For anyone who’s keeping track, I’m now up to 2.5.  Two and one half students I’ve made cry.

First was the high schooler who could not (and still cannot) tune her own violin.

Next came the fifth grader who has been taking lessons for two years and is still unable to name or identify or play any of the notes from the first song of the first book.  And she and I sat and had a nice discussion about whether or not she really wanted to play the violin, because if she was not able to make any time – ANY TIME WHATSOEVER – at home to learn her notes and practice her instrument, she would never get past the first song.  It was basically Fifth Grader Ultimatum Time.  If you want to play the violin, you will practice.  If you don’t, you are wasting my time and yours and your mother’s money and please take up something like percussion (which she did!).

And today was the half.  A different fifth grader who had written in her practice journal that she practiced EVERY DAY for ONE HOUR.  Clearly that was bullhonkey.  And PLEASE, children.  I am the champion of fake practicing.  I used to record myself practicing and play it on repeat so my mother thought I was being productive, while I sat in the closet and read.  Pretty clever for a seven year old, huh?  In any case, it was evident as soon as she picked up her viola that there was no way on God’s green earth that she’d even read through the music, let alone practiced for AN HOUR A DAY.  And I told her so.  “Listen, child, if you actually did put in this kind of time, that’s amazing and wonderful and really great that you’re able to find that much time in your day to devote to your instrument.  If, however, you actually didn’t practice, don’t try to pull one over on me, because I assure you, I CAN TELL THE DIFFERENCE.”  Then silence.  Then tears welling up in the eyes.  And, for the record, I wasn’t even being mean.  I was just calling upon my student to ‘fess up, which finally she did.

But you know what, I don’t necessarily think tears are such a bad thing.  I can’t count the number of times I left my violin lessons crying when I was little.  And sometimes these kids need to know that I’m not just going to a) let them blatantly lie to my face, b) let them skate by without ever practicing, or c) being completely and utterly incompetent and then being downright blissful with that.  I’m just not quite sure where to draw the line between being too nice and being too harsh.  I suppose it’s an art I’ll need to hone constantly.

Anyway, my goal is to keep the number of criers to just under a dozen.  I think that’s a reasonable goal.

Dear Baldy,

Usually there’s an imaginative  search parameter or two daily among your fans two-stepping into here from Google but lately it’s been repeats involving tattoos, jews, and L Anne Carrington searching for herself. Yawn.

Two of the most repeated searches from yesterday make me laugh for totally different reasons. Both involve obsessional women.

“smartie “l’anne carrington” ebook” – L Anne, L Anne, L Anne. She’s quaking in her boots trying to find out if Idletard’s Smartie actually is compiling an Ebook of her adventures.  I feel the rumblings up over the Alleghenies and the Blue Ridge right now and smell her arid sweat. Never fear, Smartie is doing just that and David I’d recommend you get a copy as soon as it comes out. You’ve stated you like to read and it’s going to be a fascinating study into mental illness, plagiarism and crime.  I promise you’ll laugh, cry, throw up and gasp before coming back for another plate of crazy.

Personally I think they should build L Anne her own special wing at the Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. She can keep company with the spooks and haints and leave the rest of us alone. It’s just south of her home in the burbs of Pittsburgh.

“David Cook Uncensored” – I’ve never visited this site run by Mary Ann/Holly containing various sockpuppets of Holly pretending to be other people yet only cheering Holly on and I don’t plan on it. I don’t even have the addy but I do understand that there’s one heck of a battle going on right now over that mysterious tattoo of yours. Apparently you getting a tattoo is turning off Mary Ann/Holly to the point where she’s almost ready to toss you on the Idol scrapheap of former lust objects along with Clay Aiken and Constantine.  Fickle fans. Mary Ann – Holly needs to join L Anne at the TALA.

The question that most springs to mind on these two is why Pennsylvania? Why the high percentage of completely wacko obsessed fans in the Keystone state? Is it something in the water?  I know my most insane clients at work come out of the Philly area and seem like they could be characters on “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia”. Something must be seriously wrong with that part of the world

Only Dick “Dick” Cheney could be proud of such spawn.  Yick…

Bulltwitters beware, there’s a new Tweep in the Twitterverse: “Liar Alert“.

This is either a bot or an extremely busy person, because its primary purpose appears to be calling out all the lies generated by the right-wing tweet machine.  One after another, after another, after another, after another…

Since it would be a full-time job (and when I say “full time” I mean “24/7″, with “no sleep”) to track all the lies of these prolific bullshitters, Liar Alert sometimes adds a bracketed “One Lie Fits All”-type note just to make things a little easier:

Oh, and lookee here:

Good luck, Liar Alert.   You got your work cut out for you.

The woman credited with originating the false “death panels” claim about health care reform legislation worked with Phillip Morris in the 1990s to derail the Clinton administration’s efforts to reform health care, according to the October 1 issue of Rolling Stone magazine.

via Originator of False “Death Panel” Rumor Worked with Philip Morris in 1990s to Kill Health Care Reform | Center for Media and Democracy.

Despite the weeping, near madness of Glenn “one step away from a nervous breakdown” Beck, despite the inevitable snide and angry cluelessness of the vapid Sean Hannity, despite the shrill shrieking screams of the two Michelles (Malkin and Bachmann), despite the desperate cries for help and attention from the Coultergeist, despite the fact that any normal person would get up and walk out of any room one of them might enter and run screaming from one that two or more polluted with their presences, none of that pitiful menagerie comes close to the sheer odiousness of Rush “we need segregated school busses” Limbaugh, still a dubious champion of lying hypocrisy and banal blather after all these years. The only living creature in the right wing sphere of hate who even comes close is his near twin, Big Dick Cheney. I swear, if you rubbed the two of them together, there would be a great sulfurous explosion and Satan would appear, ready to do your bidding.

As she does every now and then, more then than now, Maureen Dowd gets it right this morning. I particularly liked this brief summary of  the South Carolina GOP:

The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson.

“A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we’re part of the union,” said Don Fowler, the former Democratic Party chief who teaches politics at the University of South Carolina…. He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree.

God bless America….even those who’d just as soon leave it as love it.

Pierce. Altercation. Slacker Friday.  The former’s letter to the site’s end-of-week posting makes my week, week after week.

This is from today’s missive:

[B]y all the standards of objectivity I was taught in journalism school–the most basic of which was that, if you saw a man walking down the street with a bird on his head, you could report it without finding someone else to tell you that, no, what you actually saw was a bird walking down the street with a guy on his ass–there is no longer any reason to take the Republican party seriously.

[...]

[T]he fact remains that it was American conservatism that spent three decades throwing open the doors to the monkeyhouse–starting with the Goldwater campaign in 1964, moving along through the Reagan campaigns of 1976 and 1980, the NCPAC campaigns of that same era, the marriage of convenience with theocratic crackpottery, the Buchanan campaign against the first President Bush, the various exercises in lunacy aimed at Bill Clinton, the half-mad banality of Newt Gingrich, and the cult of personality that sprang up around the second President Bush. It’s a little late for delicate conservative intellectuals to ponder how it was that all that monkey poo ended up on the walls.

