John McCain: Big Fat Liar

So, it turns out that John “Walnuts” McCain’s heartwarming “cross in the dirt” story from Sunday’s Saddleback Forum was stolen in toto from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.

But this is actually old news. Ol’ Walnuts has been riding Solzhenitsyn’s coattails for some time, it seems. McCain recounts the same story in his 2005 book Character is Destiny, which received a less than warm reception from the wingers at Free Republic. One freeper readily spotted and called bullshit on the Solzhenitsyn connection back then.

No wonder McCain is “reluctant” to talk about his Hanoi Hilton experiences. Every time he tries, he ends up lying about it.

Primary Election Today!

Today’s the day we Coloradans go to the polls ( at least those of us who don’t care much for that newfangled early voting) and decide who’s gonna appear on the ballot in November for a variety of state and federal offices. My fellow City and County of Broomfield residents can get all the necessary information here, including sample ballots and voting center locations.

Republicans in this neck of the woods have no contested races at all. We Democrats have just one, the three-way contest among Joan Fitz-Gerald, Jared Polis and Will Shafroth to become the Democratic nominee for U.S. Congressional District 2. The Democratic nominee for that office is the winner come November. No Republican has a chance in CD2.

The three candidates for the CD2 nomination are a veritable embarrassment of riches. I prefer Fitz-Gerald based on her experience as a legislator at the state level and her fervent hatred of all things Republican, but we really can’t go wrong with any of these people.

I suspect Jared Polis will win. He made a mint in internet commerce awhile back and has been spending a sizeable chunk of his personal fortune saturation-bombing the airwaves with teevee ads for the past several months. Neither of the other candidates has been able to get within hollering distance of keeping up.

Update: As predicted, Polis takes it. With 99% of precincts reporting:

Polis - 42%

Fitz-Gerald - 38%

Shafroth - 20%

Comprehensive election results from across the state are available here.

According to the Denver Post, Polis spent “at least $5.3 million” of his own money on the campaign. That, together with the approximately $1 million in contributions raised by each of the three candidates, made this the most expensive primary in the country.

Polis’ opponents in November are Republican Scott Starin and a couple of random hippies from the Green and Unity Parties. If Polis wins — and it would be the mother of all upsets if he didn’t — he’ll be Colorado’s first openly gay member of Congress.

So yes, you can buy an election in this state. However, you have to be a reasonably decent human being, unlike Pete Coors.

CBS fraudulently covers up McCain’s appalling ignorance

John “Walnuts” McCain wants to be our next president based largely on his claim of being the right man to handle the Iraq war. Never mind that doesn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Forget his recent reference to the nonexistent Iraq-Pakistan border. (The “Iraq-Pakistan border”, if you want to call it that, is a whole country known as Iran.) He’s the right guy. He’s a foreign policy expert. Just ask him.

And with major “news organizations” like CBS committing outright fraud to back him up, how can McCain fail to get the message across? The Keith Olbermann video of the fraud is available here.

Katie Couric was questioning McCain about “the surge” and Barack Obama’s views thereon. Couric asked:

Senator McCain, Senator Obama says, while the increased number of US troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?

McCain answered:

I don’t know how you respond to something that is as — such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarlane [phonetic] was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening.

Absolutely wrong. The so-called Anbar Awakening began in the summer of 2006, long before the infamous “surge.”

But McCain’s spectacular ignorance is no impediment when you have friends like CBS. Here’s the answer they showed their viewers:

Senator Obama has indicated by his failure to acknowledge the success of the surge that he would rather loss a war then loss a campaign.

Which is a vacuous Rebitchlifuck blabbering point clipped from an entirely different part of the interview.

Couric took over as anchor of the CBS Evening News after Dan Rather left in disgrace over a story on George W. Bush’s horrifically dubious National Guard record. The story was accurate enough, but relied in part on documents of dubious authenticity. Turns out that CBS never tried to authenticate the documents, its public statements to the contrary notwithstanding. The right wing machine screamed bloody murder, calling the documents forgeries (never established) and demanding Rather’s head on a platter.

Surely our conservative brethren will give Couric the same treatment for this far more egregious breach of journalistic ethics, right?

