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Oh, My Akin Ideology! |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=18199"><span class="small">Will Durst, Humor Times</span></a>
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Sunday, 26 August 2012 13:22 |
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Durst writes: "Normally, rape and funny live in two different solar systems, whose orbits rarely if ever intersect with significantly different trajectories and fields of gravity, if you catch our drift."
Political satirist Will Durst. (photo: WillDurst.com)
Oh, My Akin Ideology!
By Will Durst, Humor Times
26 August 12
 ining humor out of Missouri Senate hopeful Todd Akin's barrage of claptrap is tougher than eating frozen jerky in a rowboat on the eyewall of Hurricane Isaac. Normally, rape and funny live in two different solar systems, whose orbits rarely if ever intersect with significantly different trajectories and fields of gravity, if you catch our drift.
But this guy's historic and colossally moronic remark is the very exception that proves the rule winning him in one fell brimming swoop, the Joe Biden "Foot So Deep In His Mouth He's Probably Tickling His Spleen with His Shoelaces" Lifetime Achievement Award.
During an interview with St. Louis television station KTVI, the Republican Congressman told a reporter, that from what he understands from doctors, women who are legitimately raped don't get pregnant. And the plopping noise across the country from mouths dropping open was loud enough to wake every student at Gallaudet University.
Now, we expect our anthropoidal troglodytes to believe stupid stuff; we're just not used to hearing their inane anthropoidal troglodytic beliefs articulated out loud. Refreshing and depressing at the same time.
Wow. Where do you start? Legitimately raped? Suffice it to say that no qualifying adverb is ever necessary in front of that particular noun. Especially from a man. And what does he mean by "legitimate"? It seems to infer something exists that could be known as "illegitimate" rape but, oh no, we're not going there. As redundant as Halloween in San Francisco. Boring in Burlington. Hot in hell.
Next to the abstracted nonsense of his feeble-minded opinion, it's the casual attribution that rankles. Here's a man running for the U.S. Senate using medieval wives' tales as philosophical justification. And he's a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology? Let's hope his concentration is on space and technology. Notwithstanding the space between his ears.
Also makes one worry about the state of the medical profession in Missouri. Is the "Show Me State" overrun with puritanical shamans? Thirteenth century barbers? Filipino psychic surgeons? Physician bags stuffed with snake oil and leeches? Do their white jackets have long, long sleeves that wrap around the back where they're buckled real tight?
The inundation was so overwhelming it came close to rendering Chris Matthews speechless. Almost. While an oblivious Akin tried to walk back his clueless comments, the GOP brought out the industrial-strength cattle prods to walk him back over a cliff. Steep drop. Sharp rocks. Big waves.
Republicans needed to reignite a War on Women right before their national convention the same way a fireworks factory needs a grease fire on July 3rd and the entire party rented jet skis to rooster-tail away from the eye of stupidity as far and fast as possible.
The storm surge of Hurricane Akin washed a bit of the shine off Golden Boy, Paul Ryan, as well. He and Akin have a history of introducing bills to redefine rape, and both oppose a woman's right to choose following one. Not a problem for Romney though. Who thinks completely different. Or doesn't. No one's quite sure.
Thus far, the Tea Party favorite is determined to stay in and go full-term. And Democrats across the nation are shouting themselves hoarse fanning the waves of this deluge, while whispering words of encouragement hoping this testament of dark bewilderment exercises his god-given right to remain consummately cretinous in public.
To Election Day! And beyond!
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FOCUS | The West's Hypocrisy Over Pussy Riot Is Breathtaking |
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Sunday, 26 August 2012 12:10 |
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"Artists round the globe may plead free speech, but to treat the Pussy Riot gesture as a glorious stand for artistic liberty is like praising Johnny Rotten, who did similar things, as the Voltaire of our day."
Pussy Riot demonstrators (from left) Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Aliokhina during their trial. (photo: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA)
The West's Hypocrisy Over Pussy Riot Is Breathtaking
By Simon Jenkins, Guardian UK
26 August 12
 nyone in England and Wales with a dog out of control can now be jailed for six months. If the dog causes injury, the maximum term is to be two years. I have no sympathy for such people. Keeping these beasts is weird, and those who do it probably need treatment. But the Defra minister, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, complained in May that fewer than 20 people were in jail for dangerous dog offences. The sentencing council has duly told courts to raise the threshold to two years, “to send a message”.