The serious people don’t lead in that party any more, and the leaders of it — Hello, Michael Steele — are not serious people. It is a major political party run now as an elaborate radio talk-show and completely in thrall to the maniacs who run actual radio talk-shows.

Do it!  Go on Rachel Maddow’s show!  America needs you to kick the asses of the anti-healthcare reform lying liars and tell the truth about universal healthcare!

Well how about that?  The guy who introduced universal healthcare in Canada is now voted as our “Greatest Canadian”… gee, I wonder why?

(via Dammit Janet via Northwestern Lad)

Good morning, Chochachos. It’s Wednesday, September 2nd. The Rockies are back up a game in the NL Wild Card race, and the Red Sox may be turning things on at the right time. Let’s go.

FIRST BASE: SIX SHOOTER Jonathan Papelbon has been maligned this year despite putting up solid numbers; this is one of the cases where the statistics, to hear his critics talk, don’t tell the whole story. For the talk of Daniel Bard being groomed as the “closer in waiting” to those that newly-signed Billy Wagner opens the door for the Sox to jettison Papelbon in the offseason, Papelbon was still an effective closer, if not as dominant as before. Last night, Papelbon relieved an ineffective Hideki Okajima with the bases loaded in the eighth inning and the Sox up 7-4 — and didn’t give up a run (Thanks to a large degree by a ridiculous sliding catch by Jacoby Ellsbury). He finished off the Rays, now six back in the Wild Card standings, in the following inning for his first regular season six-out save. Meanwhile, the Rangers swept their doubleheader from Jays and sit 3.5 back. In the NL. Cole Hamels 2-hit the Giants for 1-0 victory, and the Rockies beat the Mets 8-3. In other action, Albert Pujols hit his 42nd home run in the Cardinals’ 7-6 win over the Brewers, the Yankees beat the Orioles 9-6, and the Braves beat the Marlins, 4-3.

SECOND BASE: NUTRISYSTEM? NUTRI-SHIT IF YOU ASK ME This morning I was watching SportsCenter when I saw the ad for Nutrisystem — the weight-loss meal subscription plan that engages in portion control — featuring Chris Berman, who claims to have lost 41* lbs. on the diet. He joins celebrities such as Dan Marino, who lost 22* lbs., Marie Osmond, who lost 50* lbs., and Don and Anne Shula, who lost 32* and 23* lbs., respectively, on the diet plan, according to their statements.

I have a piece of news for you: this is a CROCK OF SHIT.

Everyone I’ve listed above is a celebrity. Now imagine, if you will, that I’m a celebrity (bend your brain). I am overweight. I want to lose weight. How would I go about doing this? Would I:

a) Subscribe to an info-mercial based diet system that sends you plastic-wrapped, subpar microwaveable food, OR:

b) Hire a personal trainer?

To spare you the suspense, the answer is b. I would go so far as to guess that of the celebrities listed above, zero of them consistently use, or have ever used Nutrisystem. I would go so far as to say that Nutrisystem basically admits this. See all those asterisks above? I got those straight off the Nutrisystem web site. Every single “testimonial” from a celebrity about their weight loss carries one of those asterisks, every time their weight loss figure appears. Here’s how Marino’s bio reads:

I saw the success my buddy Jim Stuckey had on the program, so I gave Nutrisystem a call. Boy, am I glad I did. I lost 22 lbs.* on the program and I feel great. I haven’t been this weight since I started playing pro football back in 1983. I got a variety of delicious foods to eat, and they were super easy to prepare. It was an easy, convenient and delicious way to feel satisfied.

“My friends call me ‘Skinny.’”

The weight just kept coming off. My goal was getting to 20 pounds lost, and I got to 22*-and I’ve kept it off for two years now. My wife loves the way I look and my family is amazed at how much younger I appear. I even have a new nickname. My friends call me “Skinny.” I don’t think anyone’s ever called me that. I wanted to look better and feel better than I had since retiring, and Nutrisystem help me reach that goal. Nutrisystem was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

On each page on the site that an asterisk appears, somewhere these words will as well: “*Results not typical.” So that’s it, folks: if you want a diet “system” where losing 22 lbs. isn’t even typical, Nutrisystem is the one for you. But I wouldn’t take Dan Marino’s word for it.

THIRD BASE: GFAIL There was a minor panic from some quarters of the Internet when GMail went down for about 100 minutes yesterday. Google was doing some upgrades and took part of its server offline, not realizing that they had miscalculated how much those servers kept GMail chugging along — that’s the story according to the GMail blog. Sounds good enough to me, and I was able to access GMail through my iGoogle portal. Still, some people reveled in the “GFail” episode. A certain floppy-haired former sports blog editor exulted on his Twitter feed: “By the way: So rarely is stubbornly hanging onto Yahoo! Mail worth all the mockery I receive. Thanks, Gmail!” He’s right about one thing: it’s rare that holding onto other mail systems is worth it. I consistently recruit people who have no reason otherwise not to switch to GMail — can’t, for work or paranoia reasons — to make the leap, and many of them just won’t do it, hemming and hawing about people not finding their new address, or whatever. I’m sure they felt good yesterday, but let me impress this upon them: they likely spend far more than those 100 minutes negotiating the anachronistic layouts of those mail systems per year already; this evened the playing field for a bit. GMail was, and still is, better than any other mail system, and the fascination — from GMail users and non-GMail users alike — with a slight service disruption is silly. It’s the Internet. It happens.

HOME: YES Deadspin put together a comprehensive look at the Mets’ season-to-date, an exercise in creative losing that would make Cubs fans proud. Some Mets fans are over it, consoled by the fact that “no one cares,” but to deny the cause-and-effect involved — and to ignore the sheer artistry of their losing — would be unfortunate. Seasons like this often seep into the ether once they’re over, gone forever, and this one probably will, too, so we’ve got to cherish it while it lasts. These results aren’t typical.

Well this is embarrassing. I’m being followed by Minnesota Democrats Exposed. Not sure if they’re just following any political blogger with a twitter account, or if they think I’ll post something “damaging.”

I don’t tweet much. For the damaging stuff they’ll have to read my blog, each and every post of which contains a world of information righties aren’t privvy to, actual news being scarce on their websites and news sources.

It’s things like this that renew my interest in local politics, and locally the GOoPers are into full frontal buffoon mode:

Dusty Trice says the MN Republicans aren’t letting their candidates speak at the State Fair

Dave Mindeman says that the only GOoPer gubernatorial candidate with a State Fair booth is Marty Seifert

Paul Demko on the legacy of the RNC and 800 arrests

“What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing.”

