Cogitamus

Happy Halloween

 

"Rock and Roll Halloween" - Bobby Bare, Jr.

Don't eat too much candy.   

Man Arrested For Waterboarding Girlfriend

From The Smoking Gun:

Man Arrested for Waterboarding Girlfriend

OCTOBER 28--After accusing his girlfriend of cheating on him, a Nebraska man allegedly tied the woman to a couch in their apartment and waterboarded her, according to police.

Trevor Case, 22, has been charged with domestic assault, false imprisonment, and making terroristic threats in connection with the bizarre incident early Saturday morning at the Lincoln home he shared with the 22-year-old victim.

Police allege that Case stuffed "hospital socks" into Danielle Stallworth's mouth and bound her wrists with belts and hair ties before placing a shirt over her head and dousing it with water, according to a Lincoln Police Department report. “He poured a pitcher of water on her head, and she started freaking out and thought she wasn’t able to breathe,” cops noted.

The waterboarding practice, of course, leaves victims with the sensation that they are drowning.

"As she was trying to get up, she clawed Case on his chest," cops reported. When the couple's young daughter awoke and came into the living room, "the situation calmed down." When questioned by police, Case admitted arguing with Stallworth, but denied tying her up. He claimed that a scratch on his chest occurred while "wrestling with a friend." 

An officer noted observing injuries on Stallworth's wrist, arm, and thigh, all of which were photographed.

Case, pictured in the above mug shot, is being held on $150,000 bond at the Lancaster County jail. The police report reveals that Case was convicted last November of domestic assault against Stallworth, with whom he has been involved in a relationship for about five years.

As Glenn Greenwald notes, wonder where he got that idea.  And read Greenwald for what that p.o.s. Jonah Goldberg says about Julian Assange.  It's unreal the monsters we have in our midst.

In September I saw some son of a bitch on my flight wearing a T-shirt on which was printed a crude cartoon and the words:  "Waterboarding: When America Was Safe." I swear to god, it's times like that when I wish I were 6-foot-5 and 250 pounds, so I could get up in his face and just say quietly, "you're going to take that off now, aren't you?"

Today in poetically synchronous modern fables

 

Mural by Bansky; Canal Street, NYC

The New York Times:

Replying to Report, Halliburton Says BP Is to Blame in Gulf

WASHINGTON — Halliburton, whose failed cement job on the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico was identified as a contributing factor to the deadly blowout by a presidential investigative panel on Thursday, is defending its work and assigning the blame for the accident to BP.

In a six-page statement issued late Thursday night, Halliburton questioned tests that showed its cement to be unstable and incapable of holding back the oil and gas in the well, saying they were conducted on different formulas than what was eventually used on BP’s doomed Macondo well. It said that a sample of the cement it planned to use on the well, tested shortly before pumping began on April 19, had produced a positive result.

But Halliburton admitted that no stability test was conducted on the actual recipe for the cement used on the well. The company said that BP had ordered a change in Halliburton’s customary formula for cement by adding a higher proportion of a chemical that slows the hardening of the mixture.

The well blew out on April 20, killing 11 workers and eventually releasing nearly five million barrels of oil into the gulf. Since then, BP, Halliburton, Transocean and other partners in the well have traded accusations of blame as civil and criminal investigations proceed.

Meanwhile. Having been lovingly retrieved from the abandoned moorlands of archived digitalia where they usually float, some reanimated anonymous pixels once again have a question for Y! Answers:

Why did my rats eat each other?

I had a cage of male dumbo eared rats. They always got along and were very tame. They were not starving. They were overweight. To my horror while i was cleaning their cage i noticed the skeletal remains of their father and the smallest male half eaten in the corner. It was disgusting! Why would they turn on each other like that?? ewwww!!!

Special Delivery

Hubbub in the skies and on the ground today as U.S. and British authorities swept planes for "suspicious devices."  Story in the NYT.

I'll note only this excerpt, dealing with a matter dear to my heart, as I've written before about TSA abuses and this country's security puffery:

The alert in Britain came just two days after the country’s transport minister said he would listen sympathetically to demands from airlines that security measures for passengers at British airports be eased.

