try some tinfoil

Watching the frenzy that all of the religious Nutzis are whipping themselves into over the merciful passing of Terri Schiavo, I can't help but notice how many of them hold a hand up while they are chanting to their god or the tooth fairy, or whoever they think they are talking to.

What's the deal with that? Is it like an antenna? Do they get better reception?

whaa?

We're having reruns of "The Daily Show" this week.

Is Jon Stewart taking an Easter vacation?

hang in there, Kofi

Now the radical right-wing Nutzis are clamoring for Kofi Annan to resign from the United Nations because it seems pretty credible that his son was obtaining money illegally through his own UN connections.

I'll agree with that, with one proviso.

By that standard, George and Jeb Bush should step down because of the manifold illegal dealings of the brother they try to hide in the attic, Neil.

It's only right, isn't it?

wake up

In Colorado, a convicted murderer had his death penalty overturned because a juror brought a copy of the bible into the deliberations, and quoted several biblical passages to her fellow jurors, including the famous "eye for an eye" admonition. Governor Bill Owens reacted to this with outrage, saying "this is a slap in the face" to "people of faith."

Good. I hope it left a mark.

This is a nation of laws. Everyone is welcome to believe whatever foolishness they choose. When their foolishness starts to affect the Constitutional rights of another person, they have crossed the line and DESERVE a slap in the face.

Don't they have governors in Colorado swear to uphold the law, or is that also a "quaint" relic of ancient times when this was a free country?

nollidge ar kewl

I just heard some overpaid news reader on CNN talking about "woppidy," the elk. We really are in the new dark ages of literacy.



For anyone who doesn't understand this, it's "wapiti." Look it the fuck up.

hard to swallow

Jesse Jackson has destroyed the last vestiges of any credibility he had managed to hang on to over the last several years. He has now publicly stated that he is in favor of having Terri Schiavo's feeding tube reinserted. He made some insipid comment about a feeding tube not being like a respirator, because "we all need sustenance." Apparently, if Terri was hooked up to a respirator that was oxygenating her blood instead of hooked up to a tube leaking nutrients into her digestive tract, it would be just fine to unplug it and let her suffocate. That would be humane. Disconnecting the feeding tube, however, is not. One can only assume that Jesse feels breathing is not a necessity.

Now, in fairness to Jesse, I admit I had this one girlfriend who could...

yeah, but think about this

Pastor Ray Mummert of Dover, Pennsylvania, is on a crusade to eliminate the satanic study of evolutionary theory from his local schools. Ray says that, as christians, he and his supporters have been "attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture."

Yes, Ray. And, we are being attacked by the ignorant, uneducated segment of the culture.

You.

rebuttal

Pat Buchanan has grave concerns for the future of our country.

In an interview on CNN, he fervidly stated that the America in which a "ten-year-old boy is arrested for simply trying to take a cup of water" to Terry Schiavo is not the America in which he grew up.

That's quite a coincidence, Pat. The America in which a ten-year-old boy (under the guidance of his father, a convicted rapist and registered sex offender who was out of his state illegally, who has continuing problems with the law and has been associated with violent right-to-life groups) is for no reason other than the quest for political power, manipulated into being arrested and handcuffed in order to incite and inflame the meddlesome, rabid, radical, right-wing, fundamentalist christian Nutzi zealots who wish to turn this country into a theocracy and to force everyone to follow the tenets of their preferred brand of superstition is not the America in which I grew up, either.

I, too, have grave concerns for the future of our country.

religious buffoons

Watching this repulsive circus swirling around the brainless Terry Schiavo's meat-clad beating heart, I find it difficult to say who is more disgusting - the hypocritical, lying scavengers embodied in Randall Terry, or the illiterate bumpkins that buy into their line of crap, people who couldn't spell words of more than four letters correctly if their own lives depended on it. The one thing they all have in common is a purported belief in things that do not exist, and a conscious decision to base their own understanding and interpretation of the universe on false premises rather than on the indisputable evidence of nature and their own senses.

Religion must die, or mankind is doomed. All religion. Religion, which is just superstition wearing an expensive robe, is the single most damaging characteristic of the human race and has caused more tragedy than any other characteristic. If humankind manages to wipe itself out, I guarantee you it will be based on religious differences. Anybody that expects good to come of a belief system based on a tissue of lies is clinically insane. The sooner the entire world moves out of the primitive darkness into the Age of Enlightenment, the sooner we can realize our potential as a species.