Casey Selix on Michele Bachmann’s ridiculous claims about healthcare in the USA

MN GOP outed as liars by MN GOP web-cam!

Dave Mindeman also has a nice bit of research in follow up to Katherine Kersten’s latest anti-slut campaign.

As usual, in Minnesota it will again be up to the DFL to figure out how best to lose the governor’s race, but I have every confidence they’ll figure out how to screw it up.

-

National Republicans behaving badly:

Florida newspaper gets reamed by readers for running ad rife with phony allegations

DOJ embeds second class all the way, and here to stay (Hans von Spakovsky sighting!)

Nothing accidental about that “Great White Hope” rope a dope in Kansas: Lynn Jenkins wrote a resolution that showed she knew full well what that phrase’s historical context referred to

Bruce Bartlett trash talks the Bushies some more

Mary Cheney, she of the lesbian partner and child, gave $1000 to anti-gay Rob Portman’s Ohio Senate campaign

Billionaires for WealthCare ramps up their efforts

Chamber of Commerce sr. veep cites Scopes monkey trial in argument against global warming

Jindal been getting taxied to church services in a state-owned helicopter

Teabaggers call Rick Perry’s bluff — they seriously want to secede from the union

Is George Tenet the Times’ former senior intelligence officer?

The Daily Beast takes on the Deathers

-

Atrios has a great link to a Wisconsin story about how our car culture fuels drunken driving.

I would, as I always do, plead for law enforcement to put a cop at the bar door at closing time to arrest the drunks before they get into their cars. And bars that habitually let their clientele get soused should lose their liquor licenses.

Half our enforcement efforts are centered on catching minors drinking at restaurants. We should let minors drink at restaurants! One drink each and don’t let them drive home but for god’s sake we need to normalize drinking for teens. Bring them up to speed instead of letting them binge on their 21st b’days.

-

Other bad things:

Spy journal story calls for eliminating 100,000 Muslim “zealots”

Lockerbie Bomber: was al Megrahi really responsible?

NYPD drops charges against the Bushwick 32, and will buy off sixteen of them

Coke cut with cattle dewormer (sounds a lot like a CIA plot to poison US coke users much like our government did with paraquat and Mexican pot)

Bill Donohue goes after Penn & Teller [P&T video was here]

Chicago picks and chooses which health department restaurant closings to publicize

Taibbi on TARP “profits” (more from Digby on Taibbi’s latest “print only” article in Rolling Stone)

Sentenced to death by being baked alive

I for one never tire of linking to stories about the University of St. Thomas’s pro-torture ex-Bushie turned professor, Robert Delahunty (don’t miss Coleen Rowley’s take in the comments!)

Engineering planet Earth (sounds like a very, very bad idea to me)

Part three of Sara Robinson’s series on Fascist America

Part 33 of Pigs in Space

Katrina: new proof shows Bush knew, didn’t care

One Pittsburgh health club shooting victim not covered, holds car wash to pay for medical expenses

-

Healthcare:

James Ridgeway on how 37-dimensional chess strategy really works

Debunking the lies about Teddy and Bush’s Medicare rip off

Matt Bai on the geriatric opposition to healthcare reform (and I’ll say it again: Fox News is the new televangelical scourge of the airwaves, lying to vulnerable seniors with Goebbelsian agitprop)

Lying when you know you’re lying

Michael Steele lying when he knows we know he’s lying

-

Elliot Spitzer thinking about a comeback run for Clinton’s Senate seat? We should be so lucky, and I mean that. Victimless crimes shouldn’t disqualify Democrats only, especially not Dems who actually kept a law enforcement boot on Wall Street’s lying neck.

-

I hope Spotify kills the iTunes store.

Music yearns to be free.

-

Iowa State Fair food vs. Minnesota State Fair food, and more on food at the MN State Fair.

I’d say the only way he can redeem himself is to show us his birth certificate.

And then he should STFU.

I have to admit I’m somewhat surprised to see that Katherine Kersten decided to shit on Woodstock this week instead of piling on with more lies about Obamacare. Then again I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone who felt so betrayed by peace and love.

I wasn’t there, but I did buy the album. I was still growing up Republican during the Summer of Love. I was never a hippy. I went straight from Nixon’s GOP to being a National Lampoon reading, stash pouch wearing, war protesting freak. The difference between the two halves of the peace movement was Peace, Love and Bobby Sherman vs. Fuck You and Your Dirty Rotten War. More updated explanations would include Zippy the Pinhead vs. Get Your War On, Bobby McFerrin vs. Michael Franti, Justin Timberlake vs. Billie Joe Armstrong.

So no, I don’t much fucking care for Kersten’s reactionary ragging on Woodstock. If Woodstock had come a few years later partiers would have cleaned up most of the trash themselves and then used it to start fires, the better to burn Nixon in effigy with.

Hippies were part of a slackjawed, blissed out movement the people Kersten idolizes went lynch mob on. MLK’s and RFK’s assassinations were commissioned by the right and Jimi Hendrix died because two authoritarian German bitches held him down while he was O.D.ing, making him drown in his own vomit even as America was experiencing the acid reflux of Vietnam.

For bitter birchers like Kersten, Woodstock was a fling, your crazy first love and wouldn’t your life have been a mess if you’d stayed with her? This week’s vocabulary list seethes with forty years of resentment morphed into a bilious mantra of recrimination and culture hate:

endless drug overdoses
Bacchanalia
thoughtless kids
uninhibited self-expression
instant gratification
“flings” with protest
recreational sex

But that’s just the hellfire. The real sermon is about the responsible middle-aged people who cleaned up afterwards. Kersten is the angry parent mopping up vomit after coming home to the aftermath of a teenage kegger complete with beer stains on great-aunt Catherine’s lace anti-macassar and that’s the last thing I had to remember her by thanks to your dog eating her handmade doilies when you didn’t come home from school on time because hanging out with your friends was more important to you than letting the dog out like you promised you would after driving your dad and me crazy because you just had to have a puppy like your friend Annie and what a slut she turned out to be.

I was planning to write about the clownhall disruptors again this morning like Nick Coleman, Garrison Keillor, Rick Pearlstein and the other cool kids did, but instead I woke up to another slice of pickled bat’s breath hanging over my morning paper like the smog that used to cling to our cities before the hippies and freaks rolled up their sleeves and cleaned up the disgusting polluted stench that was the Greatest Generation’s brown field America. Woodstock wasn’t a toxic waste dump, just a lot of trash and too few porta-potties. The real mess was the smokestack America the hippies were running away from, the aproned moms and four-martinied dads and the war that never ended.

My generation’s greatest failure was that we didn’t bury Katherine Kersten’s America face down.

-

An equally detestable Washington Post this rainy Sunday morning. Fred Hiatt populates his Potemkin village with straw men while Dan Eggen and Philip Rucker transform a well-oiled, fully funded P.R. machine into a loose network of activists. (Somebody with access to a hard copy of the Post should count up the healthcare insurance company ads running in today’s dead tree edition.)