That followed a speech by Martin Broughton, the chairman of British Airways, who criticized the United States for “redundant” checks like screening passengers’ shoes and requiring laptops to be removed from carry-on bags at checkpoints.

Mr. Broughton said there was no need to “kowtow to the Americans every time they want something done.”

Hatred Motivates Them

I'd like to piggyback on low-tech cyclist's excellent post - don't know about all of you, but he always gives me a lot of thinking/writing fodder - about the question of whether the actions of US corporations and their top executives are acting more from malevolence or stupidity.

It could be a case of being both stupid and malevolent, especially if you refuse to accept their own supposed reasons for their behavior and beliefs.

The first thing we need to realize is that there is no such thing as a fiscal conservative, or small-government conservative.  Not one member of the conservative movement has any interest whatsoever in limiting the scope or size of any level of American governance - local, state or federal.  They are conservative due to the type of large, intrusive government they want.

They want to give guardianship of a woman's ovaries to the government.  They also want the government to coerce women into either staying in failed marriages or, if the man decides to end it, to ensure that women will come out of the relationship disadvantaged.

Conservatives are well-known for their support of a gigantic military complex.  But they also want to have larger police forces and more prisons.  They want an ever-increasing supply of illegal activities, and ever-increasing penalties for (certain) types of crimes, especially those that might be associated with the types of drugs that minorities often take.

Speaking of the military, conservatives want to empower the military to act on American soil, against Americans.  This is due to their desire for the government to have the power to stop civilians with no reason, forcing them to prove their innocence of the crime of illegal immigration.

Conservatives aren't 'for' low taxes.  If they were, then the US government wouldn't, as a result of Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan's scheming, skim 15% off the top of the paychecks of over 80% of the population.  That's for FICA, which is collected before federal, state and/or local income taxes, before sales taxes or anything else.  FICA, half of which doesn't show up on employee paychecks and which, by law, employers are prohibited from displaying on pay stubs.  But these are regressive taxes that disproportionately affect the middle and lower classes, so they are embraced by conservatives.

Conservatives are not 'against entitlements.'  They are against programs that efficiently provide help for the needy, such as Medicaid.  Conservatives are for - indeed they actively create - programs that redistribute American wealth from individuals of the middle and lower classes to corporations and the wealthy that control them, such as Medicare Part D.  Whatever benefit this program provides to American citizens was included only as a sugar coating to disguise the bitter pill of corporate welfare that this program was designed to be.

Conservatives want to limit - or remove - our constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure, excessive criminal penalties, even the protections against government sponsorship of religious sects and their beliefs, what with their constant attempts to force the public display of certain Christian symbols.

Conservatives even want the government to regulate private sexual behavior.  What could possibly be more intrusive than conservatives' desire not only to outlaw homosexual marriage, but to keep, by force of law, homosexuals out of certain professions and neighborhoods?

Their every professed belief and motivation is a lie.  They clearly have no desire for a small government, or low taxes.  They aren't even that interested in a lightly-regulated marketplace - take, for example, the campaign to force dairies that don't feed hormones to their cattle to keep the simple declaration of that off their packaging. 

If they aren't motivated by anything they're publicly willing to admit, then we need to look at the common themes and threads that unite their actions.  In every arena, conservative policies are targeted to benefit wealthy, white males and to disadvantage everyone else - women, blacks, hispanics, homosexuals, whoever isn't male, wealthy and white. 

Further, if there is a choice between helping themselves and hurting those they hate, they will in almost every situation choose to hurt those they hate.  Such is the nature of hate, that people who succumb to it will hurt themselves and their loved ones in order to feel the thrill of knowing that someone else is hurt worse.

That's why the conservative movement seems so illogical.  It's why rational people have such a hard time dealing with them.  Most importantly, hatred - and nothing else other than its bastard offspring, fear - is what motivates conservative opposition to Obama and what is going to give them their victories this Tuesday.

That's the lesson elected Democrats need to learn.

Friday Morning Open Thread

 

"Vagabond Moon" - Willie Nile

Fall has finally arrived here -- the temperature dropped about 30 degrees overnight.  Me, I'm heading to warmer climes -- off to Tampa to continue the road show of pension doom. Get to say hi to Deborah at least.

