiritually, factually, and historically indistinguishable from post-WWII Soviet communist rule in Eastern Europe. Overthrow the government! Steve King is the new Vaclav Havel.
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D...ipshit-Missourah), fresh off he intellectual treatise on how passing legislation is hard and stuff, adds her voice to the chorus of idiot Democrats who think the best solution is to make sure that they royally piss off the last two remaining people who have faith in them and that the lesson of last night's loss is that quitting is the best option.
"As I said to somebody last night:, everybody needs to get the Washington wax out of their ears and listen and pay attention that people out there believe that we are going too far, too fast," McCaskill told POLITICO.
Yes, because if there's one thing that we've learned it's that the process surrounding the health reform battle that consumed nearly all of the year in an attempt to force some of the slightest and most incremental changes onto the health care system has been moving too fast and is trying to do too much. I know the one impression I've come away with in the health care fight is just the sheer speed of it all.
So there you are America, the lessons that a year long battle and a special election have taught us are that: hard work is hard, the glacial pace of the Senate is not slow enough, moving our health care system from about a 3 out of 10 to a 3.1 out of 10 is some gigantic leap that this country is unprepared to take, status quo uber alles, and that, when at all possible, doing nothing is the best option. Thanks for clearing that up Claire, I was worried there for a second that not enough Democrats were saying stupid shit and advocating for idiocy. Go sit in the shame corner with Barney Frank and Evan Bayh.
DUBAI—The recent opening of the 2,717 ft, 160 floor Burj Khalifa skyscraper was greeted with joy by many. However, the centerpiece of what Dubai officials are hoping will become the London or New York of the Middle East has been met with trepidation by several groups. Indeed, the number of vacancies in the $1.5 billion skyscraper, combined with the debt incurred to build such monstrous buildings, and the resulting collapse of Dubai’s finances, have signaled the death of one of the world’s formerly booming industries: immensely stupid construction.
In fact, with the Burj Khalifa completed there are no new plans for any new intensely idiotic building concepts or even marginally feeble-minded and functionally useless projects. Recent months have seen a dramatic scaling back or even outright cancellation of some of the dumbest and most ill-conceived architectural projects known to man.
All this has many wondering what lies ahead for the stupid building construction industry that fueled Dubai’s growth at the outset of the 21st century.
“Yeah, times are tough,” a mournful Henri Duplass, CEO of Duplass Merde, one of the largest builders of foolish structures in the world, noted. “I remember when we built that giant 22,500 square meter indoor ski slope and followed it up by building the world’s largest outdoor pool and fake beachfront 100 yards from an ocean beachfront. Those were heady times."
“Before everything went to shit, we were designing a fake Swiss lakeside mountain retreat. We were carting in a trillion tons of granite for our mountain, had drawn up plans to dig out an artificial lake the size of Lake Champlain, and were still tinkering with the massive air conditioning/sprinkler system that would have been required to keep natural Swiss flora and fauna alive in the middle of a 120 degree desert. It was going to cost $7 billion dollars and be of no use to anyone. It would have been so... so beautiful...”
“Now? We’ve been reduced to crafting practical structures that are of use to normal people. I designed some low-income housing the other day and almost vomited in my mouth.”
Indeed, the industry has taken a massive hit. In recent years, Dubai had boasted 25% of all the world’s cranes in operation, but has recently seen that statistic shrink to an alarmingly sensible level for a Middle Eastern country with little in the way of industry, culture, or population.
In addition to the Dubai Swiss Chalet project, the recent economic troubles have cause the cancellation or delay of numerous ridiculous projects including the Dubai City Tower, a 1.5 mile high 400 floor building that was to have a vertical bullet train instead of an elevator, a Hanna Barbara-themed amusement park on a hover platform, an artificial island shaped like a construction team building an artificial island, a five thousand seat stadium dedicated to women’s sports, a Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, a branch of the science department of the University of Alabama, a monument to human folly, a Catholic church, and a series of metaphorical buildings that were to be built on foundations of sand.
According to analysts most of the problems in Dubai result from a drastic overestimation of the desire of people to live there, resulting in numerous home and business vacancies combined with the sheer amount of debt the United Arab Emirates amassed to build these asinine structures. With estimates of $100 billion in debt for the state owned businesses that amassed them and little hope of recouping losses and filling vacancies in this economic climate, the outlook is bleak.
“Some would say that we’re up shit creek without a paddle,” observed Ali Mohammed Sahan, a spokesman for Dubai World, the government owned investment company that funded most of the retarded structures. “But I disagree. We have a paddle, it’s just that it’s over 600 meters tall, made of platinum and diamonds, and affixed to the ground through a complex jumble of steel trusses. It’s going to take an incredible sum and a greater influx of foreign capital for us to detach and use said paddle.”
But despite these setbacks and the massive contraction that the stupid building industry is about to go through, those close to the situation remain optimistic for the future.