FDA staffers rat out FDA

This could prove interesting:

Thoreau-FDA.com is composed of and/or descriptive of current and ex-US Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) staff who have succeeded, in resisting their upper management’s wrongful directives and requests that put public health at avoidable risk.  When unchecked, these wrongful directives/requests cause drug review outcomes to be misrepresented as carefully considered objective “science based” assessments, when they are, in fact, pre-determined. Click here to read Articles. These wrongful requests or directives by the US FDA’s upper managers are specifically called, undocumented top-down approve directives or requests.  Some US FDA staff resist such wrongful directives and requests by disobeying them.   This is called Civil Servant Disobedience.

Part of the problem, the past and present Food and Drug Administration staffers tell us, “is the abuse of FDA staff, who do their jobs by making publicly known, the existence of harmful and deadly products already approved for, and in, the market.” To paraphrase Gene Hackman in the movie Crimson Tide, these folks seem to have a serious weed up their asses and a legitimate gripe, a formidable combination.

Such issues are all the more important in light of the burgeoning trend in the federal courts to find that FDA regulations preempt state tort law. If the FDA isn’t doing its job and doing it well, we’re at the mercy of unscrupulous for-profit drug and medical device manufacturers.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on Thoreau-FDA.com and reporting on any interesting new content.

H/T - TortDeform

Colorado GOP loses registrant lead

The Republican Party no longer has the highest number of registered voters here in Colorado. So who’s the new leader? Democrats? Hell no, buddeh! That’s crazy talk. This is, after all, Colorado.

The leading voter registration status is now “Unaffiliated”, as it was from 1978 to 1990. According to the Rocky Mountain News:

2008 Unaffiliated 1,021,979 34.19%

Republican 1,020,433 34.14%

Democrat 932,603 31.2%

Republicans have lost some 42,000 registered voters in 2006, whereas Democrats have picked up about 32,000. Looks like George W. Bush may have done a bit of good after all, however unintentionally.

Right wing religious nuts unite behind McCain

So perhaps you’ve been thinking that John “Walnuts” McCain isn’t religiously insane enough to garner substantial support among the extreme Christian right. Forget it. Unhand your Johnson, Skippy, and breathe deep the odious stench of reality.

One hundred fairly well known wingnut Christian extremists met in Denver, CO on July 1 and “agreed to unify behind the Arizona senator for president.” Although the wingers aren’t deliriously happy with Walnuts, they’re convinced that he’ll be far more supportive of the Christian right agenda than presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

Attendees included Mat Staver, dean of Falwell-founded Liberty Law School (who arranged the meeting), Phyllis Schalfly, Wendy Wright, Tim and Bev LaHaye, David Barton, Phil Burress, Kelly Shackelford, Don Hodel and representatives of Focus on the Family and the American Family Association.

The group also endorsed a Declaration of American Values (pdf, 1 page). Clicking on that link is for the strong of stomach only. It’s mostly just heinous, but it has amusing components as well, particularly adherence to the laughable view that Jesus was some sort of supply-siding free marketeer.

Hypocrites defend traditional marriage

The oft-proposed, always-failed Federal Marriage Amendment is back in the form of Senate Joint Resolution 43, introduced on June 25:

110th CONGRESS

2d Session

S. J. RES. 43

Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relating to marriage.

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

June 25, 2008

Mr. WICKER (for himself, Mr. VITTER, Mr. CRAIG, Mr. ROBERTS, Mr. INHOFE, Mr. BROWNBACK, Mr. ALLARD, Mr. THUNE, and Mr. SHELBY) introduced the following joint resolution; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

---

JOINT RESOLUTION

Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relating to marriage.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of its submission by the Congress:

`Article –

`Section 1. This article may be cited as the `Marriage Protection Amendment’.

`Section 2. Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.’.

Note that our intrepid defenders of traditional man-and-woman, weiner-in-cooter marriage include an admitted whore fucker and reputed diaper fetishist — David Vitter (R-LA) — and (at least) one real, live, self-loathing homosexual — Larry “A Clumsy and Unremarkable Fuck” Craig (R-ID). With friends like that, does traditional marriage really need enemies?

