more STFU

calbuzz reports on a debate between steve poizner and tom campbell in the OC last night. mostly, i don’t care, because it’s early yet in the gubernatorial race. this, however, brought on the rageahol:

Campbell and Poizner engaged in a friendly series of pretty substantive and fairly specific exchanges on issues, ranging from tax cuts – Poizner wants big ones right away while Campbell wants to cut more spending first – to their mutual dislike of public employee unions – “When the economy goes down (government workers) don’t feel the same pain,” Poizner claimed

um, what? no, seriously. WTF? i am one of the lucky state employees–still employed, not yet furloughed–and let me tell you, i’m still feeling pain. how DARE he stand up there during a year when state employees have faced lay-offs, furloughs, pay cuts, and being paid with IOUs, and say that government workers don’t share the burden of a crashing economy? seriously, how the fuck dare he? STFU, you fucking ignorant asshole. 

 

 

Congressmen Are Such Babies

Rep Steve King (Dickweed-IA) found himself facing the commissioner of the NFL in a hearing on football head injuries, etc. prompted by a recent New Yorker article – so naturally he took the time to grandstand and try to make the moment about Rush Limbaugh. And wtf is “verbal pornography?” I’m pretty sure he just made it up.

There are plenty of other examples of King making an ass of himself available on Youtube for anyone looking to feed their addiction to rageahol.

ps. Is it just me or does Conyers sound like he’s on fuckin quaaludes or something? Oooook pooh, I guess I’l chaaaair the meeting…

On the other hand he may’ve simply had a hunch that King was about to say something stupid.. I can’t tell if he looks tired or annoyed, actually.

I’M SO CONFUSED

You mean Obama played basketball with the UConn womens’ team in April? And the press missed this when they were rushing to indict him as sexist? Shocking.

WASHINGTON — Championship ceremony is a White House standard for sports teams. Shooting hoops with the president, now that’s something to remember.

Moments after Monday’s event in front of the South Portico, President Barack Obama hustled the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball team over to the outdoor half-court, away from reporters and cameras.

The president, a former high school player and avid fan who still plays pickup games, prevailed in a brief, impromptu game of P-I-G with a few of the players.

“He was pretty good from 17 feet,” said coach Geno Auriemma. “His shot’s a little unorthodox, but it goes in … He’s got a little bit of that swagger.”

But… but… media told me he hates women…

Our Propaganda Is Subtle

The White House keeps up its attack on Fox News as biased in this video with Valerie Jarrett … Why the White House persists in making this losing argument is anybody’s guess. What’s your theory?

–Baltimore Sun TV Critic / Massive Douchebag David Zurawik, posing to his readers what is perhaps the most clumsily-delivered leading question I’ve ever seen.

I’m sure it’s a total coincidence that this fuckwit’s opinion is continually held up as evidence that Fox’s version of this little pissing contest is correct. Yeah… great. Remind me why I’m supposed to care what a TV critic thinks about politics again?

Keep The Wurlitzer Going

I’m surprised the poor thing hasn’t broken from overuse. Apparently the next fake controversy is about willful misunderstandings of the open-source software concept. Freely-available source code that can then be compiled into a binary like any other program is the same thing as Wikipedia right? Running the white house on open source software means anyone can go in and edit whatever they want at any time right?

No?

Oh.

Here’s Slate with an exceedingly-stupid take on the issue. The choice of software for the WH website is “a political disaster waiting to happen” huh? He might have a point if every bit of potential trouble he describes was something visitors of the site would encounter rather than those programming the fucking thing on the back-end. In other words? He’s essentially saying that the same people making the decision to put in this software will be the ones to turn it into a “political disaster.” Give me a fucking break. If there was the slightest hint of humor anywhere in the article I’d swear it was a satire.

Awesome

For once a bigass corporation is getting roughed up in court just like the rest of us would.

What’s the cost of not showing up to court? For PepsiCo Inc., it’s a $1.26 billion default judgment. A Wisconsin state court socked the company with the monster award in a case alleging that PepsiCo stole the idea to bottle and sell purified water from two Wisconsin men.

Now the company is scrambling to salvage the situation. The damages award was handed down on Sept. 30. PepsiCo filed motions to vacate the order and dismiss the claims on Oct. 13, saying it wasn’t even aware of the lawsuit until Oct. 6.

The litigation began in April when Charles Joyce and James Voigt sued the soft drink maker and two of its distributors, alleging they had misappropriated trade secrets from confidential discussions the plaintiffs had with the distributors in 1981 about selling purified water. The information was illicitly passed to PepsiCo, which used it to develop and sell Aquafina bottled water, the plaintiffs allege in the case filed in the Circuit Court of Jefferson County before Judge Jacqueline Erwin.

Can you imagine the kind of balls it takes to show up in court at the end of a six-month case – after damages have already been awarded – and try to use “I didn’t know I shoulda been here!” as an excuse? I’m sure that’d work out just as well for an average person as it did for Pepsi here.

OMG THOUGHTCRIME

Obama just signed the Matthew Shephard bill, which has prompted the beginning of a round of tooth-gnashing about thought crime and criminalizing intent from the usual suspects.

