When in doubt, quit.

There's been a well worn pattern for legislation over the past few years. Democrats attempt to address a pressing issue. Republicans, seeing that the successful addressing of said issue could make Democrats popular, throw all their weight into opposing it and filibustering it. In the mad dash to get 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, Democrats water the bill down to the point where all neutral observers are angered and disappointed. Bill that addresses tragically little of the original idea they meant to fix eventually passes to overblown fanfare. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Anyone want to guess how that pattern worked out for climate change legislation and energy policy? Surprise!!!! They just ended up quitting.

Light it on fire, and let its carbon pollution soar into the sky unrestricted: climate change legislation is dead.

At a press conference this afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), the Democrats' top climate and energy negotiator, acknowledged officially, and with obvious disappointment, that they lack the votes to pass legislation limiting carbon pollution, and that forthcoming energy legislation will be extremely narrow, in a bid to overcome a GOP filibuster.
...
In the meantime, Reid said, the Senate will proceed imminently with a much smaller bill that will tackle four goals:

It will deal with BP and oil spill liability, invest in the manufacturing of natural gas vehicles, create a jobs program -- formerly called Cash for Caulkers, now called Home Star -- aimed at increasing home efficiency, and put money back in the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

Well done! Round of applause. I'm sure this problem will fix itself. Mother Earth will look at this inaction and no longer wait for the government to fix things. She'll decide to pull herself up by her own bootstraps and become self-reliant. Plus, who needs a new energy policy? We're fine right now depending on the most volatile region in the world to supply us with underground dinosaur blood.

Is their a comic addendum that sounds tin eared in its naivete?

"President Obama called me before this meeting and said, point blank, he is committed to working in these next days at a more intensive pace...to help bring together the ability to find 60 votes for that comprehensive legislation," Kerry said.

Yeah, I'm sure Republicans will be real eager to jump on board with that one. I mean sure, they wanted no part of this bill now, but a week or two from now, closer to the elections, is when they'll all stop making political hay out of this, get serious, start believing science and scientists, and get serious about governing.

Hmm, I wonder if there's a recent scientific report with charts that comically underlines the depth of failure and inaction by our elected betters?

According to NASA, 2010 is on course to be the planet’s hottest year since records started in 1880. The current top 10, in descending order, are: 2005, 2007, 2009, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2004, 2001 and 2008.

Hot is the new normal.

Hah! It's funny because we'll all be dead of heat stroke soon. Bang up job, Senate!

Life In Our New Socialist Hell

I suppose I should have been worried when the screaming ghost of Karl Marx screamed across the sky, laughing and on fire. This was just before the health care vote, I noted, should we be worried about what comes after? As we now know the answer was yes.

Soon after the last vote was cast the earth cracked open, flames shot out from below, and all manner of imps and demons began to crawl out of hell to torment and bedevil humanity. We had not heeded the warnings of the GOP, we foolishly wished for better health care, and in getting that better health care we ripped a hole in reality and freed the devil from his underground prison. Now winged serpents patrol the skies, there's an increase in the amount of pale horsemen sightings, gags of imps are ripping into and devouring any human they see, large groups of hell hounds control most major cities, and we all saw what happened to Indianapolis. The screams... I'd say "My God" but it's clear God has abandoned us, no longer choosing to bless our country, it is clear He has moved on to bless another country that has not fallen victim to the ills of socialist health care. He will tell them of His investing secrets and free market ideals and they will prosper.

On the other hand, dependents can now stay on their parents plans until they're 26 and the drug price donut hole for seniors was closed, so that's nice. Well, it would be if there were any seniors still alive. As predicted, the death panels came for the elders at midnight. Oh these were not jackbooted police forces taking everyone over 70 to judges at a tribunal. No, the elderly simply simultaneously dropped dead as the clock changed over from 11:59. In a press statement later released through the now state run news, Emperor Obama noted that nanobots had taken care of our elderly problem and showed a chart listing the savings that were achieved from such a cost effective measure. The death panels were nanobots, Sarah Palin didn't see that coming.

On the bright side, with every old person dead and demons eating those who venture out into the streets of major cities, jobs are plentiful and mandatory. So now I must go before the work whistle blows and afternoon exercises start under the large picture of a smiling Obama that has been placed on the largest wall of the boot factory the government jobs service placed me at. We have to fill an order of 500,000 boots for trade with Venezuela.

