...has bought YouTube.
There were rumors a few weeks ago that YouTube was going to go subscription, which would have sucked. I'm not sure this is any better.
Google..
Gah
A 13 year old boy somehow got his hands on a freaking AK-47 and brought it to school in Joplin Missouri. He shot the ceiling. No one was injured. God help us.We don’t need God to help us. What we need is a Congress who doesn’t pander to special interests, and instead puts the Federal Assault Weapons ban back in place. It would also be nice to have a president who doesn’t pretend he’s got no power when it comes to such things, and, instead of pressing his party-led Congress to extend the ban, throws his hands up and says, “Well, derrrrr, there was nuttin’ I could do! Congress didn’t send me a bill to sign!”
And, btw, the NRA can kiss my big fat ass. You want to have a gun to hunt? Fine. You want to have a gun to protect yourself? Fine. But you can shove your manifestly ludicrous claim that banning assault weapons, which have no other purpose than killing lots of other people as quickly as possible, is an enfringement on our Second Amendment rights straight up your smoking barrels, you nutwits.
Cromedomius Maximus
The UK is on the case:
The Government is spending £2million to find a cure for baldness.In related news, President Bush has declared war on Britain.
Science minister Lord Sainsbury says he wants the UK to become the world leader in hair restoration.
Good Republican Boy
While six Democrats were competing in primaries for Washington State Representative District #43, one Republican ran unopposed: Hugh Foskett, University of Washington student and “very conservative” All-American boy.
The kind of All-American boy who really believes in Republican values. Like beer bongs, hot springs boys’ nights, and grabbing other dudes' packages.
Facebook + The Stranger = You're Fucked.
I hear ya, Hugh.
Caption This Photo
From page 6 of Newsweek's A Secret Life, on the Foley scandal.
It's labeled "GOP: Washington graffiti."
Speaking of people we don’t care about…
Homeless men are aging on the streets—“John Knight, 60, spends his days wheeling to dialysis treatments, soup kitchens and the freeway ramp where he begs for change. A hospital has become his primary residence, but he sometimes scours the city for ‘a hole to climb into before it gets dark.’ … Dennis Ragar, 66, was homeless for three or four years before he moved into the Raman Hotel, San Francisco's newest city-subsidized hotel specifically for homeless seniors. A former truck driver who suffers from diabetes and needs a hip replaced, Ragar pays $470 a month to rent a room. He says it's better than a shelter, yet not the retirement he looked forward to in his youth. ‘I thought it would be a lot better than this,’ he said.”
Seniors now represent America’s fastest growing homeless demographic.
The Culture of Life, near as I can figure it out, means that your life is worth most before you’re born and during the years when you can work and buy shit and vote Republican. Children and old people—eh.
Suspended Sentence for Child Porn Defendant
Prosecutor John F. Fahey told Judge Thomas P. Miano that [Edward J. Burke III, 47] had 141 photo images and two videotapes of known child victims on a home computer. The victims ranged in age from toddlers to prepubescent children.First of all, the prosecutor was a fool for consenting to allow the defense attorney to argue for a suspended sentence as part of a plea deal. Secondly, the judge is a fucking idiot for suspending the sentence, especially since this wasn’t just a case of possession; Burke was busted because his internet provider alerted authorities after discovering his was distributing child porn images. Thirdly, this guy is about as likely to never offend again as I am to win the Miss America pageant next year. Not impossible, but not very bloody likely!
Fahey and Burke's defense lawyer, John D. Maxwell, had worked out a deal that called for Burke to receive up to four years in prison, five years' probation, and mandatory sex offender registration for 10 years.
But the agreement gave Maxwell the right to argue for a completely suspended prison sentence, which was granted by Superior Court Judge Thomas J. Miano.
Miano noted that Burke has actively participated in sex-offender therapy for the last year and, by his doctor's account, is at very low-risk to offend again.
