Much more news to close out the month - 29-30 April 2010

Before we begin, there’s really only one thing to be said about the adventure of Electron Boy, savior of Seattle, rescuer of the Sounders, and superhero extraordinaire - there’s something in my eye and it refuses to be washed out.

Greetings, people who wade fearlessly into political discussions! Many people wanting to be associated with the Republican Party are doing more damage to the party image than the Party would like.

For example, another supporter of Arizona’s immigration law, a Representative from California, wants children born in the United States of illegal immigrants deported with their parents, Fourteenth Amendment be damned. Citizenship, he says, is something “in our souls”, so apparently there’s a significant part of soulless entities in the United States. Actually, now that I think about it, there are, but it isn’t illegal immigrants or their children.

Here's what you need to know about the Tea Party - David Duke, a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, thinks they're no more racist than he is, and that they should embrace their whiteness and promote an anti-dark people agenda. Do as he does, in other words.

As a sort of positive counter-weird to the negative weird of soulless immigrants and the juxtaposition of the Tea Party and the KKK, because New york has such a high immigrant population, there are some languages you're more likely to hear there instead of in the native lands of the people speaking them.

The party is also being hurt by absence. As an example, current Florida governor Charlie Crist dropped out of the Republican party primary and re-established himself as an independent candidate, continuing the trend of purging the moderates from the revitalized and tea-happy Republican Party. Chairman Steele, of course, must do damage control and makke it sound like Crist left the party, instead of the party’s base showing him that he’s not welcome there.

Out in the world today, Puerto Rico may have a referendum on what it thinks about its status as a territory of the United States, first voting on whether they want to change it, then possibly voting on how they want to change it. It could mean starting the path to a 51st state. The House of Representatives has approved the measure to start the process.

The United States President sought the inclusion of an exemption from Iranian sanctions for some countries cooperating with United Nations resolutions, with the likely beneficiaries being China and Russia. This looks like political calculation to me, trying to get those countries to sign on. It might end up completely ruining the effect of the sanctions, though.

Iraq is on the recount. Wait two to three weeks to obtain best results.

Vietnam's government celebrated the 35th anniversaty of the end of the war between the North and South Vietnamese, and our article writer is careful to note that while the Communists won the battle (something Americans should be forever ashamed of), it looks like the free market will win the war, with slogans having to compete with billboards and adverts, for example.

And finally, A New Zealand woman has found true love and spent a significant amount of money to have an surrogate carry a child that she will raise with her boyfriend...who is also her biological grandson. This seems like as good a time as any to point out all the states where one can marry one's cousin, and/or have it be recognized as a legal marriage if done elsewhere.

Domestically, here are some numbers for us. Namely, corporate lobbying, by the numbers. If you want somewhere to focus anger on why things don't get done or get done right, blame them.

If you’re looking for just the stupid, then, observe a proposal that would allow Virginia residents to carry guns and drink alcohol.

And then there’s the case of the priest forcing an 86 year-old woman to perform a sex act on him in the church, which leaves the door open to mark another age group on your “priests will abuse” bingo card. Or something.

The Supreme Court punted on an issue regarding a large metal cross used as a war memorial on federal land, declining to rule on whether the cross was a First Amendment violation and kicking the case back to a lower court with instructions to consider the case more completely, while commenting that the Constitution does not require the removal of all religious symbols from the public square. The dissent noted the obviously religious tone of the marker, saying that such a nakedly religious symbol by itself has not been used as a war memorial marker before.

Here’s a bit of timing hilarity - the event intended to praise offshore drilling for its safety and lack of incidents...has been postponed due to the really big leak going on when an offshore drilling platform broke. The not funny parts, of course, are the potential effects the oil slick has on the economy and the ecology of the Gulf area.

And less funny - another coal mine with a history of safety problems has dead people, this time from the roof of their mine segment collapsing.

Americans are less confident they will be able to get and afford healthcare after the passage of the health care reform bill. And the one thing really missing from this article is an actual why. There are hints that some people worry about Medicare cuts, but also that it might be they’re worried about getting their rates jacked up, being dropped from their care, or having all their costs simply skyrocket, even with insurance.

Last out, here’s more of the weird - A Department of Health building in Ohio was closed because of fleas and other animals in the building. As the places served by the building try to pass it off in a game of budgetary hot potato.

