The GOP has the candidates it deserves — personally repugnant white men who pander to voters who have only one desire: to be rid of everyone not like them. It’s a party of annihilation.
And its new big target is women. What will they do next week, one wonders? It will take all by surprise in its audacity of awfulness.
“Until 1969, I would have described myself as a `hard’ scientist, the proudly macho adjective employed by chemists and other physical scientists to distinguish their work from the `soft,’ fuzzy fields such as sociology or even psychology,” writes Djerassi, whose historic synthesis of a steroid contraceptive in 1951 revolutionized human reproduction. In this learned memoir, he describes the turning point as the publication of his first public policy article in Science magazine, an event that he says marked the beginning of a life change attributable ultimately to the pill. The first part of this memoir is a well-reasoned apologetic on the pill’s origins and its benefits to women, where Djerassi follows familiar debunkings: of fundamentalists, on the one hand, who regarded the pill as “a symbol, if not an agent, of what they perceived as a pervasive moral decline …”
Djerassi: Well, that is an interesting question … one that I [mulled over] in my book, “This Man’s Pill.??? But of course, for me as a chemist I see the birthday as being 1951 and not 1960. What people forget is that the 1960s was also the decade [that gave birth to] the sexual revolution, drug culture, rock and roll, and, most importantly, the women’s movement. All these had a great deal to do with sexual liberation, and this was an ideal window of opportunity. If we had done our chemical work 15 years later, in other words instead of 1950 but in 1965, the biologists would have then done their work in 1968, and the clinicians in the early 1970s, and you would have no pill. Absolutely no question.
It’s tempting to laugh at Rick “Leprosy” Santorum because he so obviously yearns for a country where progress never happened and the nation’s life and mores were freeze-dried in the Fifties. The pill would not exist as one of the great inventions of the world, women would still know their place — bringing a highball or martini to their men, abortions would be illegal, and sex a marker of criminal depravity unless using it to make babies.
Since being dismissed from Fox, Beck isn’t nearly as famous or influential. Here he laments Boykin’s withdrawal from the West Point prayer breakfast after the resulting media imbroglio. This is attributed to “atheist groups.”
The majority of the segment is devoted to, once again, discussing the infiltration of Islam into US society, impurifying the precious bodily fluids.
Frank Gaffney, an old chieftain of the Cult of EMP Crazy, is also on hand, intimating the country is a hotbed of seditious anti-American activity, mostly in the guise of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
CAIR and others, everyone in the segment agrees, are working to replace the US constitution with shariah law.
A blueprint exists to destroy America, it is said. And it is “to destroy America from within,” says one of Beck’s guests.
“We’re in trouble … they are dismantling us from inside,” says Beck. “At what point does one say, ‘This is treason,” he adds.
The threat of Iranian missiles launched from barges off the east coast, is discussed.
Unintentionally, it’s quite a display of paranoid obsession.
This week James Arbuthnot, a Tory member of Parliament brought the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy to the UK, resulting in a burst of stories on how England could be thrown back to the time of the movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or whatever passes for it in merry Old England.
The Defence Select Committee said the resulting radiation pulse could disrupt power and water supplies, UK defence and satellite navigation systems.
Its chairman, Tory MP James Arbuthnot, said an attack was “quite likely”.
Mr Arbuthnot added: “it would actually have a far more devastating effect to use a nuclear weapon in this way than to explode a bomb in or on a city. The reason for that is it would, over a much wider area, take out things like the National Grid, on which we all rely for almost everything, take out the water system, the sewage system.
“And rapidly it would become very difficult to live in cities. I mean within a matter of a couple of days.
“I wish the government would address this with rather more energy and cohesion and focus. I think sooner rather than later.”
A quick look at it shows part of the Conservative Party mesmerized by the US Cult of EMP Crazy lobby, specifically EMPAct America, and one of its old members, Avi Schnurr. Schnurr is also part of the Bomb Iran/Israeli missile defense lobby and here he is in an old YouTube video for EMPAct America.
“Airplanes could fall from the sky,” he says. It would be back to the days of horse and buggy, no ice cubes in the ice tray, and so on. Readers know the script.
See the witnesses list here and the list of presented “evidence,” here.