The protection of children is bandied about—uselessly, cynically—all the time. Video games, music, movies, television shows—children have to be protected from the dangers of fucking pop culture at all times, if you listen to the politicians and various “family” advocates. They have to be shielded from naked bodies in art museums, and books with controversial subjects, and the existence of birth control, and banners discouraging discrimination and harassment against LGBT students. Heck, they have to be shielded from gays altogether, who are constantly trying to shove their big, fancy, radical gayness in our faces. We see adverts where kids’ toys are sprayed with Lysol to protect them from germs; make kids wear head-to-toe protective gear just to ride a bike.
But when it comes to protecting kids against a genuine and unavoidable threat like child pornography, the victimizers get a suspended sentence, because one doctor says, against all evidence to the contrary, that they won’t victimize again, or because they’re “too short” for prison. Or our justice department totally and utterly falls down on the job. Or House leadership doesn’t really care all that much. (If you think they would have done anything differently if Foley were IM-ing 10-year-olds, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you.)
It’s all lip service all the time. It’s just so darned easy to rail against TV or video games, and it’s just so darn hard to make sure we treat child pornography with the gravity it deserves, or actually giving a shit about protecting kids against hunger, poverty, lack of healthcare, or a failing educational system. Fuck these people. They don’t give a rat’s ass about kids. If they did, this asshole would be behind bars, and there wouldn’t be a single child in America going to bed with a hungry belly tonight.
Jobless
Joe Maguire, the author of Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter, has been fired by Reuters. Other Reuters employees not happy. Reuters says tough; cites policy outlining principles of “integrity, independence and freedom from bias,” but won’t elaborate.
Saying “the book speaks for itself” isn’t enough. If Maguire was biased, or wrong, in his book, Reuters needs to say exactly where, because otherwise it looks like they fired him simply for being tough on a prominent conservative.
In which my head explodes.
This just in from Wingnuttia: North Korea’s nuke program Clinton’s fault.
Of course it is.
Bzzbzzbzzpfttsbbbzzzkabibble BOOM!
Fo' Real
Via Maru.
The only thing that would make it more accurate is if there were a picture of me, or any other average American, sitting under that giant elephant ass with a big steaming plopper square on the top of our melon.
Separation Schmeparation
As Exemptions Grow, Religion Outweighs Regulation—“An analysis by The New York Times of laws passed since 1989 shows that more than 200 special arrangements, protections or exemptions for religious groups or their adherents were tucked into Congressional legislation, covering topics ranging from pensions to immigration to land use. New breaks have also been provided by a host of pivotal court decisions at the state and federal level, and by numerous rule changes in almost every department and agency of the executive branch. The special breaks amount to “a sort of religious affirmative action program,” said John Witte Jr., director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at the Emory University law school.”
Read the whole thing. Discuss.
Must Read
What happens when a condom breaks, and you try to get emergency contraception, and get the runaround, and finally get it, but too late? You get pregnant. And what happens then? The assholes come out of the woodwork.
Also, Zuzu and Amanda.
Think Pink/Don’t Think Pink
Some of my favorite bloggers, including the lovely Blue Gal and Threading Water, are taking issue with the Pink Ribbonization of breast cancer awareness. Threading Water, in particular, has raised some good issues, including the corporate influence over charitable foundations and the lack of focus on causes to which fixation on finding a cure contributes.
Admittedly, I have kind of a love/hate relationship with the pink ribbon, for much the same reason I have a problem with any ribbon or similar awareness-raising campaign that focuses specifically on a single image. The ubiquity of the image—in this case, the pink ribbon—can lull people into a false sense of complacency that everything that can be done, is being done.
On the other hand, I dig that when I watched a boxing match this weekend, one of the boxers was wearing pink gloves in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness. It was so odd to see those bright pink gloves; of course people wondered why, and repeated references to them were made by way of explanation. Only having iconicized “pink” in such a manner made possible the discussion of breast cancer in such an incongruent venue.
Thusly, I understand why people don’t like it, and I understand why people do.
That said, I don't think awareness has reached the tipping point we may suspect when we've still got senators willing to halt important research in its tracks—very specifically, the research into causes. And not only willing, but getting away with it.