Welcome to technology, where we will soon have wind farms off the shores of the United States augmented reality technology can be intergrated into a pair of dive glasses and into floor tiles, a remote-controlled robot performed a heart catheterization, genome sequencing used to predict a healthy person's risk for diseases, and an energy harvesting device that uses changes in heat to generate microwatts of power.

Oh, and yet more researchers studying what the brain does and looks like during orgasm.

In the opinions, we start in Arizona, where Mr. York swings for the fences and whiffs by claiming the Arizona law is nothing new - we're asked for our ID all the time, and besides, legal immigrants have to carry their documentation on them at all times as a federal law. ID for those is for identity verification purposes - for you to show that you are who you are. It is not used to determine whether you’re in the country legally, and when asked for ID on other sorts of things, it’s not usually up to the judgment of the person asking, to ask or not ask based on whether they have a reasonable suspicion you’re illegal. What does an illegal immigrant look like? If you can answer that question, and it doesn’t involve rthnic background, we’re very interested to hear what you have to say. Mr. Laskin steps up to the plate next and fouls a couple pitches off by claiming the Arizona law isn't radically different from federal law, as Mr. York does, claiming that any racial profiling is either in your head or an unfortuante consequence of the indisputable fact that illegal immigrants mostly come from Latin American countries, but striking out by claiming that the Obama plan is amnesty for illegals and that the real tragedy is how leftists are reacting to the sensible and bold law.

Speaking of race relations, The Washington Times accuses the President of going from "post racial" to "totally all about the racism" based on his appeal to minorities to keep the Democratic majority in the November elections. Y’knkow, appealing to the base that got him elected. According to the editorial, though, by explicitly calling out the major portions of his base, the President was apparently saying, “White dudes need not apply” and confirming that the Democratic Party is racist against white people. (This apparently also means the Dems get trounced at the midterm elections because all the Angry White Men will turn out in force to oppose him, having sat on their behinds for 2008 because they couldn’t stomach John McCain enough to vote for him. Mr. Fund mentions this "enthusiasm gap" between Democratic-leaners and Republican-leaners.) Mr. Kuhner explicitly says the President is attempting to create a race war and pit the White Christian Men against everyone else, and hope he comes out on top, riding the wave of everyone else and showing the success of liberal fascism, courtesy the love child of Martin Heidegger and Jane Fonda. So if Barack Obama is being nakedly racist in his attempts to rally the base, does that mean Michael Steele was also nakedly racist when he said that the Republicans needed to ditch the Southern Strategy and appeal to minorities? Can we call the Tea Party nakedly racist, then, because they seem to be courting white men as their champions of liberty and freedom and subtly and not-subtly implying and saying that white men are the people who should be in charge? (Unless, of course, you believe Noemie Emery, who tells us the Tea Party has always been about fixing debts, and the liberal media has completely fabricated the Tea Party that is afraid of Hispanics, blacks, and strong women, (their own greatest fears Being Marco Rubio (Hispanic), Thomas Sowell (black), and the twin evils of Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann (strong women)), and projected them onto the real Tea Party.) Hell, can we say Arizona is racist for their law assuming people who don’t look like Americans are illegal, Virginia is heterosexist because they rolled back lawful protections for LGBT people, and Oklahoma is sexist because of their abortion laws? (Oh, wait, they are.) It would be nice and refreshing to be able to say what your opponents are and point out that they are that based on their own assumptions and accusations. Maybe then we could get to work on fixing those problems. Of course, to call them such is “condescending”, despite most people in the tea party are willingly being stupid rather than innately being stupid, and they could choose to bring up the level of discourse if they would stop choosing to think stupid.

Mr. Alexander is incensed at the inclusion of TEA Party types as possible malcontents planning to raid or attack Fort Knox in a leaked security exercise, and continues to maintain that it’s wrong for them to be included, even after he was told that the modifications that added TEA party people were not approved by the Command staff and done after the initial circulation. In the name of “making things more realistic”. Mr. Alexander, of course, believes all tea party protestors are defenders of essential liberty against the socialist Barack Obama, regardless of their other views or proclivities for carrying weapons, and thus could never be accurately characterized as potential domestic terrorists, no matter what the leftwing media wants you to believe.