-

More on townhalls and healthcare reform:

Losing your coverage over $6.82

Pulling the plug on grandma?

Mau mauing the office workers

Spector tweets off Grassley

Amenable mortality

More on the ‘03 death panel vote

The Natural Death Act of ‘73

“I’ve got facts, you’ve got Glenn Beck”

Steve Benen with analysis and a Krugman video

Don’t fear the eleven-year-old

Arguing like an eleven-year-old

The Des Moines Register says that Rep. Dave Loebsack faced a concerned yet respectful crowd, and said Loebsack was “showered” with applause.

While there were several tense moments as people discuss costs, the majority of questions were inquisitive and contained less inflammatory statements as events held by other Iowa congressmen earlier in the week.

The crowd here has loudly applauded both sides of the issue.

The Register’s curious verb tenses aside, Denny from C.R. sent me his contemporaneous notes taken from his vantage point in the bleachers.

Denny estimated the Deathers at 20% of the crowd but credits them with gaming the written question approach by “stuffing the basket” resulting in the majority of questions objecting to healthcare reform despite an overwhelmingly pro-reform crowd.

Someone asked [Loebsack] if he thought Grassley was a liar.  He wouldn’t use that term, but he clearly said that the Senator was wrong about the Deather’s issues.

His answers were frequently interrupted by yellowing and “NO”s to things he was saying.

Typical was a loud mouthed fellow behind me repeatedly complaining about how he had lost his job.  At one point, Loebsack referred to his previous career as a College Professor, and the loud mouth yelled, “that explains a lot.”

He also kept yelling at the congressman to “read the bill!!!”  It was obvious that the yeller hadn’t, or if he had, he wouldn’t have understood any of it.

Protesting questions were always met with applause and cheers, while the answers were frequently met with boos.

I think that while 1/3 of the audience were protesters, less than 1/5th were of the loud, sign waving vocal type. They were standing and carrying on about 8-10 times during the meeting.  Supporters of reform were dedicated applauders, but were calmer and rarely out of their seats.

Here in Minnesota John Kline predictably turned down Tim Walz’s invitation to run a shared townhall. Nixon Republican Kline doesn’t do townhalls and called the invite a stunt. Apparently the local media agrees because they’re not covering this story.

Lost in the shuffle of the media wallowing in he said/clown said buffoonery will be our President’s thoughtful weekly address. [video here] But the best remarks of the weekend (including the brilliant Pearlstein column linked to in the first item), is Steve Benen’s catch of Reaganite Bruce Bartlett’s assessment of where we are now.

I believe that political parties should do penance for their mistakes and just losing power is not enough. Part of that involves understanding why those mistakes were made and how to prevent them from happening again. Republicans, however, have done no penance. They just pretend that they did nothing wrong. But until they do penance they don’t deserve any credibility and should be ignored until they do….I want Republicans to admit they were wrong about [Bush], accept blame for his mistakes, and take some meaningful action to keep them from happening again. Bush should be treated as a pariah, as Richard Nixon was….

One reason this isn’t happening is because the media don’t treat Republicans as if they are discredited. On the contrary, they often seem to be treated as if they have more credibility than the administration. Just look at the silly issue of death panels. The media should have laughed it out the window, ridiculed it or at least ignored it once it was determined that there was no basis to the charge. Instead, those making the most outlandish charges are treated with deference and respect, while those that actually have credibility on the subject are treated as equals at best and often with deep skepticism, as if they are the ones with an ax to grind.

Actually, I guess it makes sense that Katherine Kersten would duck healthcare reform. All the best lies have already been used up and other, more talented scolds are zeroing in on the real culprits: the lying liars who dominate our media and who shill for the soulless bastards who’ve ruined this country.

Lie long enough and hard enough, and you’ll have an impact. Fortunately, this time around we have a charismatic President who can townhall with the best of them, and I expect these numbers to change dramatically before Congress comes back from recess.

What won’t change is the fact that the Republicans, having built a bridge they then torched with lies, have isolated themselves from reality and won’t be in a position to add anything meaningful to this debate.

Now, Isakson and other Republicans who eagerly backed [end of life counseling] are distancing themselves from it or lying low in the face of a backlash from the right.

“Until last week this was basically a nonpartisan issue,” said John Rother, executive vice president for policy at AARP, the seniors lobbying group. “People across the political spectrum recognize that far too often people’s wishes aren’t respected at the end of life and there is a lot of unnecessary suffering.”

Played right, this is the hard rock on which the Republicans will beach themselves and their angry followers. A Pitcairn Island ending would be a suitable end for the lying liars. The talk show question I haven’t heard asked is, for me, the most obvious one: Why? Why on earth would Democrats want to kill old people?

This strategy only works because the pump has been primed and millions of Americans are willing to believe anything the lying liars say about Democrats. Death threats against the President are at an all time high. This is the fruition of years and years of eliminationist rhetoric, the cutesy cartoons, crying shame and “reloading” jokes. End tolerance for the hate, and you isolate the haters and their lying enablers.

Journalists and bloggers keep digging, and unsurprisingly it seems almost all of the “kill grandma” crowd voted for similar legislation or endorsed similar concepts in recent years. Not because they want to kill grandma, but because the measures being talked about are good measures. End of life counseling/death planning is a good thing.

Healthcare is a good thing. When it’s readily available people use less of it. Preventive care/wellness is central to having a healthy nation. It’s also cheaper.

Dusty Trice has a George Lakoff video that explains how we should be countering the Republican framing of these issues. As I say everytime Lakoff’s name is mentioned, these things should be obvious to any professional politician. Listening to Lakoff, however, is also a reminder about another argument we’re not having. Any healthcare reform will put a lot of health insurance company workers out on the street. When we start having that debate, it will be impossible to keep single payer out of the discussion.

Single payer would be an easier sell, and it’s what we should be going for but it’s not. This is a debate that’s been framed by Chuck Grassley, and Chuck Grassley’s been handing out Glenn Beck books at his townhalls. Instead of fighting with these people, we need to be isolating them like the left has been successfully isolating Glenn Beck himself. Dick Armey’s quit DLA Piper (parent company of astroturf group Freedom Works) and Zachary Roth speculates that the bad P.R. led DLA Piper to push Armey out the door. Progress is being made.

Collin Peterson had his first townhall last night and said:

“I’m fair game here. I don’t have any problem if you give me hell here, but be respectful of each other.”

Respect is key to everything. You don’t have a dialogue going when people in the audience grab posters of Rosa Parks and tear them up to the applause of half the crowd. Tim Walz just came up with a brilliant strategy. Walz invited next door Congressman and Republican John Kline to hold joint townhall meetings with him. I’m betting Kline ducks the offer, but if this happens I suspect there won’t be nearly so many fear-crazed talk radio fans behaving badly as would be the case if Walz was flying solo.