Well the Washington Post gave me one of their classic moments of revulsion today, with a laudatory article about Newt Gingrich, with the subheader "Newt Gingrich looks poised for a big future."  To which I say bollocks.  (Interestingly, the subhead does not appear in the online article, only on the dead tree version -- I wonder if they've caught overwhelming shit.)   

Let me boldly predict that Newt Gingrich and I will hold the same number of elected offices in the future -- zero.  Only among the ultimate Villagers is this repellent assclown viewed as a viable candidate for anything.  And for fuck's sake, the only place this guy has ever won an election is in a small part of Georgia.  I can't imagine anything that would make Obama happier than the idea of Gingrich being the Republican nominee in 2012 -- unless it's Palin.  But I would say that Palin has a far better chance than Gingrich of winning the nomination -- Gingrich, should he run, is likely to land in Rudy Giuliani/Fred Thompson territory.   And no, he's not an intellectual or anything close. 

What's happening?   

Are Huge Corporations and Rich People Malevolent, or Just Stupid?

My money's on malevolence.

Because it seems impossible that big corporations, or at least their CFOs, and billionaires' accountants and financial advisors, aren't aware that even they do better under Democratic than Republican administrations.  And as Yglesias points out this morning, corporate profits increased an astounding 62% from the beginning of 2009 to mid-2010, a bigger increase than any other year and a half in the past 60 years.  What exactly does it take to convince these people that, despite potentially higher taxes, more regulations, minimum-wage hikes, and at least token support for labor, it's in their interests to have Democrats running the show?

And as long as demand for corporations' products and services depends on the U.S. consumer's ability to buy stuff, it would seem that they'd realize a prosperity that's more widely shared than at present is very much in their interests.

But has there ever been a year when corporate America and secretive billionaires like the Koch brothers have voted with their wallets more convincingly than this one? 

All I can conclude is that for big corporations and billionaires, power and relative standing within our system is far more important to them than how well they actually do.  Keeping unions down, keeping taxes low, gutting regulations, and disempowering the citizenry is far more important to these folks than getting richer faster.

Like I said, I've got to go with 'malevolent.'  No person of means could be this stupid, for this long, in this era of quick, cheap information, unless they really wanted to be.

The Fierce Urgency of Whenever

I was really irritated by this post by Yglesias yesterday, taking a rather sanguine view of the possibility of the Republicans recapturing the House of Representatives.  Basically, he characterizes it as an almost inevitable return to normality after the 2008 election, and a development that will not result in earth shattering change, i.e. the Republicans will not be able to dismantle the social welfare state, such as it is in the United States.

I was struck by the mechanistic and passive view of politics that this represents -- the notion that things will inexorably return to some sort of equilibrium in the political system and that a roughly 50-50 gridlock inducing split is inevitable.  Of course Yglesias has also expressed satisfaction that the passing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is essentially the end of the project of creating the American welfare state.  I guess if one has such a constrained view of what our ambitions should be then maybe it isn't such a big deal.

I would beg to differ in a pretty big way, both from a policy and historical/political perspective.  First, from a policy perspective, the welfare state in America is pretty threadbare.  Although PPACA is a substantial legislative accomplishment, it has not brought about universal coverage, it does not have a truly effective cost containment scheme, and it perpetuates our vastly inefficient, mind-bogglingly complex health insurance system.  Moreover, it is likely to come under fierce attack by the GOP in any congress in which they control one or both chambers.  But putting aside PPACA's flaws, the list of basic social welfare benefits that Americans do not enjoy in contrast to their European counterparts remains pretty staggering, from paid maternity/paternity leave to mandatory leave for illness to mandated vacation time to a meaningful right to belong to a union to government provided day care/pre-school.  This doesn't even touch upon having sane energy/environmental/transportation policies or a political landscape where civil and reproductive rights aren't under constant attack.  Lastly, it completely ignores the desperate need to find a different paradigm for the conduct of foreign policy and the societal resources devoted to war-making as the default mechanism of pursuing U.S. interests in the world. 