Let Terry's body die in peace. Her mind died fifteen years ago. There's nobody home. Stop damaging our country and our world. Believe whatever superstitious nonsense you want, but stop inflicting your stupidity on the rest of us.

something completely different

Is it just me, or is the whole Terry Schiavo abomination turning into a morbid parody of a Monty Python sketch? Today, the lawyers for the parents of the stricken woman who is missing four-fifths of her brain announced that last week, yes, LAST WEEK, she had actually spoken to them and said "I want to live" in response to their bedside questioning of her to try to determine her intentions.


"That parrot's not dead..."

picky details

So the pasty and porky little radical extremist right-winger Jebbie Bush has now asked legislators to "vote their conscience" in the matter of Terry Schiavo. What an interesting request. Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't the governor of a state be advising legislators to "vote the law?"

what's on/what's not 5

what's on:

"It is wise to always err on the side of life!" - George W. Bush crassly and cynically using Terry Schiavo, a hopelessly brain-damaged political football being shamefully exploited by the radical right in order to deflect attention from their ethical and governance problems




what's not:

"P-p-p-please don't kill me!" - George W. Bush crassly and sarcastically mocking Karla Faye Tucker, a convicted murderer, mental patient, and conscious Texas woman, as he sends her to her lethal injection after rejecting her appeals for clemency and "christian" mercy





All the while, with few exceptions, democrats once again cower in the shadows.

thanks and kudos

I'd like to invite any readers to visit an intellectually stimulating blog at http://majikthise.typepad.com - Majikthise was kind enough to link to the Sun Hudson post below on my humble blog. Welcome to anybody who came here by way of that link, and thank you for coming, I hope it was worth the click.

I guess I may have to start writing this more regularly now and trying to make sure it's actually good...

la-oo-za-ers

The democratic party is useless. Once again, the radical right-wingers have done something incredibly audacious and in violation of the principles this country claims to stand for, and have practically dared the democrats to stand up and take a principled position. Once again the democrats have by their own inaction ceded the point that the republican talking points are valid. They have decided to take a "safe" course, not wanting to be somehow blamed for Terry Schiavo's death no matter how unjustly and incorrectly, instead of simply taking a difficult position on a complex situation and explaining and defending it with some vigor.

It would appear they think the American people are as stupid as the republicans do, and that the very people who elect them are incapable of understanding that emotion and faith are not sufficient to overcome harsh medical reality, and that the hypocrisy of the party of the "culture of life" is enough to disqualify them from being able to claim any moral high ground in this sad case.

Good-bye, America. I fear your noble experiment is rapidly coming to an end.

if you say so

Tom Delay: "Terry Schiavo is as alive as you or I."

I'll have to grudgingly admit that Mr. Tom "Ethically Challenged" Delay was half correct when he made this assertion, no doubt based on his years of experience and vast medical expertise. Terry Schiavo has no higher brain functions, nothing more than primitive reflexes. Neither does Tom Delay.

what's on/what's not 4

what's on:

wall-to-wall Terry Schiavo (being "saved" by radical right-wingers)




what's not:

Happy Anniversary, Iraq invasion! Two years and things seem worse for the average Iraqi than ever. How's that "Mission Accomplished" stuff working for you, mr. prezdint?

some of us are still lower life forms

According to an article in the New York Times, several science museums around the US are pulling or not showing IMAX science films that mention evolutionary theory because radical religious people are objecting to the content and what they perceive as its contradiction of their preferred brand of superstition.

Isn't that sort of like going to an adult bookstore and complaining about all of the sex and nudity?

he could probably find a trial lawyer

Michael Schiavo should sue Tom Delay for publicly slandering him as abusive and neglectful of his stricken wife. As the radical puritan right-wing politicians continue to intrude on the very "sanctity" of marriage they purport to stand for, they show their true natures more every day.

It's time for the free-thinking people of this country to stand up just like we did against the Establishment and the war in Viet Nam. Truth and courage worked before, it can work again.

sorry, Sun

Today the US Congress issued subpoenas as an end-run around a court ruling to remove the feeding tube from the persistent vegetative-state sufferer Terry Schiavo. The hypocritical and ethically-challenged Tom Delay demonstrated the suppuration of church and state by observing that this weekend was a significant date in his own avowed religion as he verbally smeared several liberal politicians over their support of the standing legal ruling while he promoted his own interference in the case as morally superior. It's inspiring how courageous Delay and his repugnant ilk are when they find it politically convenient. Ask Sun Hudson.