As a man shrieks at me over a loudspeaker to make boots faster lest my family be killed for my insufficient commitment to the cause, large wyverns and demons lay waste to our infrastructure, and Father Obama names himself Life Ruler of the Sovereign Socialist States of Obamerica, I ask you: was health care really worth it? It completely ruined this country, just like the Republicans said. OK, they didn't say anything about the shrieking monster that spits acid and tries to mate with all vehicles, but I think they strongly implied that's what would crawl out of hell if we ignored their warnings and broke the seventh seal by refusing to allow insurance companies to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions.

I just thank God the public option was removed from the bill. Who knows what we might have unleashed had that passed.

Yub nub!

House Approves Landmark Bill to Extend Health Care to Millions



Or, alternately...



Your mileage may vary.

And now a weary nation turns it's eyes to the Senate and asks itself "How are they gonna fuck this up?"

Holder gets fake tough

Attorney General Eric Holder is not a pussy, terrorist loving, Al Qaeda sleeper agent hiring, penisless, Islamofascism appeaser, thank you very much, Liz Cheney. He's a goddamn manly man! Do you want to see him flex his goddamn biceps? No you don't, you don't even want to go to Holder's gun show. He'll show you some gun buying loopholes!

Shit, you don't believe him? Well let's hear him talk tough about Bin Laden.

Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress on Tuesday that Osama bin Laden will never face trial in the United States because he will not be captured alive.

In testy exchanges with House Republicans, the attorney general compared terrorists to mass murderer Charles Manson and predicted that events would ensure "we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden" not to the al-Qaida leader as a captive.
...
The attorney general said it infuriates him to hear conservative critics complain that terrorists would get too many rights in the court system.

Infuriates him! Infuriates! He's so hot under the collar he could rip a legal textbook in half.

All though I do like him dropping a reference to my favorite 1970's revenge film We Will Mirandize His Corpse. Classic film. Charles Bronson plays a liberal Supreme Court justice who has just seen his family murdered by a collection of gun manufacturers he ruled against in a 2nd Amendment case. He then goes on a rollicking rampage of murderous revenge against the gun industry, not forgetting to abide by the legal precedents he swore to uphold. He becomes a one man judge, jury, and executioner. I think it was written by Noam Chomsky.

I think it also might have been a catch phrase in one of the later Dirty Harry movies where Dirty Harry Callahan is made police chief but is hampered by a douchey liberal California Attorney General who wants him to treat criminals with respect... too much respect. As too many criminals are let off in the name of liberal ideas and the populace is besieged by crooks Dirty Harry can't arrest, he goes on a kill spree against the lowlifes before turning his sights on the liberal AG. As he's pointing a Magnum revolver at the cowering AG he shouts "You may think I don't care about the law. You may think I don't care about notions of admissible evidence and protection of Fifth Amendment rights. Know this: I'll mirandize your corpse. See you in hell." he then grimaces and blows the AG away before walking down the state capitol steps to the applause of free citizens everywhere.

So props for referencing those classic films. I'd be more impressed if he actually stood by those principles that he can try terrorists in open court instead of holding them indefinitely, trying them in military omissions, and trying to negotiate with Republicans for a way to not try to put the guys he already said he'd try in open court on trial in open court. Or if he could bother to ever look into all those Constitutional violations, torture, wiretapping, and war crimes that last Administration did. I guess hard-ass statements towards a man I don't think we're even looking for will have to do.

Broken News: Area man apologizes after his parody of religion becomes church doctrine

DOVER—Early today, after much soul searching and numerous bouts of laughing to himself, humorist Charlie Warren formally apologized for the series of events that led a satirical take on religion and religious extremism to become the officially sanctioned doctrine of the Catholic Church.

“I would just like to offer my humblest apologies to the, uh, world, the billions of followers of Christianity, the Pope, and, uh, the Baby Jesus,” a slightly perplexed Warren proclaimed to the assembled media and local religious leaders. “I was just having a bit of fun, making a few jokes or two. I didn’t expect it to go this far. I won’t do it again. My bad.”

He then threw his hands up in the air and with a tinge of complete disbelief in his voice, exclaimed “I just thought people would understand it was an obvious joke!”