H/T - SquareState

Colorado Democratic Delegate Totals

Ever since Super Tuesday the assemblage of dumbasses collectively known as the mainstream media has been reporting on how many delegates Colorado will be sending to the Democratic National Convention, along with who they’re pledged to vote for. Trouble is, there were no such delegates until the conclusion of the Colorado Democratic Party’s State Assembly and Convention last weekend.

On Super Tuesday we held our precinct caucuses. Those began with a preference poll for presidential candidates. The results of the preference poll formed the basis of the media’s blatherings about delegate totals. Trouble is, the preference poll doesn’t mean much in Colorado’s rather Byzantine delegate selection process.

At the caucuses we selected delegates to attend county party conventions and separate conventions held in each of Colorado’s seven congressional districts. At the county conventions we elected delegates to the state party convention. The preference polling at the various levels determines how many delegates will be sent to the next level and how many of those delegates will be “pledged” to particular candidates. However, the pledges aren’t binding. For instance, the precinct sent me to the county convention as an Obama delegate, but I was free to change my mind and vote for Clinton upon showing up at the convention. (I didn’t, of course, but I could have.)

The process culminates in the state party convention, held last weekend in Colorado Springs. Only when that event ends do we know how many delegates Colorado will send to the national convention and who they’re pledged to support.

In addition, Democrats in each congressional district hold separate Congressional District Conventions. At those events we elect delegates to the national convention over and above those elected at the state convention.

So now, at long last, the totals are in. You’ll find the information here on the homepage of CDP’s website.

From the state convention, Obama got 13 delegates and 2 alternates to the national convention. Clinton got six delegates and no alternates. From the seven congressional district conventions, Obama got 23 delegates and 7 alternates, while Clinton tallied 13 delegates and no alternates. Final tally: Obama - 36 delegates (and 9 alternates); Clinton - 19 delegates.

Of course, now that accurate totals are available, the mainstream media has long since lost interest in Colorado. That state of affairs will no doubt continue until the national convention itself, which takes place in Denver.

Hagee: Jews were askin’ for it

This story is all over the intart00bz. I first saw it at Esoteric Dissertations, so Codesmithy gets the hat tip.

Click on the above link and you’ll find audio of right wing evangelical lunatic John Hagee waxing insane about how the Jews were to blame for the Holocaust and Hitler was simply doing the Lord’s work.

Other notable Hagee sputterings include referencing the Catholic Church as “The Great Whore,” an “apostate church,” the “anti-Christ” and a “false cult system.” And then there was the whole Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for New Orleans hosting a gay pride parade thing. My personal favorite is Hagee’s call for a joint U.S.-Israeli military strike on Iran “to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West… a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ.”

Republican presidential candidate Walnuts McCain remains “very honored” to have Hagee’s endorsement. Walnuts claims to repudiate Hagee’s statements “that are anti-semetic or anti-Catholic, racist, any other,” but there’s really nothing to repudiate because the good pastor’s comments “were taken out of context[.]“

As always, Lord save me from your followers.

More: Illusory Tenant links to this appropriately derisive article from Salon:

These psycho Christians make Robert Mitchum’s sociopathic traveling preacher in “The Night of the Hunter” (the guy with “love” tattooed on one hand and “hate” on the other) look like St. Francis of Assisi.

Go tell it on the mountain, brother!

Still More: It looks like the Hitler-was-God’s-agent-on-earth comment was too much even for Walnuts: McCain officially rejects Hagee endorsement

Moar Boy Scouts Welfare Queenage

Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 600 (2000) is one of my top ten all time favorite U.S. Supreme Court cases. The Court ruled by a 5-4 vote that a New Jersey statute prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination violated the BSA’s First Amendment right of expressive association by forcing it to accept gays as scoutmasters. The result isn’t especially enthralling, but the method is revealing as hell. Chief Justice Rehnquist’s majority opinion is a superb example of how alleged “conservative” practitioners of “judicial restraint” will do damn near anything, up to and including violating the canons of judicial conduct, to reach a desired result. To see how it works, check out the majority opinion, then read Justice Stevens’ dissent to find out how the majority ignores, distorts and flat-out lies about the record evidence in the case.