In short, anyone devoted to a liberal/left vision of the U.S. would necessarily see the Obama Administration as a starting point for realizing that vision, not the culmination of it.  The 2010 elections should have been an opportunity, like 1934 (where the Republicans lost seats despite having sustained devastating losses in 1930 and 1932 -- they lost an additional ten Senate seats and had their caucus reduced to 25, and they lost an additional fourteen seats in the House binging their number to a stunning 103), where the gains of 2006 and 2008 were built upon, not one where devastating losses were incurred. 

Most of all, following the unalloyed debacle of the Bush years, the opportunity was present to begin shifting the Overton Window to the left, laying the groundwork for a meaningful move away from the reflexive worship of both free markets and the use of force as cornerstones of American politics.       

As I have noted before repeatedly, progressive epochs in the U.S. have been difficult to sustain.  But the New Deal consensus basically maintained its sway in this country for forty-eight years.  We should be looking to fuel a movement of significant political and social change over the next decade, one which can then be consolidated and maintained for a generation.  Instead, we find ourselves battling the most reactionary slate of candidates assembled on the national scene in my lifetime, many of whom have a decent chance of becoming members of the "world's greatest deliberative body."  This should not be met with a shrug, when it fact it is a calamity.

Again, I waited for my entire adult life for an election like 2008.  To see its possibilities squandered and prematurely quashed is a pretty devastating thing to contemplate.  We cannot passively accept such things as inevitable and we sure as shit need to have a more compelling vision of the future than seeing PPACA as the culmination of our collective ambitions.       

Olbermann Makes the Case

 

Okay, it's a little bit of a bludgeoning, but it's the rare comprehensive bit of broadcast journalism that captures the full breadth and depth of the insanity that is the Republican Party circa 2010.  

All of you who have the privilege to vote in places where it is meaningful -- please get out there and pull the lever for the Dems.  Even for those who may have disappointed you.  These lunatics on the other side need to be stopped.    

Best Ad So Far This Election Cycle

This ad is simple, and brilliant. It brings up only a few of the good things Jerry did for the state the last time he was governor. Thing is, Meg is absolutely right about the climate in California thirty years ago. Ronald Reagan, while in the process of leaving a deficit, built at taxpayer expense a big ass mansion. Jerry closed it down and rented, with his own money, a little flat across from the Capitol. He garaged the bulletproof Cadillac Limo that Reagan had the state buy him and drove his own car. Thing is, those are totally Jerry things to do. He spent so much time in the office that it really didn't matter where he was for the few hours a day that he wasn't on the job.

One of the things Jerry did that really saved the state was the way he took on the infestation of Mediterranian Fruit Flies. That could have absolutely destroyed California's agricultural economy. While they ridiculed him and called him "Governor Moonbeam" he was saving their fucking asses.

No matter how the election turns out, Jerry is on my short list of truffles and his favorite, Peppermint Stick Ice Cream.

All you want Jerry. Anytime you want it.

I often get asked by folks what I do to prepare for a show, or in this case, three shows. It's easy, I practice my ass off. I'm playing about eight hours a day. Four on the guitars, with a little extra time to bring my fiddle and mandolin chops up to spec. Well, busy hands are happy hands.

There was a restrainer below and a stomper above; see--two sides!

In a statement sent to the Associated Press, [Tim] Profitt (with Rand Paul, above) has admitted placing his shoe firmly on the face of a Lauren Valle outside a Senate debate on Monday night, but insisted that the camera angle of the footage that captured the alteration made the scuffle look worse than it was. The fact that Profitt is an official coordinator of the Rand Paul campaign opens Paul to potential civil liabilities.--SFGate

The kudzu-like proliferation of Both-Sides-ism that has all but choked off hope of redemption, via committing real journalism (ha!), for just about every pundit, pretty face, and "reporter" these days is why I had to stop watching Morning Joe altogether. Joe Scar and Mica are, I believe, contractually obligated to say "...and we hear rhetoric like this on both sides" or "...this is a problem with both parties" or "extremists on the far right AND the far left", and so on, after any and every story in which wingnuts might conceivably look bad (which is to say, virtually all stories in which the powerful hurt the less-so, and you have to pity the poor Villagers because there's really no way to temper the sheer viciousness and lawlessness of these people other than to make vague allusions to George Soros and the incivility of lefty blogs while counting the hours until your next Georgetown cocktail party).