The same sentiment a year ago motivated magistrates to play to the gallery by jailing 1,292 people for stealing bottles of water or trainers or sending idiot incitements during the dispersed rampage dubbed “urban riots”. Hysterical ministers raced home from holiday to tell judges to send messages. Judges duly ruined the lives of hundreds of young people, at great public expense and to no advantage to their victims. I have no sympathy for these people either, but again the politicised response to crime was disproportionate.
A month before, a London court jailed a stoned Charlie Gilmour after he swung on a union flag from the Cenotaph and tossed a bin at a police car, thus causing widespread outrage in the offices of the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail. The judge sent him down for 18 months to send a message carefully designed to wreck his university career. Yet again we need have no sympathy for Gilmour. But there is no such thing as a rap over the knuckles in jail. Judges know that any term in prison is a sentence for life.
How can British politicians, whose statements clearly seek to influence pliable judges, criticise other sovereign states for doing likewise? Last week the Foreign Office professed itself “deeply concerned” at the fate of Russia’s Pussy Riot three, jailed for two years for “hooliganism” in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral. They had staged what, by all accounts, was an obscene publicity stunt, videoing an anti-Putin song defamatory of the Virgin Mary in front of pious worshippers.
Good for free speech, we might all say. That the act outraged public decency is an understatement. In a Levada poll of Russian public opinion, just 5% thought the girls should go unpunished and 65% wanted them in prison, 29% with hard labour. Artists round the globe may plead free speech, but to treat the Pussy Riot gesture as a glorious stand for artistic liberty is like praising Johnny Rotten, who did similar things, as the Voltaire of our day. There can be disproportionate apologias as well as disproportionate sentences.
Artists can look after their own. For the British and US governments to get on high horses about Russian sentencing is hypocrisy. America and Britain damned the “disproportionate” Pussy Riot terms. In America’s case this was from a nation that jails drug offenders for 20, 30 or 40 years, holds terrorism “suspects” incommunicado indefinitely and imprisons for life even trivial “three strikes” offenders. Last week alone a US military court declared that reporting the Guantánamo Bay trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be censored. Any mention of his torture in prison was banned as “reasonably expected to damage national security”. This has no apparent connection to proportionate punishment or freedom of speech.
The British security establishment during the Tony Blair-Gordon Brown regime tried to censor history books for possible “terrorist” incitement. It introduced control orders, restricted courts and long-period detention without trial. It made unlicensed demonstrating an offence and has since sought prosecution of Twitter and Facebook abuse. British ministers and courts are craven to what passes for public opinion. The idea that, whenever a crime or antisocial action hits the headlines, “the courts must send a message” is politicised justice. At times, especially in tragic cases involving children, it gets near to a lynch mob. Again the only message sent is to the media. If Britain’s draconian sentencing were effective, British jails would not be bursting at the seams.
There is of course a difference between the liberties enjoyed in most western democracies and the cruder jurisprudence of modern Russia, China and much of the Muslim world. It would be silly to pretend otherwise. But the difference is not so great as to merit the barrage of megaphone comment from west to east. Pussy Riot may have attacked no one physically, but no society, certainly not Britain, legislates on the basis that “words can never hurt”. If a rock group invaded Westminster Abbey and gravely insulted a religious or ethnic minority before the high altar, we all know that ministers would howl for “exemplary punishment” and judges would oblige.
Commenting on the social mores of other countries may offer an offshore outlet for the righteous indignation of politicians and editorialists. It has no noticeable effect. Western comments on the treatment of women in Muslim states, dissidents in China or drug offenders in south-east Asia are dismissed as imperial interference. But then how would we feel if Moscow or Singapore or Tehran condemned the treatment of Cenotaph protesters?
British courts jail at the drop of a headline. One of the few cabinet ministers in recent years to show a sincere desire to relate punishment to crime and imprisonment to consequence is the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke. He is now being bad-mouthed out of his job by Downing Street’s dark arts, frightened not of Clarke but of the rightwing press. Clarke is, with Iain Duncan Smith, a rare minister intellectually engaged with his job and eager courageously to see it through. Why are the Lib Dems not defending him? For David Cameron to sack Clarke would indeed send a message. Of the worst sort.
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The Pursuit of Assange Is an Assault On Freedom |
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Sunday, 26 August 2012 08:22 |
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Pilger writes: "It is as if the Olympics happy-clappery has been subverted overnight by a revealing display of colonial thuggery."