And most generally (and one-sidedly), Mr. Heninger says the President's public criticism of the Republicans and other persons opposed to him is "conduct unbecoming a President" and such negativity, while ingrained into the Democrats and appealing to do, is a mistake and will result in his defeat. Because the President presented himself as a perfect model of positivity in his campaign, and people will be disillusioned with the reality. If Mr. Heninger had stuck with this idea, he probably would have made a reasonable argument. But it’s an afterthought to his real point, that a President being openly critical of his opponents is wrong. Well, let’s see - intransigence, opposition based on a caricature of the person, lies about the policy, stalling, delaying, working to undermine strong bills into weak ones despite the populace wanting even stronger measures than those proposed, an unerring tie to the people who have some significant blame for the recession, and the continued philosophy that government can’t do antything right and so shouldn’t do anything at all. That’s what he’s facing, in greater and lesser degrees, based on which part of his agenda he wants to work with. For msot of us, if we were faced with co-workers that were anything like what the Republicans are now, we’d have long since resorted to the unparliamentary language.

Instead, we get Mr. Klein pointing out all the dysfunctions of the Congress in much more polite language, as well as what happens when Congress cannot effectively do its job. (Mr. Klein notes that ideological solidarity may be the reason, paradoxical that it may seem, for Congressional inability to get things done - there’s no way to coalition-build if all the Democrats and all the Republicans are doctrinaire to certain points.)

From there, Mr. Brookes thinks that North Korea should serve as a lesson to the sorts of unchecked aggression rogue states will have once they get their nuclear arsenals, with the countries they attack too afraid to respond lest they get nuked. Representatives Issa, Burton, and Miller accuse the President of continuing to look the other way while Iran develops nuclear weapons, demanding sanctions at the very least and insisting that the United States be able to turn Iran into a desert of glass if we think they’re too close and aren’t going to turn away. I do wonder why opinion columnists think we’re abandoning Israel, when government officials insist that they're not going to do anything of the sort. I guess it fits their narrative that the President is intent on harming allies, ineffectively courting enemies, and preparing America for its decline from being the exceptional power in the world.

Mr. Gaffney, Jr. offers advice to the President that he pick the next Supreme Court nominee based on whether they will interfere with the conduct or war or leave decisions about that up to the executive and the military. Two guesses to which position Mr. Gaffney, Jr. supports, and the first doesn’t count.

And last out, a standard piece from the Washington Times about how bank and Wall Street investment firm reforms will be misguided, costly, and ineffective, because government is what brought about the disaster, thanks to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and requirements that banks lend to people with bad credit. Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks are simply a convenient villain, brought in to rile up the populace so the government can exert more control, forcing banks to stay small and inefficient and preventing them from making deals between themselves with derivatives and insurances. It would prevent them from using The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) to its fullest. We always find it interesting that the private sector strenuously blames government regulation for causing a meltdown of the economy when you can easily find businesses appearing to collude with each other, bonuses that were not tied to performance, and other facets of capitalism that would make for much easier explanations.

Last for tonight, a different set of numbers and explanations - An Overview of Abortion in the United States, which tells us a whole lot of interesting data and reasons, gathered from the people experiencing unintended pregnancies and abortions, most of which contradicts the stories and “facts” cited by anti-choice organizations about the safety of abortions, motivations for getting abortions, and things that lower pregnancy rates and abortions.

And as a postscript, because it’s going to extend into another entry, tonight’s Worst Persons In the World - the bronze to the Journeys into Manhood ex-gay therapy camp, claiming they can get someone from gay to straight in 48 hours. Here’s a hint why they’re the worst - ex-gay therapy doesn’t work, bilks their attendees for money, and create dangerous mental loops and guilt that is harmful to the psyche of the supposedly now straight person.

Garnering the silver, the source in the Washington Times is an unsigned claiming that "discrimination is necessary" to protect us all against "she-males teaching kindergarteners", cross-dressers at church functions, and men (because they have male body parts) who claim to be women and want to use the women's bathroom. The response is getting called out for that editorial in the Washington Times for being horribly transphobic and tacitly encouraging harassment, violence, and trauma against children and adults in the name of protecting those children from The Different, y’know, THEM. The idiot that let that editorial through, you’re a stupid, stupid rat creature. But you can only get the runner up prize in tonight’s Worst Persons Derby, as the winner inspired an entire entry of rage all by themselves. That entry will follow.

Worst Person In The World: Someone hypocritcally accuses someone else of trying to take over.

Today merits a separate Worst Person in the World merit because a simple paragraph of pithy dismissal isn’t going to cut it on this one. Long, but hopefully not rambly. The regular news post for today will be the next entry as you continue scrolling. Read in whichever order you like.