There are six health care lobbyists for every member of Congress. Six to one. We need to get past this skirmishing over lies because the real fight still lays ahead. Already the Truth-O-Meter folks are calling Chamber of Commerce claims that taxes would skyrocket Half True. That’s more than half misleading. Taxes would go up for a very few which in my book means that the Chamber of Commerce is 98% wrong. Don’t like taxing the rich more heavily? That’s another fight entirely and not related to funding healthcare.

It makes a difference when the left is mobilized and the wins against lying media will translate into better news coverage, making subsequent wins easier to come by. If we win this one, the Republicans will have literally marooned themselves and will cease to be a factor. I think that’s happening.

Denny from C.R. just called. He’s sitting in a packed high school gym waiting for a townhall with Rep. Dave Loebsack. The gym is full and the town hall doesn’t start for at least another hour. No sign of signs or talk radio nuts. I asked and Denny says the news about Chuck Grassley having voted for “death planning” in 2003 is already all over the Iowa media.

The tide is turning and Grassley’s boast of having stalled to keep healthcare from passing out of committee before the recess may end up biting him on his bony ass. Each day we seem to get stronger as their side’s lying flank becomes more exposed. I give it a week and people will be demanding death counseling. Give it two weeks and we’ll be talking about what kind of public option we want.

Keep this momentum going for a month and we might get an actual debate over single payer, aka killing the healthcare insurance industry off once and for all time. That wouldn’t just be sweet revenge, it would be great for our nation. Government could cherrypick the worker bees and the bump in laid off white collar workers would put pressure on government to start creating more jobs (instead of shipping them overseas).

It’s Friday, August 14, and it’s the 97th anniversary of the United States’ first invasion of Nicaragua, as well as the 29th anniversary of the Lech Walesa-led Gdansk shipyard strike. Alice Ghostley, David Crosby, Steve Martin, Gary Larson, Magic Johnson, and Halle Berry all celebrate birthdays today.

New data shows that income inequality is spiraling even higher as the very rich win even faster when things go into the shitter. In Louisiana, a diaper-wearing pervert rekindles the legacy of Huey Long by exploiting the righteous anger of screwed Americans, helping twist it into inchoate hate.

The NYTimes as much as calls Chuck Grassley a liar, and it turns out that Chuck’s grandson/legislator voted for advance directive (aka death panel) legislation. Rudy Giuliani embraces the death panel lie, and even The New Republic is calling this shit out as swiftboating.

James Ridgeway comments on lone wolves and lynch mobs, or what Paul Krugman calls the Republican Death Trip. Terrance Heath says there will be blood.

Rachel Maddow does the video version.

-

Netroots Nation is going well by all accounts. The NYTimes reports on Bill Clinton’s speech, and Crooks and Liars has video of Digby (who just dumped about a dozen quality posts on her site before blowing town for the Pittsburgh lefty fest).

-

More later but I’m off and running early today.

Reggae tonight.

After all the nitpicking and fulminating and posturing, Judge Sotomayor is now Justice Sotomayor. Mel Martinez put it all into context.

The Cuban-born lawmaker from Florida dismissed the furor over Sotomayor’s so-called “wise Latina” remark, saying what matters is that the New York federal appeals judge’s opinions, “not what she said to a group of students one day.”

Sotomayor has been criticized by some Republicans for suggesting in speeches that a “wise Latina” would “reach a better conclusion” in some cases than a white male.

Martinez charged that some Republicans were using Sotomayor’s speeches as “an excuse” not to vote for her confirmation. Her critics, he said, “have yet to produce objective evidence that she has allowed personal bias to influence her judicial decision-making.”

Something for wingnuts to suck on over the weekend.

-

[T]he driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.

Many people hoped that last year’s election would mark the end of the “angry white voter” era in America. Indeed, voters who can be swayed by appeals to cultural and racial fear are a declining share of the electorate.

But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.

And if Mr. Obama can’t recapture some of the passion of 2008, can’t inspire his supporters to stand up and be heard, health care reform may well fail.

Paul Krugman

OK, that was the good cop. Here’s Steven Pearlstein to slap around the usual suspects:

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

….While holding themselves out as paragons of fiscal rectitude, Republicans grandstand against just about every idea to reduce the amount of health care people consume or the prices paid to health-care providers — the only two ways I can think of to credibly bring health spending under control.

When Democrats, for example, propose to fund research to give doctors, patients and health plans better information on what works and what doesn’t, Republicans sense a sinister plot to have the government decide what treatments you will get. By the same wacko-logic, a proposal that Medicare pay for counseling on end-of-life care is transformed into a secret plan for mass euthanasia of the elderly.

Government negotiation on drug prices? The end of medical innovation as we know it, according to the GOP’s Dr. No. Reduce Medicare payments to overpriced specialists and inefficient hospitals? The first step on the slippery slope toward rationing.

Can there be anyone more two-faced than the Republican leaders who in one breath rail against the evils of government-run health care and in another propose a government-subsidized high-risk pool for people with chronic illness, government-subsidized community health centers for the uninsured, and opening up Medicare to people at age 55?

Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society — whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.

If health reform is to be anyone’s Waterloo, let it be theirs.

I don’t know if you’ve watched the townhall videos but the “protesters” are among the worst informed Americans I’ve ever seen. You can reliably count on the major media to interview the biggest stoner at the antiwar rally, but I’ve watched clips where speaker after speaker spouted gibberish based on lies based on agitprop based on lies.

Steve Benen asks, but what if my opponents are crazy? Good question and always timely with this crowd. Charlieq is calling them Kristalnacht Town Meetings. TBogg has the Arkansas videeo, and calls them crazy shouty people [who] will save the Constitution from things they don’t understand. More video from Rachel Maddow. At Campaign for America’s Future, they’re calling them Dick’s Army and pointing out that only a lobbyist funded mob would chant “what’s wrong with profit?”

Also at CFA, Sara Robinson asks, Fascist America: Are We There Yet? All the evidence says yes. Sara’s Orcinus stablemate has more on Glenn Beck’s well-armed fan who freaked out over the alleged FEMA camp, and more on Glenn telling people not to RESORT TO VIOLENCE. But the violence keeps coming, and the media keeps covering up its true face.

Jane Hamsher on the veterans group leader who just told Chris Dodd to kill himself. (It was a reference to Dodd’s health problems and the euthanasia tall tales.) A North Carolina GOoPer jokes about Democrats being lynched at townhalls. Tristero marvels at how the last eight years of Bush-Cheney have magically disappeared. Steve Benen reminds us of how the right went loopy in the ’90s.

This isn’t just coming from bloggers. The Chicago Tribune writes about healthcare protests as staged opposition. They even have a link to the Kenyan birth certificate generator. I would remind you that the Chicago Tribune is the largest Republican newspaper in the country.