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taken refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. (photo: Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters)
The Pursuit of Assange Is an Assault on Freedom
By John Pilger, AntiWar.com
26 August 12
 he British government's threat to invade the Ecuadorean embassy in London and seize Julian Assange is of historic significance. David Cameron, the former PR man to a television industry huckster and arms salesman to sheikdoms, is well placed to dishonor international conventions that have protected Britons in places of upheaval. Just as Tony Blair's invasion of Iraq led directly to the acts of terrorism in London on July 7, 2005, so Cameron and Foreign Secretary William Hague have compromised the safety of British representatives across the world.
Threatening to abuse a law designed to expel murderers from foreign embassies, while defaming an innocent man as an "alleged criminal," Hague has made a laughing stock of Britain across the world, though this view is mostly suppressed in Britain. The same brave newspapers and broadcasters that have supported Britain's part in epic bloody crimes, from the genocide in Indonesia to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, now attack the "human rights record" of Ecuador, whose real crime is to stand up to the bullies in London and Washington.
It is as if the Olympics happy-clappery has been subverted overnight by a revealing display of colonial thuggery. Witness the British army officer-cum-BBC reporter Mark Urban "interviewing" a braying Sir Christopher Meyer, Blair's former apologist in Washington, outside the Ecuadorean embassy, the pair of them erupting with Blimpish indignation that the unclubbable Assange and the uncowed Rafael Correa should expose the western system of rapacious power. Similar affront is vivid in the pages of the Guardian, which has counseled Hague to be "patient" and that storming the embassy would be "more trouble than it is worth." Assange was not a political refugee, the Guardian declared, because "neither Sweden nor the U.K. would in any case deport someone who might face torture or the death penalty."
The irresponsibility of this statement matches the Guardian's perfidious role in the whole Assange affair. The paper knows full well that documents released by WikiLeaks indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters of civil rights. In December 2001, the Swedish government abruptly revoked the political refugee status of two Egyptians, Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed el-Zari, who were handed to a CIA kidnap squad at Stockholm airport and "rendered" to Egypt, where they were tortured. An investigation by the Swedish ombudsman for justice found that the government had "seriously violated" the two men's human rights. In a 2009 U.S. embassy cable obtained by WikiLeaks, entitled "WikiLeaks puts neutrality in the Dustbin of History," the Swedish elite's vaunted reputation for neutrality is exposed as a sham. Another U.S. cable reveals that "the extent of [Sweden's military and intelligence] cooperation [with NATO] is not widely known" and unless kept secret "would open the government to domestic criticism."
The Swedish foreign minister, Carl Bildt, played a notorious leading role in George W. Bush's Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and retains close ties to the Republican Party's extreme right. According to the former Swedish director of public prosecutions Sven-Erik Alhem, Sweden's decision to seek the extradition of Assange on allegations of sexual misconduct is "unreasonable and unprofessional, as well as unfair and disproportionate." Having offered himself for questioning, Assange was given permission to leave Sweden for London where, again, he offered to be questioned. In May, in a final appeal judgment on the extradition, Britain's Supreme Court introduced more farce by referring to nonexistent "charges."
Accompanying this has been a vituperative personal campaign against Assange. Much of it has emanated from the Guardian, which, like a spurned lover,has turned on its besieged former source, having hugely profited from WikiLeaks disclosures. With not a penny going to Assange or WikiLeaks, a Guardian book has led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal.The authors, David Leigh and Luke Harding, gratuitously abuse Assange as a "damaged personality" and "callous." They also reveal the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the U.S. embassy cables. On Aug. 20, Harding was outside the Ecuadorean embassy, gloating on his blog that "Scotland Yard may get the last laugh." It is ironic, if entirely appropriate, that a Guardian editorial putting the paper's latest boot into Assange bears an uncanny likeness to the Murdoch press's predictable augmented bigotry on the same subject. How the glory of Leveson, Hackgate, and honorable, independent journalism doth fade.
His tormentors make the point of Assange's persecution. Charged with no crime, he is not a fugitive from justice. Swedish case documents, including the text messages of the women involved, demonstrate to any fair-minded person the absurdity of the sex allegations - allegations almost entirely promptly dismissed by the senior prosecutor in Stockholm, Eva Finne, before the intervention of a politician, Claes Borgstr?At the pre-trial of Bradley Manning, a U.S. army investigator confirmed that the FBI was secretly targeting the "founders, owners, or managers of WikiLeaks" for espionage.