It matters not how uncompromisingly godawful the wingnuts' behavior might be. It matters not that both the First Amendment and American criminal law--hell, the human brain--can and do recognize a world of difference between the sticks and stones that break bones and the words that never harmed.

Because whenever an episode of violence and thuggery erupts--like the one in Alaska, when security secessionists militia military members hired goons armed with semi-automatic penis-extenders handcuffed and illegally detained a journalist at a public event for daring to do his job and ask questions of Senate hopeful Joe Miller (R-Kochsuckerville), or the one this week at a Kentucky rally, during which a Dickensian villain/Rand Paul campaign coordinator named Tim Profitt quite literally joined forces with other Randians and engaged in a little brownshirt-style aggravated assault and battery (video here, if you can stomach it) against Lauren Valle, a relatively small-framed and pixie-haired protester who had apparently donned a blonde wig, á la the FOX News bots, in order to express her opinion via the deeply threatening vehicle of satirical theatre--in which Conservatives come off as ever more dangerously unhinged and violent, you can be certain our Barbecue Media will dutifully dig through its memory banks and recall a shocking story about some member of the Professional Left who--back in...oh, 2004 it must have been--didn't like the salad dressing choices at a fundraiser dinner and registered his gustatory protest by using a napkin and water glass to moisten the corner of every place-card at the table.

Then there are all those bloggers who say fuck too much. They're so uncivilized, those hippies!

See? Both sides, people. Both sides.

Now hold still and stop getting styling gel all over my new jackboots.

(H/T Barefoot Progressive, via Prup)

Everybody Needs a Theme Song

With the way this week is climbing up my ass, this is mine.

Feel free to toss your hair while it plays. I know I do.

This is also the only appropriate soundtrack to teabagger candidates, whether cuffing journalists, or curb stomping satirists, it's the only way I can cope.

It didn't even take them 20 20 20 4 hours before they demanded an apology from the stompee. It was her fault after all.

GOP Brownshirts, and the Candidates Who Only Kinda Condemn Them

Guess you've already seen the video of where some Rand Paul supporters drag a woman to the ground, hold her down in the street with her head on the curb, and one of them stomps on her head.

Paul forthrightly condemned this action on the part of his supporters with unequivocal language like "we want everybody to be civil," "there was enormous passion on both sides," "there was a bit of a crowd control problem," "so many people, so passionate on both sides, jockeying back and forth," and "I hope in the future it's going to be better."

That sure makes me feel better about the GOP's reaction to the brownshirts in its midst.  How about you?

McMegan Brings The Obliviousness

McMegan: "It's one thing to be angry; it's another when anger is the main force that binds a group together."

Is she talking about the Tea Party movement, a movement that has no coherent focus other than being pissed that Democrats are temporarily, and to a limited extent, in charge of our political system, and that people of different faiths and skin tones might get some of their tax dollars?

Nah, she's talking about lefty bloggers. 

Well, naturally.  We have nothing in common except anger, other than [insert long list of goals that everyone from Kevin Drum to Jane Hamsher can agree on].

For one of the New Elites, she sure is dumb.

Tuesday Open Thread

 

"Alone Again Or" - Calexico (Cover of a song by "Love" back from the summer of love.)

Speaking of which, who have you curb stomped today? 

It's hard to keep up with all of the right wing thuggery -- I was suggesting to a journalist friend of mine the other night that the Joe Miller campaign's "arrest" and handcuffing of a reporter might be worthy of a column of condemnation.  She looked at me like I was insane -- what is there to say about it was her response.  Mmmm -- I don't know -- I guess it's an utterly routine event when private security goons hired by a likely to be U.S. Senator detain and handcuff a journalist covering a campaign event.  And the fact that one of those security guards is an active duty member of the armed forces.  Well, I guess that just makes it even more unremarkable. 

I am at the point where I can't wait for the mid-terms to be over.  I just want to see the damage done and think about where it leaves us.  I feel like there isn't much more to be said.  I think it's incredibly important that people go out and vote against this right wing madness, but my hopes are fairly minimal at the moment. 

Sorry for my total lack of presence.  I have been in Louisville, Memphis, Nashville and Chicago over the last sixteen days and am heading to Tampa on Friday.  I am barely keeping my head above water, personally and professionally -- the fact that there is nothing much good to write about isn't helping either.