What’s it all about? Money. Lies for political gain. Power plays to wire in profits for life. But mostly it’s about the Dixification (now with 100% more Alaskan bear grease!) of the Republican party, a party that no longer has to be taken seriously, a party busy burying themselves lest Khrushchev do it to them first.

The greatest threats always come from within.

The greatest reforms always come from without (the Beltway’s input). Incrementally, perhaps, but things are getting better. Thanks to the laying off of non-blue collar workers, there’s a movement afoot to restrict employer credit inquiries on job applicants to only those individuals whose credit histories are relevant to the job being applied for. This has always been a monstrous injustice, but only now that the pension-gutted “winners” have been turned into losers are we hearing serious talk about fixing all the myriad little fucked up things that make life an unnecessary hell.

Military corruption is finally being investigated in meaningful ways. This alone could pay for healthcare reform (assuming we do reform half-assed and don’t save as much money as we could with single payer). Wall Street bonuses aren’t just news for the weird items anymore. Establishment media critics are starting to call more fouls (but serious players just resort to new albeit friendlier means of persuasion).

And atrocities still happen in the bluest of states. Distribute the blame as widely as you like, just so long as you remember that the only conduit for repairing this ungodly mess is through the Democratic party, and yes, the most direct route would have to transverse a few dead bodies.

Obama’s swayed more than one red state to our way of thinking. Let’s not waste that. So long as the right obsesses with fundraising and sand pounding, there is no serious opposition, just blue dogs, wholly-owned and in the bag media to be circumvented.

Problems not previously seen as such are now being addressed. Victims are finally being set free. Blogger journos are being promoted to the op-ed page. The media is being called out, some apologies are being made, and even players and allies are saying it’s time for them to move on and get a clue (even as others spin numbers differently, trying to hold off the revelation of the internet).

We live in interesting times. Let’s try to deal with that.

-

The meta on that item: this new posting style remains condensed to the point of constipation because it’s all really the same news over and over again. Left moves forward cautiously, right lashes back hysterically. You could get Bushian and call the right evil, but clueless is really a better word. Their handlers are evil, but the movement itself is klangbirding like a motherfucker.

We are winning, but the other side is determined to suck as much joy out of the process as possible. Then again, what else would you expect from losers who’ve been losing gracelessly for almost 150 years now?

-

Errol Morris and Ricky Jay on lying, part ii.

-

A twenty-minute video of the Strib being printed circa WWII. I only got audio when I played it, but you might do better.

This video definitely works better, is well suited for a rainy morning (which is what it is here), and if you stick with it you learn some happy stuff.

-

John Hughes, R.I.P.

If Home Alone wasn’t such a great film, why would you even care what Macaulay Culkin turned into?

Paul Krugman with a scathing rip on high-speed trading and $100 million bonuses.

Neither the administration, nor our political system in general, is ready to face up to the fact that we’ve become a society in which the big bucks go to bad actors, a society that lavishly rewards those who make us poorer.

A gratifying read, to say the least but paired off against a Ross Douthat column in which we learn that California’s dire economic straights were the fault of liberal programs? Well, let’s just say there’s no truth/lies karmic imbalance at the NYTimes today. And if Matt Yglesias finds something nice to say about this Douthat column, I’m dumping his RSS feed again.

But if there’s a tie on the op-ed page, this editorial breaks it with today’s win going to liberals for being more disgusted than the trash talking GOoPers.

-

Do women make better bosses? The Times provides inadequate context and the conversation drifts. Imho, after working with thousands of career development clients most of whom had something to say about their last boss, women do make better bosses than men when they behave like women, and not like men.

Unpack that anyway you like but almost everything that’s wrong with business today stems from a male culture that prizes type As over braniacs and narcissists over empaths.

-

The Times also reports on the healthcare battle being waged outside of the Beltway, but the article is sorely lacking in salient details that were readily available to anyone with access to Google. The barest mention of Harry and Louise but not one word about the massive amounts of money being poured into lobbyists, the strategy papers for disrupting townhalls, or the blatant astroturfing of Congress.

It’s as if Stolberg and Herszenhorn were writing about Al Capone but focused only on his legit businesses. This isn’t even half the story, there’s not even a down payment on the truth despite these reporters have exhausted their line of credibility long ago.

-

Digby on McConnell’s decision to burn all bridges in a lost cause.

The Republican party ain’t ever coming back, not in our lifetimes but I think Digby’s missing the point here. America-hating assholes like McConnell are solidifying the base much like the televangelists do. These jackals aren’t playing to win, they’re playing to keep their fundraising base intact.

So long as talk radio and Fox News continue to report phony/distorted news, the nation is at risk. But thanks to their charming habit of reading liberal minds and explaining liberal motives, they’ve created the perfect propaganda machine. Done properly, and this has been done perfectly, wingnuts learn a completely different set of facts. Argue with them and you deepen their alienation from society and the truth.

It’s all about brainwashing the sheep by telling them they’re rams. Liberals aren’t impervious to this approach, but liberal bloggers who constantly engage in agitprop (John Aravosis springs immediately to mind) seem to get fewer and fewer links from other A listers. But that might just be due to the left being tired from a very long fight in which we’ve yet to achieve many goals. Undoubtedly the potential is there for lefties to dive off the pier into their own lake of political oblivion and isolated certainty.

-

The recovery of Capt. Speicher’s body reminds Larisa Alexandrovna of how hard Cheney & Co. humped Speicher’s corpse in building their case for war.

-

Orly Taitz caught red-handed flogging an obviously phony document. World Net Daily with an assist.

Any major media who lets her back on the air should be eviscerated by each and every subsequent liberal guest. And California activists should file to have her disbarred for this clumsy forgery.

-

Recovering Scientologists keep stepping forward yet somehow no charges have been brought against Miscavige or the church.

Civil actions are not enough. If the government can’t go after Scientology, they’re greenlighting every vacuous New Age cult imaginable.

Besides, the more Americans come to understand cults, the easier it will be for Southern whites to escape the Republican party.

-

Ever since a reader justifiably burned me for passing on a Jonathan Turley link that was single-sourced and lacking in credibility (Iranian virgins raped before execution), I’ve been stealing links from him more than I’ve been linking to him.

This “Creationist murders evolutionist and gets five years” story is for real, and if you have doubts about Turley’s version, just click the link he provides. So long as there’s a link to the source, I can’t argue with the value of his blog. He’s supplanted TalkLeft as the best place to go for legal outrages, even if he’s a little light on the factchecking end of things.

DarkSyde is anything but light on the factual end of things, and his account of how creationists continue to run Texas is a detailed but worthwhile read.

-

The WaPost continues its descent into WaTimes territory. Today they give an op-ed to Tim Pawlenty.

Fine by me. The more Republicans are exposed to Gov. BridgeFail, the more they’ll come to realize that he’s not good with red meat, and he throws it like a girl.