And reliance on EMPAct America’s old study, referred to as the EMP Commission Report is shown here.
Schnurr testified on non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons also, a favorite topic of EMPAct America, for at least a decade.
Non-nuclear EMP weapons, like radiofrequency weapons, can damage and destroy electronics locally. Such weapons have short ranges, kilometers for some military systems to meters for devices improvised by terrorists or criminals. Industrial EMP simulators, intended to test commercial systems for hardness against interference from stray electronic and radio emissions, are on the open market and can be purchased by anyone. At least one such EMP simulator is designed to look like a suitcase, can be operated by an individual, and is powerful enough to damage or destroy the electronic controls that regulate the operation of transformers and other components of the power grid. Armed with such a device, and with some knowledge about the electric grid, a terrorist or lunatic could blackout a city.[36]
44. Avi Schnurr said:
The biggest issue with non-nuclear EMP weapons is that the complexity and threshold required to produce them is minimal, to say the most. At the summit meeting in Washington DC, for example, there were two Assistant Secretaries of Defence, a Deputy Under-Secretary and the Pentagon’s chief lawyer, all of whom expressed grave concerns over this risk—the non-nuclear EMP risk in particular, but the risk of EMP in general. The non-nuclear EMP risk is much shorter-range. However, that range, which could be 100 metres, a fraction of a kilometre or a kilometre—under certain circumstances, which I could discuss separately, it could be multiple kilometres—includes the risk of having a field strength that would be even greater, although limited in extent, than a nuclear EMP […]. We had a speaker at that summit who described, to the extent he was allowed to describe it, a device that he built from hardware he acquired from retail stores in the United States, which he had built into a van.[37]
45. A number of nations are thought to be undertaking research into the development of non-nuclear EMP attack weapons, but the Government does not currently regard them as a serious risk …
In the main, Arbuthnot’s report for Parliament relies entirely on material now five to ten years old, and entirely the product of the US electromagnetic pulse defense lobby.
From the Arizona wire, Tim Ralston, the man who blew off his thumb with an errant gun blast on National Geographic‘s Doomsday Preppers:
He’s not worried about Mayan prophecies or weird predictions about the end of days, the worst case scenario for Tim Ralston is an electromagnetic pulse attack by a rogue country.
“If they dropped one bomb in our atmosphere — about 300 miles — say, above Kansas City, it will set off a chain reaction that in a millisecond our power grid as we know it would be shut down for well over two years,” Ralston said.
Ralston, married father of two from Scottsdale, is getting national media attention for the doomsday precautions …
“No, shooting your thumb off isn’t some ‘Prepper’ rite of passage,” reads the caption on a video chronicling the matter.
The collateral damage of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, in action.
[Early] last year, [Rick Santorum] warned that the United States itself could be vulnerable to an Iranian electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack — a scenario in which a nuclear weapon is detonated above the United States, knocking out electricity and communication technologies across the country,” writes some unremarkable person at Foreign Policy.
Rick Santorum is entirely cut from the nasty cloth described by Altemeyer. The more he is in the news, his words published nationwide, the more despicable he appears to those not exactly like him.
If you were asked to imagine a presidential candidate as horrid and horrifying as Rick Santorum more than a decade ago you likely wouldn’t have been able to match the reality. Conversely, it’s Santorum’s most insane bits which now put him, perhaps only momentarily, at the top of the heap for the psychopath vote. To paraphrase Shakespeare, they like Santorum because he’s so toxic he could poison poison.
The Alternet piece, in total seriousness, excerpts a bit taken from the Volkische Beobachter, the newspaper of Hitler’s Nazi Party, and asks readers to compare it with the utterances of Rick Santorum.
Hence, the right wing’s ongoing attempts to erase the separation of church and state, its crusade against Planned Parenthood, its strange obsession with gays. Consider the following political platform, which sounds almost as if it were taken from a speech by Rick Santorum:
The preservation of the family with many children is a matter of biological concept and national feeling. The family with many children must be preserved … because it is a highly valuable, indispensable part of the … nation. Valuable and indispensable not only because it alone guarantees the maintenance of the population in the future but because it is the strongest basis of national morality and national culture … The preservation of this family form is a necessity of national and cultural politics … This concept is strictly at variance with the demands for an abolition of paragraph 218; it considers unborn life as sacrosanct. For the legalization of abortion is at variance with the function of the family, which is to produce children and would lead to the definite destruction of the family with many children …
[When] you look at the numbers, it’s stunning how little this Republican primary electorate resembles the rest of the United States … They are much closer to the population of 1890 than of 2012.