“Somewhere in a backyard someplace, there’s some kid in a sandbox building some dumb fucking thing out of whatever he can get his hands on,” observed a prideful Duplass. “And somewhere there’s some rich idiot who wants to deficit spend his country into poverty and utilize the modern equivalent of slave labor to get it built. That’s the kind of thing that gives me hope for the future.”
“We’ll be back before you know it. Building, I don’t know, a bunch of skyscrapers that fit together like Tetris blocks or something,” Duplass smiled. “We’ll be back.
Economist Larry Summers, current Director of the White House's National Economic Council, drops a quote attacking the notion that markets act rationally in an unpublished paper. It's successful in that area, but it's useful in so many other areas too.
THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around.
Can I get that on a t-shirt? Maybe a mug or a mousepad?
This seems like such a well adjusted movement. Gotta love people who just got their taxes cut complaining about tax raises, all the third rate conspiracy nuts, people bedecked in tea bags, misappropriated quotes from our founding fathers in an attempt to tie the Revolutionary War in with a bunch of right wingers bitching about liberals, JESUS~!!!!!, the thinly veiled racism, the people who think they're personally paying for every Negro mortgage north of the Mason-Dixon line, the people who didn't care one tiny bit about the violation of our rights over the past few years thinking that passing a spending bill that attempts to stem our slide into a great depression is a fascist violation of their constitutional rights, the people who didn't care about deficits and spending over the past eight years suddenly concerned when we have to deficit spend to fix the problems their hero George created, and the general level of bootheel licking towards the rich. What's that Mr. Taibbi? Yes, peasant mentality is a good description.
We barely have to do any work, they're already self-parodied.
Human Events has done us all the favor of delving into the fertile labyrinth that is the mind of America's dumb rural aunt, Sarah Palin. When asked to explain what John McCain most smelled like what was the biggest selecting Palin mistake selecting Palin that selecting Palin the campaign selecting Palin made selecting Palin, Sarah decided to swing for the fences after mindwiping every interview she did from her brain.
PALIN: The biggest mistake made was that I could have called more shots on this: the opportunities that were not seized to speak to more Americans via media. I was not allowed to do very many interviews, and the interviews that I did were not necessarily those I would have chosen. But I was so thankful to have the opportunity to run with John McCain that I was not going to argue with the strategy decisions that some of his people were making regarding the media contacts.
But if I would have been in charge, I would have wanted to speak to more reporters because that’s how you get your message out to the electorate.
You and the Obama camp both, sister. Your continually inept interviews caused so many Americans to hock puke up into their mouths that it was the only thing keeping them from tasking the full flavor of the boiled shoe leather they were forced to eat because the economy collapsed. You are the woman perpetually baffled by the question "Could you be a little more specific." You got steamrolled by Katie Couric and were all but hidden from the press corps. You should never be allowed to talk to anyone unless they are so sycophantic as to completely protect and answer questions for you (Human Events FTW~!). The only thing more destructive than your interviews was the selection of you by Crazy Uncle Walnuts.
Be 2012 already, I need to see what kind of campaign she runs for President.
If you've been to the Huffington Post recently you've no doubt seen their breathless coverage of the supposed French Terror attacks. Big banner headline, many pictures, multiple stories. You must have thought, like I did, that "the shit" was "going down" and there must have been some serious co-ordination to pull off both a bomb in a department store and an assassination attempt on Sarkozy. Is this the new 9/11? Is this the beginning of a co-ordinated terror campaign across Europe? Are chickens coming home and roosting?
No, no they aren't. The assassination attempt, such as it was, involved a man being pulled out of line at the front gates where it was found he was carrying a knife and a taser. Apparently trying to taser and stick Nick on that part of the tour where you get to meet the President. He should have snuck the knife in his shoe, got a press pass, and thrown it at Sarkozy. The bombing plot, such as it was, involved old sticks of dynamite with no detonator, bundled together and placed in a bathroom, and a call from the terrorist masterminds telling the police exactly where it was. The Interior Minister deemed "There was no risk of explosion". The group responsible wanted France to pull out of Afghanistan or "Otherwise we will go back into action in your big capitalist stores and this time without warning you", followed by a "You big meanies" before retiring to their retarded French Cal Berkeley equivalent.
Clearly 9/11 Part Deux, and worthy of breathless coverage and headlines. Are we back to hyping every nitwit with a harebrained scheme as the next bin Laden? Great. Someone bump up the alert color to orange or whatever color meant "shit yourself".
Deciding to make a late charge in the "Biggest Balls of the Year" competition, Merril Lynch CEO John Thain decided that despite the fact that his company lost $11.67 billion and was forced to sell to Bank of America to stave off the negation of its existence, he deserves a fat stack of cash with a cherry on top.