The set-up: Mr. Kilpatrick says that the outrage against the Catholic church and their continual covering-up and reshuffling of priests that abuse children is not outrage against child abuse, but part of a broader anti-Christian agenda.

How does he know this? Well, we’re not outraged that the President is dropping inflammatory terms like “jihad” from the national security document, so clearly we’re a-okay with Islam, the religion whose adherents are unfailingly terrorists waiting for their opportunity to impose their world and its backwards, bizarre rules (many of them shared with Christians or Jews) on the rest of us fine, upstanding Christian citizens. Furthermore, nobody was outraged when Roman Polanski raped a young girl (in Bizarro World, perhaps) and nobody is outraged that researcher Alfred Kinsey consulted with admitted pedophiles to gather data for his survey and research on human sexuality (uh, comprehensiveness requires talking to people that will squick you out, usually).

His first thesis is that Catholics are obviously just a convenient scapegoat - once they’ve been taken down, the secularists will come for every other Christian denomination, too. Liberals are attempting to tear down the taboo against pedophilia, as evidenced by their continued attempts to normalize same-sex relationships despite most of the abuse being male priests on male children. Clearly, to Mr. Kilpatrick, homosexuality and pedophilia of teen boys are linked, if not one causes another, and it has nothing to do at all with a religion that declares only males can become priests, can hold higher offices in the religion, and has several local churches that insist only men can be the assistants at the altar as well, and then further requires that men be sexually celibate to be priests. Furthermore, the priest is supposed to be a person of trust endowed with the ultimate authority to tell us what God wants and means for us, making it much harder for anyone to believe the priest would be abusing the children. (This might not have any correlation at all, actually. Could be a red herring, but the male-centric Catholic Church does seem like it would have a higher-than-statistical chance of attracting homosexuals, and the doctrinal insistences that children must be unquestioningly obedient of the priests as well as their parents does help create an environment where a pedophile could hide.)

Mr. Kilpatrick then says recent efforts to root out pedophiles, initated by Cardinal Ratzinger, have been stunningly effective, so much so that public schools are more likely to have abuse than the Catholic Church, so there must be a hidden agenda as to why we continue to harp on these issues. The problem doesn’t exist anymore, and we don’t need to apologize for when it happened in the past! No, the real reason we’re still on this subject, says Mr. Kilpatrick, is because Christianity is one of the few places in society that still proposes moral absolutes. Moral absolutes are the Kryptonite of liberals, because they say something is always wrong and don’t let society wiggle its way out by using situational ethics. Moral absolutes stop society from being completely liberal with its sexual practices (implication: homosexuals, pedophiles, incest, bestiality, and everything bad you can think of will be okay and nobody can say it’s wrong without being accused of “hate speech”!) So Christianity must be the butt of rude jokes, told that evangelizing could be considered a hate crime, have its vocal supporters fined or jailed for expressing their views, so that its influence will be weakened enough to let the secular forces take over. It’s discrimination against them, while Other Religions can do all sorts of hateful things and they’ll get a pass in the name of diversity or multiculturalism. Which leads to his second thesis.

That thesis is that the push for secularism is actually the first part of a sinister plot by Islam, The Evil Religion that enshrines child abuse in its scriptures, marries off young girls to older men and recruits boys to be the lovers of older men, the true enemy, to take over once Christianity, the bulwark against their evil, is weakened and destroyed. No media outlet ever talks about any of the abuses of Islam, though, and never ever links those cases that do get talked about to The Evil Religion so that everyone can see how Evil it is and run to the comforting arms of Christianity, the Forces of Good. Europe, now being slowly taken over by The Evil Religion, has seen female genital mutilation, child marriages, and honor killings pop up, strictly as imports from The Evil Religion’s immigrants and the government’s unwillingness to ban The Evil Religion for condoning such practices. According to Mr. Kilpatrick, first we go secular, then Islam sweeps in and takes over in our weakened state, leaving the dominant society one where “children in hijabs [are] hurried into the local government approved clitorectomy clinic”.

...where to begin? Do I start with the parts of Christianity that explicitly can say that beating your child is acceptable and necessary to raising them properly and steering them away from evil? “Christian Domestic discipline?” The part where the prophet summons bears to eat the children that make fun of him? The practice of stoning people who violate the moral laws? The possibility that King David was LGBT, an adulterer, and yet is blessed to be the head of the line from which Jesus appears? The Levitical laws and their selective application in modern society? Jacob stealing his brother’s birthright and then tricking his dad? The gang rapists of Sodom and Gomorrah (who got theirs in the end, we must note)? The incestuous daughters of Lot?