The WaPost also lets Al Kamen talk about Matt Latimer’s soon-to-come-out book in which many Bushies expect to be on the receiving end of some unpleasant stories. I doubt it will be worth the purchase price, but Kamen’s anecdote about how Stephen Hadley insisted on being served food on a silver tray even during late night work sessions speaks directly to the kind of breaks from reality common in the BC admin.

I really can’t think of any rationale for Hadley’s fetish other than shiny. Which is not a bad word to describe the Post’s ongoing war against the war against Bush. Some pretty shiny pants are set on fire in that staff-written screed.

-

Lu Young, R.I.P.

Love trumps politics. You rarely read an obit like this about anyone in Congress. Don and Lu Young had a real marriage and you don’t find many of those in D.C.

Are Birthers part of the anti-healthcare insurance reform strategy? Bill Sher thinks so. Maha is incensed (don’tcha just love angry Buddhists?). mcjoan discusses bipartisanship (didn’t someone once call it “date rape”?), while Religion Dispatches calls out the lie about “mandatory” euthanasia.

And lets not forget how the Americans for Prosperity lynched a Democratic member of Congress in effigy for supporting healthcare reform.

-

I have to ding the leftysphere today. David Waldman’s a big boy so I’ll tag him on this one. Yes, Jeff Flake the reliably hard right Arizona Congressman has filed 533 amendments to the defense appropriations bill.

What Waldman and other lefty bloggers aren’t mentioning, however, is that is the garbage bill that includes the F-22 fighter-jet-POS program, among other bullshit the military doesn’t want. In the name of jobs (jobs that cost far too much) Democrats like Jack Murtha have created a very shitty defense appropriations bill.

This one’s begging for a veto and Obama should do just that if the F-22’s still in this bill when it hits his desk.

Flake is a pain in the ass, but whatever his motives he’s right to slow down this bill. With any luck Murtha will be indicted before this session is out, and the military-industrial complex will lose one of their most reliable stooges.

And yes, I applauded Murtha when he came to speak on Coleen Rowley’s behalf. It was useful to have him speak out against Bush-Cheney’s optional war of aggression, but that wasn’t enough to redeem the billions he’s poured down defense ratholes over the years.

-

While Truth-O-Meter stumbles when they try to make sense of numbers, they do their best work when they address specific claims that have no basis in fact. Glenn Beck is saying the director of the White House  Office of Science and Technology Policy “has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.”

That’s an absolute lie and Truth-O-Meter calls it “Pants on Fire” false. John Holdren co-authored a book on population growth with Paul and Annie Ehrlich back in the early ’70s. In that book they outlined some of the really bad shit that could happen if population growth spiraled out of control. Saying “this might happen” is something experts do all the time, but our wingnutterati love to dishonestly “quote” these scenarios and then misrepresent them. That’s how you use accurate quotes to lie, and old books not on the Internet are hard to factcheck.

Truth-O-Meter also gives a “Pants on Fire” grade to one of the right’s hoarier chain emails, the one that lies and says the Senate voted to give Social Security benefits to illegal aliens. This one has obviously never happened, but it should. Citizenship shouldn’t make a difference when it comes to collecting what you’ve paid in. Undocumented workers pay in but don’t get any pay back. Every serious study finds that undocumented workers get shafted royally but it’s hard to argue with folks who get their information from liars and bigots.

The real whopper of the day comes from Jon Chait. The WaPost gave op-ed space to Harvard’s Martin Feldstein who grossly misexplained single payer by using Britain’s socialistic healthcare system as an example. Wrong on every conceivable count. The UK employs all the doctors and healthcare workers directly. Single payer means you see whoever you like, and then they get paid by the government. All single payer does is simplify the billing end of things while leaving the delivery of health care in the hands of the private sector. The outrage being voiced by bloggers today is that the WaPost hasn’t corrected this massive whopper.

And Rush Limbaugh deserves special mention for reminding his listeners that Andrea Dworkin could be a poster child for the obese. I was never a fan of Dworkin’s, but you’d think the fact she’s been dead for over four years would remove her from Limbaugh’s spite list.

Nuh uh. Thanks to the hate sliming from the right, our new generation of feminist spokespersons are for the most part of above average attractiveness (not that that’s relevant). I suspect that’s why Rush keeps digging up Dworkin. (Rush’s employers, btw, just said thanks but no thanks to Sarah Palin. I can’t imagine why they would think she couldn’t gab coherently for three hours at a time.)

Obligatory Glenn Beck link, although this one’s really about Fox News.

One last bit on corrections. After I left a boneheaded comment at Eschaton in which I totally misunderstood Atrios’ complaint about Connie Schultz, the story keeps turning up in my RSS feeds. Now it’s TechDirt and they shred Schultz for not having done any factchecking.

-

I think the previous item speaks directly to why Obama’s having trouble with his agenda. The media is jampacked with disinformation lately. Adding to the mess, Rasmussen has invented a new way of polling that grossly inflates presidential disapproval ratings.

Needless to say this system won’t be adopted by anyone else, and will vanish the moment the Roberts Court installs a new Republican president. But in the meantime that won’t stop the corporate media from repeating Rasmussen’s bogus numbers.

-

Steve Outing explains in delicious detail why newspapers simply cannot get away with locking up content behind paywalls. Not only will this idiocy not work, it cannot work.

-

I don’t feel like I owe Al Franken any apologies, but I was remiss in not linking to his Sotomayor speech.

It was a very good speech. If he keeps making speeches like this one, I might actually become a fan again.

Another link, one I’d rather not have seen. Brian Falldin, who I don’t know, Aaron Landry, who I like, and Dusty Trice, who is Dusty Trice, have filed an ethics complaint against Michele Bachmann.

I hate when my side Brodkorbs someone. They have a point, but if you’ve followed Bachmann’s career you know that the scariest thing about her is her rabid sincerity. She’s being accused of plugging a business in one of her franked mailings, but I really doubt that was her point.

Petty complaints never won over a faint heart. I expect Bachmann to get re-elected, and then I expect the DFL to redistrict her into John Kline’s CD. End of Bachmann. She can’t win statewide office and she’s too whacko to do anything but preach to the faithful, a group that gets smaller every day.

-

Shit, where did the time go? This writing instead of just linking eats up the clock like a motherfucker.

More in a bit (tons o’links still open in the browser).

The Conservative government is launching unfair and hasty consultations on controversial copyright law reforms, a number of interest groups charged Monday.

“It’s the middle of the summer and they gave us two weeks to put together a position,” said Peter Pilarski of the Retail Council of Canada, who questioned whether the government was fully committed to hearing different points of view on copyright law since it chose to hold consultations on short notice during the summer.

via London Free Press – Canada & World- Tories slammed over ‘unfair’ copyright law reforms.

Once again, LIEnews makes shit up in their report on the story about the guy who drove his SUV too close for the comfort of an anti-abortion protester:

And once again erroneously identifies him as an “abortion advocate”, when there’s no evidence that the abortion issue had anything to do with the situation, or what the perpetrator’s opinion is (let alone being an “advocate”).