Merrill Lynch & Co. chief John Thain has suggested to directors that he get a 2008 bonus of as much as $10 million, but the battered securities firm's compensation committee is resisting his request, according to people familiar with the situation. ... Thain has said he deserves a bonus because he helped avert what could have been a much larger crisis at the firm, people familiar with his thinking told the WSJ.
Ah yes, I believe this is what's known as the "Incredible Huevos Maneuver". The old "Although we faced total ruination under my stewardship, we only hit 90% ruination so....uhhhh...money please" gambit. I guess by the standards of economic relativism, yeah Johnny, you didn't go Lehman Brothers on everyone. By normal standards you are a nitwit who ran his company into the ground and helped contribute to the new depression. Take pride, have a cookie, and fuck off. Sans the $10 million bonus you didn't earn.
Today all the Senators meet in the secret chambers beneath Washington to vote on whether or not Joe Lieberman gets dipped slowly into a hot vat of acid or given a bag of money. Also whether or not he keeps his seat on the Homeland Security Committee. Democrats like Pat Leahy, Byron Dorgan, and Tom Carper all believe Holy Joe should face some sort of consequences for his constant campaigning for McCain, his slamming, dissembling, and lying about Obama and his policies, his RNC speech, his campaigning for Republican senators like Norm Coleman, and stuff like his statement that he didn't know if the US could survive 60 Democrats in the Senate. They generally think a man who does this shouldn't really be rewarded with a committee post that came about as a result of Democratic control, when all Joe did was fight for Republican control. Also, he already had the chair and did absolutely nothing with it for 2 years.
There are senators like Amy Klobuchar and Evan Bayh who think that Lieberman should be let back in if he makes a really sincere apology and says he's really really sorry. Others just think he should be let back in anyway, because they're Democrats and are terminally stupid. Reid already discussed stripping Joe of his chairmanship and he reportedly threw a snit and threatened to go over to the Republicans.
His empty threat to go join with a group of powerless individuals with no committee chairs and dooming himself to election defeat in his home state apparently scared some of the Democratic caucus and because they are big spineless lady boys they are expected to let him stay, give him control over Homeland Security, and at worst strip him of his Environment and Public Works subcommittee chairmanship. Though if he stamps his feet and holds his breath over that the Democrats will probably make him Majority Leader instead, perhaps impeaching Obama and replacing him with Lieberman. Obama should be thrilled with that since he made so many calls to people asking to keep Mr. Sanctimonious in the caucus.
So unless there's a major finding of a spine in the next few hours, Joe Lieberman gets everything he wants. I'm sure all those Senate Democrats are going to be real surprised when he continues to dick them over in the Homeland Security Committee and generally act like the personification of smug self-centered obsession. You earned it Democrats. Congrats.
Michael Barone, senior writer for US News and World Report
"The liberal media attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby," Barone said, according to accounts by attendees. "They wanted her to kill that child. ... I'm talking about my media colleagues with whom I've worked for 35 years."
I think that's overly simplistic. I mean sure all of liberal America hated the fact that she gave birth, I mean we are trying to outlaw the concept, but we were also incensed at the clear presence of shoes during that pregnancy and the lack of timesheets proving residence in a kitchen. Also that she was insufficiently a liberal feminazi. I know those concepts don't seem to go together, but they do. You just have to cross your brain, unfocus it, like a mental Magic Eye painting.
You're on to us Mr. Barone. Well played. Unfortunately it was too late, our man has already been elected. See you in 2012.
I suppose it was only a matter of time. Still searching for that ever-elusive bottom, John McCain today invoked the S-Word during his weekly radio address.
“You see, [Obama] believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that help us all make more of it. Joe in his plainspoken way, said this sounded a lot like socialism,” McCain said.
Sadly, the Joe to whom he's referring is, in fact, Joe the Plumber/Florist/Carpenter/Blow Job Enthusiast, on whom I am growing tempted to take out a contract.
Also, the "redistribution" he's referring to is called progressive taxation, not Socialism.
But none of that matters. McCain's campaign is allergic to reality, in a Bushian sense with which we are all by this point very familiar. I bet you a shiny American nickel that within the week we'll hear allegations of Obama administering blood-bathed neopagan rites to Hugo Chavez at a Planned Parenthood retreat or, I don't know, palling around with terrorists.
While McCain was using his platform at an economic forum to claim that Venezuela is a Middle Eastern country, his campaign sent out an email to its supporter list (I still haven't been removed) that offers an interesting look into the candidate's rationale for backing the bailout:
If we do nothing, many businesses may fail. Sonic Corporation, a drive-in restaurant chain based in Oklahoma, learned on Thursday that one of its lenders, GE Capital, had stopped extending new loans to the chain's franchisees. That will block plans to rebuild restaurants, add equipment and open new locations.
Apparently Oklahoma governor Brad Henry (D-ipshit) isn't satisfied with how difficult it already is for one of his female constituents to assert control over her reproductive rights.