From the New York Times, the piece continues: “[The nomination is] occurring in a different place, guided by talk-radio extremists and religious zealots, with only a vague resemblance to the states where it has taken place.”
This comes as no surprise. It’s easy to see the extremists are good at being horrible, particularly when financed by idiot billionaires who wonder why their old patriarchal jokes about women putting aspirin between their knees from Fifties aren’t funny anymore.
When I worked at the Morning Call newspaper in the late Eighties, editors wouldn’t allow such quotes into the newspaper, even if they were made by important townsmen at local meetings. People were gently saved from themselves.
Now this doesn’t happen. Perversely, there’s a big audience that loves hearing extremely angry white bigots be themselves.
It’s here in southern California in the guise of Los Angeles radio celebrities John and Ken.
Since they’re the biggest thing in radio in the Southland it remains to be seen whether it sticks. It probably won’t for it’s not like the radio men don’t do such things regularly.
John and Ken have a huge audience precisely because they cater to the other California, not the place I live.
California, as anyone with any sense will tell you, is two states.
The one that matters, with the majority and a polyglot, diverse population, is found in the coastal cities and towns.
And there is the second California, mostly really angry white guys and their families, living in the interior. That audience likes to hear radio that blames all problems on people of other colors — the Asians, the Latinos, the “crack ho’s,” the homos, the liberals — and suggests we’d all be better off if they were either all in prison or given sound beatings.
That’s the audience of John and Ken.
The Los Angeles Times recently ran a profile of the two, one suggesting they are more nuanced than your average bigots.
I know Times people, have met many over the years, and saw them again at the memorial for my friend, Don. They don’t listen to John & Ken and they all knew the stuff their paper printed on them, in trying to appear fair and balanced, to coin a phrase, was nonsense.
Broadcasting from a Democratic stronghold in a politically deep blue state, Kobylt and Chiampou have created one of the most popular local radio talk shows in the country by tapping into the contradiction that is California. Not a single Republican holds a statewide elected office. The Legislature is solidly Democratic … The angrier the Californians, the likelier they are to listen in.
For much of their tenure in Southern California, the New Jersey radio transplants have hammered away at illegal immigration. They spent weeks calling on Brown to veto the second half of the California Dream Act, which gives taxpayer-supported college grants to illegal immigrants …
They also gave out the cellphone number for Jorge-Mario Cabrera, spokesman for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, and urged listeners to give him a piece of their minds. More than 500 did, Cabrera said.
Transcripts of about 40 calls provided by Cabrera are filled with profanity. One man who called 42 times, Cabrera said, offered this sentiment: “You pig. I hope you die in your own vomit.”
The John & Ken audience is the same as the one ruling the GOP race.
Politically, John & Ken and their loyal fans have no power in California outside the ability to be spiteful and harassing. And if it weren’t for the newspaper, other media pieces and the occasional billboard, the majority of Californians wouldn’t know anything about them.
However, as in the small white idiot GOP caucuses in the heartland, as with the John & Ken fanbase, the loyalists are extremely focused. And this has been their time to show the rest of us what odious folks they truly are.
Over a year ago I started a tab on Ted Nugent, primarily to show how his special brand of stupid foaming-at-the-mouth incivility had traveled into the mainstream.
But today miscellaneous Ted Nugents, some far more well-dressed, are in the news daily.
Ted-style quote, still excessive and alienating as ever, has become the stuff through which the GOP rallies its own.
“We have a guy in the White House who is an absolute, America-hating punk,??? Nugent said. “And it isn’t really the punk’s fault. It’s we the people for bending over and letting the punk in the door.???
“How about a welfare program … (where) for every kid who gets a sandwich from the welfare program, there’s about 10,000 pigs buying bling-bling, dope and meth with my welfare money,???