If you could.

You can't.

Sun Hudson died quietly Tuesday, March 15th at a hospital in Houston, Texas. He was born with a genetically-based malformation of the lungs called thanatophoric dysplasia. He was five months old. His mother, Wanda Hudson, had fought every day for the five months he was alive to keep him on the life-support methods that were all that kept him alive. He would never have been able to live without life-support, no matter how long he lived, his case was hopeless and not treatable by contemporary medicine to any extent other than the ability to keep his heart beating. The hospital's ethics committee reviewed Sun's case, and determined that all life-support should be stopped. No other hospital was willing to take Sun and continue to keep his heart beating, as was permitted by Texas law. Wanda Hudson took legal steps to try to force the Houston hospital to continue providing life-support for Sun, but a regional court ruled that the hospital currently treating Sun was within their legal rights, and the life-support was withdrawn. Sun died shortly after.

No radical right-wingers picketed the hospital. Tom Delay didn't call Sun's death by suffocation "barbaric." The governor of Texas didn't intervene. There were no all-morning wall-to-wall coverages of Sun's disconnection from the extreme measures that were all that kept him "alive," in exactly the same mindless, consciousness-free, alive-only-as-a-beating-heart existence that Terry Schiavo and many other people are in. Sun's passing was sad, but proper. Terry Schiavo's passing will be sad, but proper.

Sun Hudson was black.

what's on/what's not 3

what's on:

Terry Schiavo




what's not:

Paul Wolfowitz's PRE-9/11 plan to conquer Iraq and destroy OPEC



Sleepers, awake.

what's on/what's not 2

what's on:

steroids, steroids, steroids



what's not:

at least 108 detainees have died, many by abuse, in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan

what's news?

What's on:

Scott Peterson sentence
Robert Blake verdict
Ashley Smith
Michael Jackson
Jessical Lunsford
steroids in sports
false anthrax attack
oil hits $56.00/gallon




What's not:

Bush's plan to destroy Social Security
Karen Hughes appointed chief propagandist
Paul Wolfowitz as World Bank head
Senate approves drilling in ANWR
House ethics issues
Sgrena/Calipari shooting investigation
"Jeff Gannon"
WorldCom/Ebbers
U.S. torture/murders of detainees



Thank goodness we have our priorities straight.

the flip side

Can we forget about Ashley Smith? Yes, she was fortunate. She managed to avoid being killed by a man who had killed four other people in the previous twenty-four hours. From the non-stop news coverage, it appeared that "reporters" who would have us take them seriously for their "objective" views want us to believe that little Ashley (who seems to be self-servingly milking her fifteen minutes for all its' worth while trying to appear that she isn't) survived her hideous ordeal of breakfast preparation and quiet conversation as a result of her avowed religious convictions, not because she managed to follow some of the basic principles of surviving a hostage situation.

So, if she survived because she prayed so hard, doesn't that mean that the other four people who were killed must not have been praying properly, if at all?

happy 79th!

Dr. Robert Goddard. March 26, 1926. The first small step.

criminal justice - really

This won't be a popular topic, but I'd like to point out what a bunch of crybabies Americans have become. Scott Peterson, a man who is clearly a creep and no gentleman in any way, was recently convicted of murder on skimpy and distantly circumstantial evidence. During the current sentencing phase of Peterson's overly-televised murder trial, the family members of his murdered wife got to take turns angrily yelling at him as part of their "victim impact statements."

I realize they have had to deal with a great loss, but these people are utter trailer trash, compounding a tragic event with their own self-pitying rage. Why don't they just stake Peterson down and stone him? Isn't that what they are really interested in, trying to cause him as equivalent a pain as they can in the name of their "closure," a wretched concept if ever there was one? Our justice system is not supposed to be about making the victims feel better, it is about catching offenders and meting out standardized and dispassionate punishment for their crimes.

On a side note, it is appalling how many media people (these clods are not reporters) have stated that Peterson was convicted of killing "his unborn child and his wife." Give it a rest. He likely killed a woman who happened to be pregnant. Let's not let the conservatives in this country use a sad circumstance to promote their "right-to-life" agenda. It is already a crime to murder a woman, we don't need to surreptitiously promote fetuses to citizenship to have justice rendered. Difficult cases make bad law. This case is already bad enough.

relatively speaking

Happy Birthday, Dr. Einstein!

here's an idea

If the Republican party really believes in reducing the size of the federal government, why don't they reduce it by half and get the fuck out of it?