Relatively tame so far but I imagine we’ll get a lot more of this by tomorrow. At any rate this just really isn’t complicated or controversial or full of gray areas in any way shape or form. You either harm/kill people for their sexuality or you aren’t affected by this law, it’s that simple. (I don’t know who he’s been hanging out with but one of the commentors on the Townhall piece calls it another piece of legislation that “discriminates against average Americans.” Um, no.)

ed. It’s also revealing that these people only tend to show up when there’s a discussion about whether or not to extend currently-existing hate crime laws to new groups. If we’re going by their actions it really seems that they don’t have a problem with hate crime laws, only gay people. I mean, shouldn’t they be arguing for a total repeal if hatecrime legislation amounts to criminalizing thought? Another point is that the bill’s full name is the “Matthew Shephard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act.” I guess it’s less fashionable to be seen speaking out against protecting black folks.

On the other hand, the thing about intent is perfectly reasonable given that our legal system makes no distinction between first and second degree murder, the normal and gross negligent forms of homicide, manslaughter, so on and so forth. It’s not as though homicide (killing) and murder (intentional killing) are codified as distinct crimes or anything, so I can see where people feel comfortable saying that.

Wait…

‘Annals of Political Hypocrisy’ Section MMXLI Subsection My God Fuck It

I’m getting tired of this book already and I only just made it up yesterday. Here we have an article written by a sinister robot that has been programmed to file hypocritical political articles under the pseudonym “Bonnie Erbe.” Its contention? That the only difference between Obama and Jessie Helms is that one was more open and out front about the fact that he would never abandon his close-minded misogynist views. It continues on to assert that the evidence for this is found in Obama taking an insufficient number of female staffers on sporting events with him, further stating that it doesn’t care how many he takes from here on out or what he does on other issues because its programming indicates that it should behave like a human being whose mind is made up and will not change.

So in other words? You got it: “Bonnie” is the latest in an apparently limitless supply of robotic clones who have been sent here to express dissatisfaction with self-observed characteristics projected onto others. You sort’ve wonder if a fractured personality is a carved-in-stone requirement for being a pundit of any sort. (If so where do I sign up?)

And here I am thinking crazy shit like, “I could’ve swore Obama signed something called the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act shortly after taking office.” Clearly his golfing partners are a better indication of his record on womens’ issues then his um, y’know, record on womens’ issues. Now that we’ve sorted that out I’m only left to question whether or not I’m supposed to be pretending the Bonnie-bot wouldn’t have cranked out an article about Obama playing sports against females ‘cuz he’s a big mean bully who likes to intimidate women had the situation been inverted.

By the by, while we’re on the subject of this piece of shit article take a look at the comments. The vast majority of them are just generic bromides about Obama being gay, muslim, “Dear Leader,” “The One,” etc with most showing no attempt to put them into the context of the Obama-as-alleged-secret-misogynist* frame whatsoever. I thought they were just really dumb people, or possibly even paid RNC/lobbyist/whatever employees. But lately I’m starting to think: you don’t suppose they’re actually just spambots do you? I mean literally a computer program browsing the web and posting negative shit about Obama, not in the sense that I’m jokingly accusing Erbe of being an android. What do you think?

*apparently not a secret enough misogynist that he would’ve thought to take some female staffers golfing to cushion against this possibility. He’s capable of covering up the fact that he’s a muslim jihadi extremist “kenyan candidate” sent here to await activation and further instruction but not, yknow, minor day to day details about his workout routine. Because that story doesn’t leave any sort of credibility gap whatsoever.

ps. In case you’re wondering – and I was after using both phrases so I looked them up – a robot is a robot and an android is a robot designed to look like a human.

Christ On A Fucking Crutch

Now we’re pretending that rewarding big donors with access, perks etc. isn’t part of the normal give-and-take of politics. I’m approaching my fake-controversy saturation point, frankly. This is all just so stupid and typical.

shut up, you scum-sucking bastard

i should stop being surprised. and maybe i was, in fact, less “surprised” and more “le sigh” about this. but still.

Twitter, Inc., shut down 33 fake Twitter accounts created by [Connecticut] Republicans using the names of Democratic state representatives. The Republican scheme was to send out posts under the Democrats’ names mocking the liberal tax-and-spend bastards.

“That’s unfortunate,” was state Republican Chairman Chris Healy’s response when told of Twitter, Inc.’s decision. “I’m not quite sure what the issue is, other than that the Democrats were successful in stopping free speech.”

…

In an e-mail reply to a Democratic legislative leader’s complaint, a Twitter representative stated:

“A person may not impersonate others through the Twitter service in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse or deceive others. … Impersonation is against our terms unless it is a parody. The standard for defining parody is, ‘Would a reasonable person be aware that it’s a joke?’ ”

“Because this is not the case in your situation, we have removed the profile(s) from circulation.”

“That’s silly,” Healy said of the decision. “That’s not impersonation; that’s satire.”

yes, that’s right. republicans set up fake twitter accounts impersonating their democratic opponents, those accounts got deleted via the twitter TOS, and the guy in charge says that this amounts to “stopping free speech.”

for the uneducated among us–the professional politicians, mind you–let’s refresh. this is what the first amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

did congress shut down your fraudulent twitter accounts, healy? did any other government office or agency? no? it was a private company, you say? then shut the fuck up.

i’m not really shocked by the tactics, not in this post-rovian world, but nothing infuriates me so much as to see our elected officials, the ones who have, presumably, actually read the constitution, deliberately misconstruing what it says and hiding behind those rights that every american can name. there are plenty of real, actual constitutional debates going on; we don’t need these frivolous, bullshit misrepresentations to further confuse the issue. that’s the real harm they’re doing to our society, regardless of their impact on the 2010 connecticut state elections.