Four years ago, a barely noticed Pentagon document, leaked by WikiLeaks, described how WikiLeaks and Assange would be destroyed with a smear campaign leading to "criminal prosecution." On Aug. 18, the Sydney Morning Herald disclosed, in a Freedom of Information release of official files, that the Australian government had repeatedly received confirmation that the U.S. was conducting an "unprecedented" pursuit of Assange and had raised no objections. Among Ecuador's reasons for granting asylum is Assange's abandonment "by the state of which he is a citizen." In 2010, an investigation by the Australian Federal Police found that Assange and WikiLeaks had committed no crime. His persecution is an assault on us all and on freedom.
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RNC You Didn't Build That |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7118"><span class="small">Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 25 August 2012 15:29 |
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Gibson writes: "The Republican Party having their national convention with a 'We Built This' theme in a stadium made possible by the government spending they claim to hate is the perfect illustration of how silly today's Republican Party has become."
A Tampa police armored vehicle is parked outside The Tampa Bay Times Forum in downtown Tampa. (photo: Brian Blanco/Reuters)
RNC You Didn't Build That
By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News
25 August 12
Reader Supported News | Perspective
he entire theme of the upcoming Republican National Convention in Tampa is "We Built This." It's a dig at a remark Obama made at a Virginia campaign event, where he pushed the narrative that government investments in national infrastructure like good schools, good roads and good police/fire protection is essential to the success of the business community. Naturally, the GOP took a few words out of Obama's speech and sold it to a media eager to paint the president as anti-business, even though the stock market is near an all-time high and corporate profits are already at all-time highs.
At a nauseating campaign rally last week dubbed a "town hall meeting" in Manchester, New Hampshire, which turned away Democrats with tickets to the event, both candidates relentlessly harped on Obama's "you didn't build that" remark. The meticulously-scripted event only took questions from fawning supporters, one of whom was a small business owner who also reveled in the GOP's new favorite anti-Obama meme. Paul Ryan's twitter is full of such tired platitudes like: "I'm proud to stand with @MittRomney - a leader who knows that if you have a small business, you did build that!"
Ironically, the Tampa Bay Times Forum arena, the location the Republican Party chose to host a convention with the "We Built This" theme, was built with taxpayer funds, which accounted for $86 million, or 62%, of the total money needed to finance the construction of the stadium. It's a fitting paradox, as the GOP is expected to nominate a guy for president who made his millions tearing down American businesses and selling them to China, and a vice-presidential pick whose past voting history contradicts nearly every one of his current positions.
Like his party's philosophy, Paul Ryan is a walking contradiction. He didn't become a deficit hawk until Barack Obama was elected. The biggest spending bills during the Bush administration - tax cuts for the top 1%, two unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the costly Medicare Part D donut hole - all account for most of the current debt for which Ryan, who voted to add $6.8 trillion to the debt, is using to bludgeon Obama. At the August 20 campaign event in New Hampshire, Ryan managed to speak of 1 in 6 Americans living in poverty as "unacceptable" while keeping a straight face, while simultaneously championing a budget plan that would literally cut taxes for people like himself and Romney, while raising taxes on - and cutting paid-for benefits for - people like those in the audience cheering for him. The $4 trillion in cuts proposed in the Ryan budget is offset by the $4 trillion less in revenue that would be collected. Paul Ryan, like his budget, is a complete fraud.
Republicans like Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor blast big government spending in the press, while simultaneously lobbying for it in private. Ryan's district benefited from spending from Obama's Recovery Act, which used $20 million to make homes more energy-efficient. House Republican Leader Eric Cantor wrote this letter asking for government spending in his own district. Then, once the TV cameras are on, Cantor, Ryan, and the Republicans fall all over themselves to talk about how government doesn't create jobs. And in order to reinforce their false narrative that can't otherwise stand on its own under scrutiny, they fight to get more of themselves elected to office on the premise of "government can't do anything right," and vote down every proposal that would create jobs and improve the economy while saying, "See? We told you government doesn't do anything!"
The Republican Party having their national convention with a "We Built This" theme in a stadium made possible by the government spending they claim to hate is the perfect illustration of how silly today's Republican Party has become. If you're voting Republican in this election and you aren't a millionaire or a corporate lobbyist, you're proving to everyone around that you're just as silly as your politicians.
Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Old Lyme, Connecticut. You can contact Carl at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
, and listen to his online radio talk show, Swag The Dog, at blogtalkradio.com/swag-the-dog.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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t's just astonishing to us how long this campaign has gone on with no discussion of what's happening to poor people. Official Washington continues to see poverty with tunnel vision - "out of sight, out of mind."