Bearing false witness:  okay when it’s fer Jaysus and feti.

Today the scare-quote-crazed Christianist mouthpieces “Lifesite” and “Lifenews” are dutifully parrotting the story that someone tried to fuck with a security camera at Operation Scumbag’s “headquarters” on the “weekend” (suspect “unknown” and “at large”).   But for some reason, they’re not reporting it exactly the same way.  Lifesite:

And Lifenews:

See the big fat lie?  Of course you do.  The Lifenews headline claims that the perp (if indeed there was a perp, but I’ll get to that) was an “abortion advocate”.  Given that Lifesite ran the story 3 days after Lifenews, this isn’t some breaking! news! that’s come out about the suspect.  If there was even the shadow of an indication that the suspect was an “abortion advocate”, Lifesite would be screaming their lungs out about it… but they’re not.  If even Lifesite, which generally bullshits with reckless abandon, didn’t consider this detail worth adding, then it must be a Whopper.  Maybe, through a momentary lapse in their usual batshit insanity, Lifesite editors were able to see that there’s nothing to indicate this little “event” was anything other than a routine B&E… if that.

Yeah.  Let’s look at this thing.  Here’s what they want us to believe actually happened:  (1) A few days after they started bitching to the cops about “threats” and (2) got the cold shoulder from said cops,

Posted same day as story about bicycle "attacker"

(3) someone tried to fuck with their security camera, (4) in broad daylight no less, with (5) people inside the building, and (6) nothing but a bicycle as a getaway vehicle, and that (7) the deal went down while OR’s Troy Newman just happened to be on the phone with a Washington Times reporter, talking about, you guessed it, (8) the death threats Operation Slimebucket’s received.  To top it off, they have a video of the whole routine that looks like a Grade 7 Theatre Arts performance.   But that’s not all…

The Lifenews story with the bogus headline was posted on Friday — however, Operation Douchenozzle’s press release wasn’t posted until Saturday morning.

I guess it’s possible that Lifenews somehow got the “scoop” right after it “happened”, but knowing these people and how much they LIE (there’s evidence of that right in the headline of the Lifenews story), it’s probably just as possible that something else is going on.

*Sniff*  Smells like something rotten is burning, and it’s coming from the general vicinity of Lifenews and Operation Slimebucket.

We all know how anti-choicers twist the truth to promote their agenda, but occasionally they come up with propaganda of such brain-damaged magnitude that it stands alone in its douchebaggery.  Such was the case with something posted yesterday at Jill Stanek’s fetusblog, where they’ve gone into a full-metal pearl-clutching frenzy over a story headlined:

Well, that alone is enough to start a stampede for the fainting couch.  A killer abortionist, and no coverage!  So Unfair and pro-abortionally biased, because after all, the circumstances between this woman’s tragic death and Dr. Tiller’s assassination are exactly the same.  Except that they’re not.

Dr. Tiller was stalked, harassed and shot dead in cold blood in a pre-meditated murder by an anti-abortion lunatic.  The woman in Stanek’s story died because her doctor was negligent, improperly (and one would strongly suspect, inadvertently) administering  the wrong kind of anaesthetic… before the procedure even got started.  That’s right, this story is about anaesthetic, and only tangentially-related to abortion.

As always, in order to cut through the bullshit you have to read right to the bottom of the article to find that:

The District Attorney found the abortionist’s conduct to be “willful, wanton, and reckless” because he sedated Laura with level three drugs without any means of cardiac monitoring or blood pressure cuff; had no assistant who could administer sedation, monitor the patient, or assist in resuscitating her; and, “failed to timely initiate a call to 911.” The board also alleged that the abortionist made false statements.

Tragic story?  Definitely.  Asshole doctor?  For sure.  Death by abortion?  Nope.  Pre-meditated, cold-blooded, sensational murder?  Please.

With fetus fetishists and their “stories”, it’s a good rule of thumb to start off with the assumption that they’re lying, or at least stretching the truth beyond all known parameters, and work your way up from there.

(h/t – Big Blue Fetus, who also hopes everyone buys this horseshit)

]]> http://somenotesonliving.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/to-those-who-think-they-know-us/ Thu, 14 May 2009 17:28:08 +0000 proudprogressive http://somenotesonliving.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/to-those-who-think-they-know-us/

In her quiet tones, and soft speech Erica says it all pretty much here in this video. Lets remember too that those who judge us, those who make laws about the lgbtq are not lgbtq themselves in the “large majority” (or so they say )and its for this very reason , so much of what is said by them about us is biased  and uniformed. soaked in their own priviledge. cisgendered. (look it up, a non gender outlaw, How  can a person of apparent white privilege know what it is to be a person of  color, to desire to wear a turban vs. a cross  in this culture ??? no we cannot.

Until we have walked a mile in the shoes of someone else, lets walk in compassion, err on the side of love. Religious fanatics , read your new testament !  Its got the words of the person you claim to follow ! Stop forcing your views upon the entirety of our diverse culture – We are not your enemy , willful ignorance, lust for power , hypocrisy these are the true enemies of humanity.

Wake up its not the middle ages anymore. Your preachers are exploiting you !!    No one is threatening your religious views , we as a nation have some laws about the notion of shoving  religion down people’s throats….we as a nation , are not a theocracy.  Historically,  we systematically as a nation have had to pass laws , to ensure equal access and protection to counter  hate filled tendencies as a society.   We blame the poor for their troubles, we blame the victims of crime for being victims..its completely twisted.  And for the umpteenth time – a crime is not just a crime. It  never has been and it never will be – the judicial process always takes into account motives – crimes against lgbtq people can be random and by the same token , they can be bias motivated crimes..that is what the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Bill is all about , giving states and localities to ability to investigate what exactly was the motive.

Would you want creed taken out of the protected classes of people ? See it protects you to be fundamentalists – think i like that ? i don’t but i tolerate it. Just like you will when the lgbtq are included as a protected class. So if its good enough for you , its good enough for me. Got that ?  You have a right to believe what you want – i have a right not to believe. WE do not have a right however to murder doctors , or beat on people who don’t believe like you do in order to  terrorize whole communities of people.   we are supposed to live in a society that may not agree with each other , but we have to co exist.  Bible thumpers read what your guy said about Hypocrites..it would do you some good. You spend to much time evangelizing , and its getting really really old. You don’t know us  , Your hate is ugly. Your ignorance is breath taking , your lack of intellectual curiousity dangerous !

True seekers, are supposed to question …religion is not spirituality. remember that ! – enjoy your spirituality , and stop being cookie cutter clone troopers. Sow peace , go read the Gospel of Christ the NEW testament for fuck sake,  and take it to heart.  Quit cherry picking the bible in order to perpetuate hate. And stop shoving your fundamentalist interpretations spoon fed to you by the Huckstes that play you like fiddles , down everyone’s throat – you give your savior a bad name.