I don't know what the answer is. I hesitate to condemn people who are trying to do something, even if misguided, when there are still so many people who are actively obstructionist as regards finding both causes and cures. For that reason, I hope both people who support Pink Ribbons and people who don’t will understand and respect that there is room for both of them at this blog.
Foley Round-Up
DNCC Chair Rahm Emanuel on This Week, debating Rep. Adam Putnam who was sent in RNCC Chair Tom Reynolds’ stead. Emanuel comes off well; Putnam looks like a jerk.
The Foley timeline keeps getting longer.
A Republican congressman knew of disgraced former representative Mark Foley's inappropriate Internet exchanges as far back as 2000 and personally confronted Foley about his communications.Meanwhile, the Republicans still try to blame the Dems. Unbelievable.
…The revelation pushes back by at least five years the date when a member of Congress has acknowledged learning of Foley's behavior with former pages. A timeline issued by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) suggested that the first lawmakers to know, Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.), the chairman of the House Page Board, and Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.), became aware of "over-friendly" e-mails only last fall. It also expands the universe of players in the drama beyond members, either in leadership or on the page board.
And conservative Christians blame Foley, but not the GOP.
[M]any said the episode only reinforced their reasons to vote for their two Republican incumbents in neck-and-neck re-election fights, Representative Thelma Drake and Senator George Allen.And if that doesn’t say enough about their bigotry, this pretty much seals the deal:
“This is Foley’s lifestyle,” said Ron Gwaltney, a home builder, as he waited with his family outside a Christian rock concert last Thursday in Norfolk. “He tried to keep it quiet from his family and his voters. He is responsible for what he did. He is paying a price for what he did. I am not sure how much farther it needs to go.”Why are they so willing to hold GOP leaders unaccountable? Charles W. Dunn, dean of the school of government at the Pat Robertson-founded Regent University, explains:
The Democratic Party is “the party that is tolerant of, maybe more so than Republicans, that lifestyle,” Mr. Gwaltney said, referring to homosexuality.
Most of the evangelical Christians interviewed said that so far they saw Mr. Foley’s behavior as a matter of personal morality, not institutional dysfunction.
House Republicans may benefit from the evangelical conception of sin. Where liberals tend to think of collective responsibility, conservative Christians focus on personal morality. “The conservative Christian audience or base has this acute moral lens through which they look at this, and it is very personal,” Mr. Dunn said. “This is Foley’s personal sin.”Naturally, Dunn is full of shit. When you’ve got people like the good Mr. Gwaltney chalking up Foley’s sin to “a lifestyle” and blaming the Democrats for being “tolerant of…that lifestyle,” the suggestion is that Foley’s actions were inevitable, which effectively blames the LGBT community and its supporters for Foley’s “personal sin.”
On the other hand, Dunn uses liberals’ attempt to find out who among the GOP was also personally at fault for letting this happen as evidence that liberals “think of collective responsibility,” though no liberal is suggesting that Hastert et. al. caused Foley to behave that way, only that they enabled him to continue.
Dunn’s got it completely backwards. Conservative Christians who don’t give a rip about holding the GOP leadership accountable want the LGBT community and its supporters to take the fall along with Foley; that isn’t about “personal sin,” but about condemning an entire community. Conservatives love to go on about personal responsibility and individual sin and all that shit, but they’re the most egregious offenders of dismissing people’s behavior by maligning an entire community, which is what they erroneously lambaste liberals for doing when we endeavor to consider context and social influence. The problem is, they’re not looking at institutionalized homophobia, for example, and seeing that maybe it contributes to creating people with unhealthy sexual appetites; they’re looking at LGBT tolerance and using it to excuse the GOP, so they can continue to purvey homophobia, all while they turn a blind eye to the reality that it was the GOP, not the LGBT community, who created, aided, and abetted Mark Foley.