One good aspect to all of the airplane travel is that it gave me a chance to read Andrew Bacevitch's "Washington Rules" about which more later -- I highly recommend that everyone pick up a copy and give it a read.  It's a really important, compelling, and well constructed argument against the sixty-plus year Washington consensus in favor of military violence as a means of solving foreign policy issues.   

What's of interest to you today?   

Unpopular Science: One man's unhappy encounters with the laws of physics

 
Illustration by Christopher Niemann, from the New York Times.

One of the funniest things I've read in a while.  (Anyone with kids or pets will get this one, whether you slept through your physics classes or not!)  Christopher Niemann consistently does the most clever and ingenious little picture stories for the NYT.

Salon.com: The 10 Most Terrifying Would-Be Congressmen

From Salon.  The 10 Most Terrifying Would-Be Congress Critters.  Hoo-boy.

 

Aid, Foreign and Otherwise

 
Because in a world of so much horror we still need hope, the voice of Nicholas Kristof is always welcome.  For years he has been stepping out of the role of cold-eyed, dispassionate journalist and using his columns in the New York Times to educate us on what we can do, in tiny ways, in our tiny little lives, to lessen that horror.  His book, Half the Sky, co-written with his wife Sheryl WuDunn is by now famous.  Yet he still finds new stories of fire in the belly to tell.  Books, schools, medical clinics?  Yes.  But also banana fibers and menstrual pads.  Read about it all in his latest column.

Charles Murray Does a Zaphod Beeblebrox in the WaPo

He may not be president of anything, but his job, per the HHG, is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it.

In a piece titled "The Tea Party Warns of a New Elite. They're Right," Charles ("Bell Curve") Murray defines a 'new elite' no longer composed of bluebloods, but of people who've graduated from the best colleges, who hail from the upper middle classes and who have at least one college-educated parent themselves.

Yeah.  Like we run the world or anything.

Because last time I looked, Big Money still rules the world.  Even with all the stars aligned our way, it took a year-long death march for the good guys to get an almost-universal health care bill through Congress.  Regulation of the Wall Street mega-rich boys who brought down our economy a few years back was watered down, and the jury's still out on whether it will really amount to much.  Many other things we were for (climate change legislation is probably the sine qua non of hoped-for actions whose strongest constituency was Murray's 'New Elite') didn't even get considered by one or both houses of Congress.

The New Ruling Elite is the same as the Old Ruling Elite.  Money = Power.  Murray's just trying to draw people's attention away from that fact.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I'd also note that the Real America he sets against the New Elite is largely rural/small town and white.  Like many others on the right, he's still peddling the notion that America should be run to suit small-town white people, even though they stopped resembling a majority a long time ago.   Same old same old.

Wikileaks Exposes the War Again

There have been a few writers and other artists, including some of the greatest poets (like e.e.cummings) who understood that if you really wanted wars to end then the truth must be told about them.

The Guardian, UK is the best news source to read, they have the gumption and integrity enough to call torture by its name and not its euphemisms.

One of my biggest disappointments with President Obama is his reluctance to dig into the steaming shitpile of depavity that Bush/Cheney left on the rug of the Oval Office by their unjust, expensive, and demented wars. They lied to get them started and they have relentlessly suppressed the truth of them since the beginning. Had they told anything close to the truth the wars would have never started. Had they once, just fucking once, told the truth about them they would have been ended long ago.

It is long past time for the reckoning.

Long.
Fucking.
Past.

"Family Values" Come In All Stripes

Then, on the other side of the world, we have this.  Reminds me of the New Bedford rape case of 1983.  It's easy to tsk-tsk about other people's "backwardness," but plenty of this sentiment still exists in this country as well:

For Egyptians, Lebanese Pop Star's Murder Was Her Own Fault

. . . Yet there has been no outpouring of sympathy for Ms. Tamim, who was killed at the age of 30.

“She made him kill her, and she deserves it,” said Sherine Moustafa, a 39-year-old Egyptian corporate lawyer, an opinion that was echoed by every woman of dozens interviewed. “If he killed her, this means she’s done something outrageous to drive him to it,” reasoned Ms. Moustafa, who has no relation to the convicted businessman. Both her sister and mother, who sat next to her, agreed.