The Jewish and Christian traditions are soaked in blood, violence, taboo breaking, blasphemy, sex, adultery, and all sorts of sinful behaviors. Mostly, we note, in the beginning parts, the histories and the accounts of the people, their kings, and the judges. Once we hit the Christian Foundational Writings, the message shifts. The main message there is faith, hope, and love, especially love, with some fairly explicit commands to tell the Laws of old to go fuck off if they don’t bring someone into a deeper faith and inspire more love for their fellow humans. The stoners for the adulterer? “If you’re perfect, go ahead and throw.” Roman tax collectors, Samaritans, lepers, sinners, The Other People? “Let’s have dinner together. Let me get you a drink of water.” Clerics with an inflated sense of their own importance? “Fuck off.” People making profit off of religious activities? “Fuck off, and here’s a few lashes on your ass for good measure.” Even so, the way to salvation for the people is through a blood sacrifice! One foreshadowed (by the arrangement of the text) all the way back in Genesis, when God commands Abraham to take Isaac, his son, and slaughter him as an offering. Abraham’s hand is stayed at the last minute, but there’s no God to overrule the killing of his own divine son. Even in the hopey-changey parts, there’s still plenty of stuff bubbling underneath the surface. To displace all of that tradition onto your kid brother and say he’s the only one who’s ever violent or misogynistic in modern times (let’s not get started on Paul of Tarsus) or seeks to impose himself on the world requires some serious ignorance or cognitive dissonance.

Yes, we’re seeing people immigrate to other countries and bring their cultural practices with them. That does not mean they’ve been legalized - there were several well-publicized cases where FGM was roundly condemned and another set composed of child brides seeking injunctions from the law that they had to marry. They won, by the way. Even the vaunted “Sharia courts” in Europe are only empowered by the regular courts to handle disputes that don’t involve breaking secular laws, as far as I know. And we get much more publicity about bombings done in other countries by people of other religions, but curiously little about the religious motivations of non-Muslims when they commit violence. Scott Roeder? Christian terrorist. He doesn’t get that moniker, though, because the debate over him focused mostly on the medical service that George Tiller provided and the morality of that rather than condemning the terrorist attack. For those that did condemn them, by the way. There were plenty of Christian terrorist groups that praised Scott Roeder, and that praise the use of explosives and murder against those seeking or providing medical services, out of their own twisted desire to impose their morality on the rest of us and take over the country. Christian terrorists beat and kill plenty of LGBT people every year, but the debate focuses on whether or not being LGBT is something that should be allowed, not on condemning the vicious violence against fellow human beings. They’re not mutilating their children, but they are leaving them unprepared for the world around them. Some Christians believe that vaccination is unacceptable, and so will leave their children to die rather than seek treatment. That’s not just child abuse, that’s infanticide. Yet they are not universally condemned as “baby-killers”. Government contractor Xe, nee Blackwater, has a lot of evidence suggesting that some part of the organization, if not the whole upper management, viewed themselves as Christians taking the fight to Muslims - Christian terrorism against the Muslim population, wrapped, knowingly, in the language of a War against (Muslim) Terrorism. (It sounds like the beginning of an awful recursion loop.) And that’s apart from all the stories emanating from the armed services about the treatment of non-Christians by their fellows and officers. An outsider to our culture could probably say with high certainty that the Christianists, including their terror arms, have successfully subverted the intended secular government to create their own empire. They’ve got an abundant amount of evidence to choose from.

Mr. Kilpatrick and anyone of his ilk are not only denying their history and projecting it onto the other, they’re trying to fight against someone else doing what they have already done, and are throwing up as many smokescreens designed to appeal to the societal inculcation of what is right and wrong as they can to hide it. It’s not “Save us from the Evil”, it’s “Save us from having our power challenged!” An actually secular government would look and act much differently than the government of the United States and of the various States. I think that if the government were to find a way of detaching itself from the thorns of Christianity wrapped around it and find a way of keeping them from returning, there would be no need to worry about Islam supposedly taking its place and taking over - the right structures would already be in place to resist any religious entity trying to take over, regardless of what religion it was.