North Korea Tests Nuke
North Korea faced united global condemnation and calls for harsh sanctions Monday after it announced it had detonated an atomic weapon in an underground test. President Bush said North Korea has "defied the will of the international community," and the U.N. Security Council planned a meeting this morning, where the U.S. and Japan are expected to press for more sanctions on the impoverished North.That China is condemning the test and encouraging North Korea to return to disarmament talks is good news. The bad news is that sanctions are only going to worsen the situation for the people of North Korea, who would have starved to death long ago if not for the goodwill of the international community. Talk about a need for regime change.
Bush said the action "deserves an immediate response" by the U.N. Security Council."
There were conflicting reports on the size of the blast in northeast North Korea. South Korea said it was relatively small, while Russia said it had been perhaps as powerful as the nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan during World War II.
The explosion prompted worldwide concern it could seriously destabilize the region, and even Pyongyang's ally China said it strongly opposed the move. South Korea's spy chief said there were possible indications the North was moving to conduct more tests.
…If details of the test are confirmed, North Korea would be the ninth country known to have nuclear weapons, along with the United States, Russia, France, China, Britain, India, Pakistan and Israel.
…A nuclear North Korea would dramatically alter the strategic balance of power in the Pacific region and seriously undermine global anti-proliferation efforts. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the test would mark the beginning of a "dangerous nuclear age" in north Asia.
North Korea “insists its nuclear program is necessary to deter a U.S. invasion,” which is just as absurd as it is a believable excuse, thanks to Bush’s “Axis of Evil” rhetoric. In any case, we’re left with another giant frigging mess.
To Be Filed Under Seriously Weird
Huh? This is got to be one of the weirdest things I've ever heard. Denny Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, is also his roommate.
In Hastert's brief, evasive press conference on Thursday, sharp reporters immediately zeroed in on Palmer's role in the Foley information flow. Did Hastert leap to the defense of his chief of staff's honor in the crucial credibility contest with Kirk Fordham? Did he say I know Scott Palmer and I know he's telling the truth? No. He avoided every question with Palmer's name in it. Hastert obviously does not want to talk about Scott Palmer.That is beyond bizarre. I'm truly beginning to think that there's a not insignificant number of powerful men in D.C. who have resurrected the ancient sex paradigm: "Women are for making babies; boys/younger men are for fun." It doesn't have anything to go with being gay, certainly not as we'd (or even they'd) define it, but about entrenched misogyny and male dominion. And it's creeping me out even contemplating it.
If Fordham did warn Palmer about Foley a long time ago, what are the odds that Palmer did not tell Hastert? As close to zero as you can get. Many chiefs of staff are close, very close, to their bosses on Capitol Hill. But none are closer than Scott Palmer is to Denny Hastert. They don't just work together all day, they live together.
There are plenty of odd couple Congressmen who have roomed together on Capitol Hill, but I have never heard of a chief of staff who rooms with his boss. It is beyond unusual. But it must have its advantages. Anything they forget to tell each other at the office, they have until bedtime to catch up on. And then there's breakfast for anything they forgot to tell each other before falling asleep. And then there's all day at the office. Hastert and Palmer are together more than any other co-workers in the Congress.
Hat tip to Pam, who also has an excellent piece on the GOP closet.
Blame the Victim
Frankly, this is the responsibility of the parents. If you get online you may find people who are creepy. There are creepy people out there who will do and say creepy things. Avoid them. That's what you have to do. And maybe we can say that a little more to the pages.The GOP: Protecting Families by Telling Parents It’s Their Fault if Their Kids Get Sexually Harassed by a Congressman.
You know, these kids are actually precocious kids. It looks like, just maybe, this one email was just a prank, just a bunch of kids sitting around, egging this guy on, you know. So, uh, the world's a complicated place, and we just have to do the best we can.Pretending for a moment that’s even what happened, I can say with absolute certainty that no matter how many teenage boys tried to “egg” me into have cybersex with them, I wouldn’t. Nor would most adults. The fact that there are elected Republicans who can’t say the same, however, gives a glimpse into the reason they feel compelled to try to legislate morality for all the rest of us.
(Hat tip Todd.)