The parody, in which an alleged Bishop purported to claim that rubbing children in bacon fat and yelling at them in Latin would ward off “ill gay omens” and that the church should partake in the use of a giant catapult while giving confession so that church patrons may “confess their sins closer to God”, was originally published on Warren’s blog.

Despite the ridiculous claims in the piece and the fact that the Bishop referenced in the narrative, Bishop Don Magic Juan, is an O.G. Chicago pimp, several news services picked up and ran the story as if it were real. Soon after, the Catholic League began pushing these theories, public support in churches increased, and at the behest of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Vatican made these two tenets into church doctrine, placing orders for thousands of catapults and thousands of gallons of rendered hog fat.

“C’mon,” Warren shouted. “Wasn’t the joke massively obvious?”

While to most outside observers that answer would be an emphatic yes, the question still remains how such a ludicrous attempt at satire was able to make it into the laws of the Catholic Church.

“Oooh…..I don’t know if I want to say this out loud, it could get me in a lot of trouble,” said a nervous Oliver Palmer, a news editor for Reuters, one of the news services that originally picked up the Warren piece. “How about…religious fundamentalists in this country are so batshit insane nowadays that there is no ceiling to the kind of incomprehensibly deranged activity, belief, or political cause they will engage in. Anything is plausible. Anything!”

Palmer sighed a bit and winced, “I bet I’m going to get such a nasty letters from Bill Donohue and the Catholic League for saying that.”

But far from castigating Palmer and others who share his similar outlook on the state of religion inside America and around the world, the Vatican was sympathetic.

“It’s a fair cop,” observed Bishop Gianluco Scherzo, the head of the Vatican’s Department for Mitigating the Damage Catholicism Does to Itself. “I mean for years we covered up child molestations, we’re in Africa contributing to the spread of AIDS by opposing the use of condoms or making official statements that they don’t work, and in DC we’re about to shut homeless shelters and adoption centers just because we might have to hire a gay, or at least not fire a gay because he is a gay. And that’s just the official actions of the Catholic Church! We’re not even talking about what all the Christian offshoots and fundamentalists think.”

Scherzo shuddered as he thought of it, “American fundamentalists…woof. Give me the creeps. No, this was all too plausible. Though I still think we’re going to keep both changes. Eh, it’s not like they’re all that much crazier than what we actually believe and most of the catapults are already built and paid for.”

For his part, Mr. Warren has seemed to have learned his lesson.

“Not only do I reiterate my pledge to never dip my toes in the fevered swamps of religion so naively again. But if I do make any future attempts at parody or news satire, I assure you I will do so in only the most hamhanded and obvious way possible, replete with loose ciphers for myself speaking overt statements about their views on current religious trends,” Warren said, his hand placed firmly over his heart.

“You know,” he paused. “Like a hack would.”

Monkey news

Yo ugly ass momma, evolutionarily speaking

Oldest "Human" Skeleton Found--Disproves "Missing Link"

Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a humanLucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago (interactive time line: how the new discovery changes human evolutionary theory).
...
The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today's apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior—long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors—is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings.

I don't want to alarm you, but it seems that God, in conjunction with the baby Jesus, has decided to up his game in regards to providing convincingly plausibly lies to get heretics to believe in evolution and not in the Bible. He's getting serious. Not content just to bury dinosaur bones, God has upped his game: burying evidence He faked that purportedly shows Man's earliest known, 4.4 million year old evolutionary fore-bearer and also scientifically disproves the "missing link" theory, knocking out the notion that we somehow branched off from chimps.

I think we all know what to do now. I'll bury myself in Bible studies, you call Fred Phelps, and we'll go to Tim White and Berhane Asfaw's labs (the two who made the "discovery" and worked out the "science") to laugh at how the scientific community has once again fallen for one of His practical jokes. The punchline is: everyone burns in hell. So believe in your precious fossils, carbon dating, and beloved maths and sciences. We enlightened types know that the earth is 6,000 years old, Jesus rode a Triceratops into Jerusalem, this "evidence" of "evolution" is a hilarious practical joke, and the only good use for math is adding up the ages of everyone in the Bible to provide a timeline of the Earth. Meet me at the creation museum if you want to further discuss how hilarious this is or Kirk Cameron's own scientific work into disproving evolution.

Skynet goes active tomorrow

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.