Perhaps the most odious bit of nonsense regarding the Boy Scouts is the notion that they’re a purely private organization and for that reasons shouldn’t be subject to nondiscrimination laws applicable to public entities. In truth, the Boy Scouts have enjoyed and benefited from a lengthy, close and exceptionally profitable relationship with the federal government.

Chris Rodda reports on the latest Congressional give-away to the Boy Scouts here. The current bit of largess comes in the form of House Bill 5872 (pdf, 8 pages). The bill’s purpose is “[t]o require the Secretary of the Treasury to mint coins in commemoration of the centennial of the Boy Scouts of America, and for other purposes.”

Commemorative coin issuance is hardly a big deal in and of itself. That’s been going on since 1892. The intriguing part is the “other purposes” statement. Just what are those “other purposes” anyway?

Check out Section 7 of the bill, which mandates that “[a]ll sales of coins issued under this Act shall include a surcharge of $10 per coin” and directs that the Secretary pay all surcharges collected to the National Boy Scouts of America Foundation. Rodda calculates that bill could result in a windfall of up to $3.5 million for the Boy Scouts.

The Boy Scouts themselves tout their status as a de facto religion here. A few highlights:

Q. Can an individual who states that he does not believe in God be a volunteer Scout leader or member?

A. No. The Scout Oath represents the basic values of Scouting, and it addresses the issue of “duty to God” before duty to country, others, and self.

. . .

Q. What allows the Boy Scouts of America to exclude atheists and agnostics from membership?

A. The Boy Scouts of America is a private membership group. As with any private organization, Boy Scouts’ retains the constitutional right to establish and maintain standards for membership. Anyone who supports the values of Scouting and meets these standards is welcome to join the organization.

Naturally, the Scouts’ focus on YHWH and the need to be “morally straight” dictates exclusion of gays as well as atheists and agnostics:

Q. Don’t Boy Scouts discriminate against gays and atheists?

A. Boy Scouts of America is one of the most diverse youth groups in the country, serving boys of every ethnicity, religion, and economic circumstance and having programs for older teens of both sexes. That Boy Scouts also has traditional values, like requiring youth to do their “duty to God” and be “morally straight” is nothing to be ashamed of and should not be controversial. No court case has ever held that Boy Scouts discriminates unlawfully, and it is unfortunate here that anyone would characterized Boy Scouts’ constitutionally protected right to hold traditional values as “discriminatory.” That is just name-calling.

Q. May an individual who openly declares himself to be a homosexual be a volunteer Scout leader?

A. No. The Boy Scouts of America is a private membership organization; leadership in Boy Scouting is a privilege and not a right. Boy Scouts believes that homosexual conduct is not compatible with the aims and purposes of Scouting and that a known or avowed homosexual does not present a desirable role model for the youth in the Scouting program. Boy Scouts will continue to select only those who meet Boy Scout standards and qualifications for membership.

The Scout are, of course, correct about their right to practice mindless troglodytic bigotry. I’m fine with that. I don’t want to make the Aryan Nation admit African-Americans or require the American Nazi Party to admit Jews either.

The problem lies in using the U.S. government as a fund raising tool for what amounts to an uberconservative church. Once again we harken back to the words of Justice Hugo Black, the strict constructionist’s strict constructionist:

The “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect “a wall of separation between Church and State.”

Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1, 15-16 (1947).

You want the benefits associated with being a private organization? Fine and goddamn dandy. But don’t you fucking dare expect the rest of us to pay for it.

The unconstitutionality of this horseshit seems obvious, but you’d never be able to tell from the goings-on in Congress. H.R. 5872 sailed through the House of Representatives and passed on a vote of 403-8. On May 19 the bill was introduced in the Senate and referred to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Senate proceedings figure to be equally smooth.

So, then, the next time some piggish Boy Scout muckity muck starts blabbering about how being “morally straight” requires belief in God and keeping one’s weiner away from the No-No Boxes of other men, heap some Reaganesque derision on him. Call the prick a welfare queen. The term fits like the proverbial glove.