“If we don’t fix the United States government this November, we will get exactly what we asked for,??? Nugent said, “and it won’t be the rabid coyote’s fault for getting into our living room – it will be our fault for not shooting him.???
“Prior to being elected President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln represented Sangamon County in the Illinois Legislature,” reads a Wikipedia entry on it.
Lincoln, as everyone knows, was fatally shot by John Wilkes Booth.
An amusing editorial cartoon of Ted Nugent standing before a portrait of Lincoln, from the Springfield, IL, newspaper is here. Click on it for a large version.
“And sent from on high, would come a prophet, in simple sleeveless vestments, to help the faithful defeat the wicked king, before he spreads his health care seed!”
Mark Fiore cartoon animation on the wisdom of the bishops. The guy who does the voices is teh shit!
It’s an easy choice. Leprosy is treatable. Rick Santorum isn’t. And the incidence of him in this country is a lot greater. Rick Santorum is one of the most singularly repugnant politicians in a group characterized by cavernous personal faults and flaws. Of an unlikable and impossible to admire bunch, Santorum takes the cake.
He’s a Catholic — the worst, someone straight from the church I knew as a very little boy, a mild-looking conservatively dressed sociopath with a pasted-on smile.
It’s virtually inconceivable to me that Republican voters are so nuts they’d actually vote for someone who holds beliefs pitting them against women over birth control and everyone else for having sex for lots of reasons outside procreation.
Santorum is emblematic of the beamish and out-of-touch orthodoxy, the unbending unbeliever-hostile unreason of the Catholic church in the US.
I got married in the Catholic church decades ago and while divorced for a good long time, in the eyes of it I am in that relationship forever.
Fortunately, we still live in the US.
Now for the second part of the story.
As a requirement for getting married in the church in the late Eighties partners had to take a course on marital relationships, administered by the parish in which they were to be joined. This was put in place to battle the merciless statistics on divorce.
Worked good, didn’t it?
Part of the course was on birth control. The church chose one of its local parishioners to teach this subject, feeling he was qualified in some way not apparent to anyone else.
The man counseled the class on the rhythm method, the monitoring of the woman’s temperature and her cycles of secretions. Really, that’s how it was phrased.
The fellow revealed he had five children, or maybe it was six, in the space of about four years and some change. The rhythm method was working very well for him.
It was hard to contain a natural superciliousness.
Of course, the idea wasn’t to teach birth control. It was to get you to have children, a lot of them, and as quickly as possible. Contraception, even the rhythm method, was not OK, to paraphrase and embellish slightly on the wisdom of Rick Santorum.
At one point a priest must have gotten the impression I wasn’t an ideal candidate for Roman Catholic marriage. So he asked me a question he presumably thought could be used to slow things down: “Are you on drugs, George?”
So I got married in the church after saying “No,” anyway. After that I never went to a single Mass. It was the end of having anything to do with the religion.
About a year after having been married a priest from the Allentown diocese showed up at the apartment door wishing to chat. He wanted to know why I had lapsed. I told him I wasn’t going to waste any time on him with an answer and I did it through the intercom security system apartments use to keep out the riffraff.
“Aren’t you going to let me in?” the man asked. It apparently stunned him that someone married by the church could be so rude.
Like the Catholic clergy in Allentown, when I see Rick Santorum I see someone who’s idea of righteousness is getting in everyone else’s business in the name of their own warped code. They are worth only scorn. If you saw Santorum approaching on the sidewalk, you’d cross the street to get away.
People who support Rick Santorum seem from another planet entirely. Either that or they’re so desperate and rendered stupid by a hatred of Mitt Romney they cast their votes for a person worse than an Old Testament disease.
While I’m not watching any more episodes of National Geographic’s pitiful series, Doomsday Preppers, that doesn’t mean press releases for it go unseen. Published to to maximize the appearance of one of the show’s profiled preppers, it advertises a a fellow who has unsurprisingly built a business on survivalism.
Much of Doomsday Preppers is obviously devoted to the acquisition of survival gear and militaria.
For example, the appeal of the doomsday shovel must be its adaptability born in the tradition of the battlefield entrenching tool. It is not only for digging a hole but also for bashing those who would steal your dried corn, pemmican and preserves in the head.