Muslims wearing things ~ OPEN THREAD ~

Via Amanda, check out this Tumblr, Muslims Wearing Things.

As I noted on Facebook:

Oh my goodness, who knew--Muslims wear suits and dresses and army uniforms and surgical scrubs and gowns and tiaras and track suits and swimsuits and jeans and sneakers...how will we ever know when to be afraid? *eyeroll*

What are you up to on this gorgeous fall weekend?

Another Member of the "Family Values" Party

Looks like another Republican candidate is in trouble, though the race against his Democratic opponent is still disturbingly close:  Jeff Perry of Massachusetts.  Here's an excerpt from the article by Andrew Ryan in Boston:

Perry has also acknowledged misstating the facts of the 1992 strip search on his bar application, in which he said the victim had been arrested. Neither of the girls was arrested. The family of the second victim won a lawsuit against the town of Wareham, and Allen's family settled out of court.

"I cannot stand by silently any longer while what happened to me is discussed in the press," Allen said. "It upsets me that Jeff Perry can run for Congress after what he did to me when I was 14 years old."

Allen, now in her early 30s, lives in the 10th Congressional District, and family members have said the assault affected her and her family tremendously. Having it dredged up as Perry runs for Congress has been exceptionally painful, family members have said. Allen's father told the Globe earlier this year that he was angry at Perry, saying, "There's nowhere he should run except out of town."

I'm Being Censored!

Not really.  But by the logic of Newt Gingrich and a bunch of other righties upset by NPR's sacking of Juan Williams, apparently I've been censored my entire life.

You see, no major news outlet has ever given me a forum for sharing my opinions with a wider audience.  Not ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, Fox, the NYT, the WaPo, not anyone.

But the usual wingnuts are whining that NPR is committing censorship by firing Williams.  If depriving him of a platform is censorship, then not giving him access to such a platform in the first place would have to be even more stringent censorship. 

Yep, by their lights, just about all of us are being censored.  (Help, help, I'm being repressed, come see the violence inherent in the system, etc.)

What a bunch of weenies.

Since other than to make this minor point, I don't care one iota about the Juan Williams brouhaha, let this be an open thread.

Three things to do when Clarence Thomas's wife calls you*

[*This landed in my In box via David (aka TRex), and we aren't sure who wrote it, so if you know, please let on in comments so I may hat-tip him or her.]

By Andy Borowitz at the New Yorker

Three Things to Do When Clarence Thomas's Wife Calls You

Like many Americans, over the past several years I have been the recipient of multiple unwelcome voicemails from the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. These calls have come in the middle of the night, at the crack of dawn, even at the dinner hour favored by telemarketers. Regardless of the time of day, all of these voicemails have one thing in common: she always sounds like she's drunk-dialing me, except she appears to be completely sober.

I know what you're saying: “It'll never happen to me. Virginia Thomas doesn't even have my phone number!” Well, that's what I thought, and several years of trauma counseling later, I've come to realize (the hard way) what a fool's paradise I was living in. Consider this: according to a recent study, the odds of Virginia Thomas leaving a threatening voicemail for you are higher than those of Christine O'Donnell correctly identifying the First Amendment. With those grim statistics in mind, here are three simple steps you can take if and when Mrs. Clarence Thomas calls:

Start apologizing the moment you hear her voice. Remember, like a bear at a campsite, Virginia Thomas does not want to eat you, she's only after your food, and in this case, your apology is the only thing protecting you from Mrs. Thomas mauling you to death. If apologizing does not work, clap your hands loudly into the receiver in the hopes of scaring her away.

When she says, This is Virginia Thomas, reply, "No, this is Virginia Thomas. Who's calling? Wait a minute--is that you, Anita Hill?"”When she denies being Anita Hill (and she will), say, "There you go again, with your infernal lies. This is like Clarence's confirmation hearings all over again. You disgust me, Anita Hill."”With any luck, accusing her of being Anita Hill will disorient her long enough for you to summon help.

Get in the habit of answering your phone, "Long Dong Silver residence."

One final note: if you get a call in the middle of the night and there is silence on the other end, that is not Virginia Thomas. That is Clarence Thomas.