John McCain Hates Women
For those misguided souls who believe John McCain is a moderate.
Besides opposing a women’s right to legal and safe abortion, he is also anti-birth control.
John McCain’s Record on Opposing Women’s Health Care:
- John McCain’s health care plan will leave 47 million Americans uninsured. His plan would largely force families to buy their own insurance through a private insurer, and decrease insurance offerings through employment. Source: CBS News
- John McCain voted to shut down the Title X family-planning program, which provide millions of women with breast cancer screenings and birth control. Source: Huffington Post
- John McCain supported George W. Bush’s veto of children’s health insurance. McCain opposes expanding the plan that will provide health care for millions of uninsured children. Source: CNN
- John McCain voted against a bill that funded sex education, provided access to emergency contraception to prevent pregnancy, increased funding to family planning services, and expanded teen-pregnancy-prevention programs. Source: OnTheIssues.org
- John McCain voted against requiring health insurance companies to cover the cost of prescription birth control. When asked if health insurance plans that covered Viagra should also cover prescription birth control, McCain had no answer. Source: Katha Pollitt, Alternet, available at Alternet.com, also from CNN
- John McCain strongly supports abstinence-only education in schools, despite extensive research demonstrating that it increases teen pregnancy and sexually-transmitted disease rates. Source: San Francisco Gate, February 16, 2007, available at sfgate.com
- John McCain doesn’t know if condoms work to prevent the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. When asked at a rally in 2007 if condoms helped stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, McCain said he didn’t know. Source: The New York Times, March 16, 2007. Available at NYTimes.com. Importantly, research by amFAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, released a report demonstrating that when used correctly, condoms are 80-95% effective in reducing the risk of HIV infection. Source: amFAR Issue Brief, January 2005, available at amFAR.org
He also doesn’t think women are entitled to equal pay.
John McCain’s Record on Opposing Fair Pay for Women:
- John McCain opposes fair pay for women. He thinks it is fine for employers to pay women less than men for equal work. In 2008 he refused to vote for the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which allows women to receive equal pay for equal qualifications to a man. John McCain said that instead of fair pay for equal work, women need more “education and training.” Source: Huffington Post.
- In 1990, John McCain also voted against a bill that would have strengthened civil rights in the workplace and banned discrimination on the base of sex. Source: Senate.gov
He hates women so much he can’t even be civil to his own wife, calling her a cunt in public when she teased him about his thinning hair.
To borrow and rephrase a right wing axium, a woman who votes for McCain is like a chicken who votes for Colonel Sanders.
I’m the Big, Bad, Wolf
Apparently, I couldn’t be scarier if I grew a set of horns and a tail. At least according to one shrill, Illinois politician.
Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago) interrupted atheist activist Rob Sherman during his testimony Wednesday afternoon before the House State Government Administration Committee in Springfield and told him, “What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous . . . it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!
“This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God,” Davis said. “Get out of that seat . . . You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.”
Ah, the power I would have over this nutjob! Just my mere, godless presence, would send her into shrieking fits. I imagine the presence of my immediate family–husband, mother, mother-in-law–would make her god-fearing heart explode. (Father-in-law and sister-in-law are probably also godless; I just haven’t hear either admit it.)
Isn’t it interesting how easily frightened Christians are of, well, frankly, everything? We all know that teh Gay and abortion give ‘em the vapors, so their atheist phobia is no big surprise. You’d think having the Big Imaginary Daddy in the Sky on their side, and the comfort that the rest of us will someday be roasting in hell, would be enough to allay their fears.
Which calls to might an article in the Albuquerque Journal local Right Wing Rag. (I’d include a link, but the editors of that bird cage liner think their content is too important to make available free.) Front page, with enormous photos, was an article about Calvary Chapel’s (warehouse church) latest campaign to get butts in the pews. Essentially, the theme was “Be Afraid.” Besides pushing the usual predictable memes–gays, terrorists, and Internet porn will eat your chiiildren!–the campaign featured posters showing families in gas masks, and other no doubt, fascist-inspired, imagery. The pastor behind the campaign noted that “It’s okay to be afraid, if something is worth being afraid about.”
To which the pastor at the church where I work, took umbrage. In a polite, but mildly snarky letter to the editor, he noted that, “No, it isn’t okay to be afraid.” In fact, he explained, the Bible is filled with admonitions against fear. His point was that essentially (He put it more elegantly, but after all, I don’t actually believe in the fairy tale) “No Fear” is kind of the point of the Bible and Jesus. It’s about hope and all that fuzzy-wuzzy God stuff.
Doing a cursory Google for the topic easily yields a couple of No Fear kind of scriptures:
Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.”
Deuteronomy 31:6
“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear … “
1 John 4:18
So what exactly do these fearful Christians use their Bible for?
Doorstops? A place to press dried flowers?
Bwah. Who’s afraid of the big bad atheist?
McShit Flinging Monkey
I’m beat. But I felt like flogging the “Only an idiot would vote for John McCain” meme today. From Moveon.org:
10 things you should know about John McCain (but probably don’t):
2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain “will make Cheney look like Gandhi.”
3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.
4. McCain opposes a woman’s right to choose. He said, “I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned.”
5. The Children’s Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children’s health care bill last year, then defended Bush’s veto of the bill.
6. He’s one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a “second job” and skip their vacations.
7. Many of McCain’s fellow Republican senators say he’s too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He’s erratic. He’s hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”
8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.
9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his “spiritual guide,” Rod Parsley, believes America’s founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a “false religion.” McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church “the Antichrist” and a “false cult.”
10. He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0—yes, zero—from the League of Conservation Voters last year.
Like the people he represents, McCain is ignorant about basic facts in Iraq.
Ish. Anyone who has to rely on Lieberman as their in-person fact checker, should not be president. Can you imagine the fuss the press would have made if this had been Obama making this kind of “gaffe?”
I may actually watch a debate between Obama and McCain. Just to see McCain meltdown when Obama verbally flattens him. McCain, as noted in Item 7 above, has a nasty temper.
Where “Cindy,” is his wife. He called his wife a cunt.
If any man, especially one that supposedly loved me, talked to me like that, and he learn the meaning of a long day. After I fed him his balls.
Tah-dah! There he is. The Republican candidate for president.
Needed, One Large Bucket
Oh, honestly, won’t somebody stuff Hillary in a sack with a boulder and drop her in a river somewhere? The time has come.
While chatting with my mother the Texas democrat–yes, there are democrats in Texas–I mentioned this lovely blog posting over at DailyKos. (It should be noted, that as of late, Kos has become an Obama-only blog. Seems all the Hillary supporters, miffed by the lack of adulation their candidate received at the blog, took their toys and went home. Snerk.) The writer (an atheist) of this particular diary once worked for Reverend Wright.
He preached that no-holds-barred, do-the-right-thing, eye-for-an-eye stuff that is so hard to live up to, but was for him the only acceptable way to live. Dr. Wright did not turn me into a black militant. But he did turn me into a white atheist who spent a lot of time thinking about what it might be like to grow up as a black man in the America he knows. He helped me to wear those shoes, at least for a little while, and he tried to wear mine.
Imagine my surprise a week ago, when there he was, in all his Pentecostal glory, on the TV, saying “God Damn America!” What could have made him say such a thing? Maybe it was the segregated bathrooms, restaurants, hotels, busses, trains, and planes. Or was it the dogs? The fire hoses? the billy clubs? The nooses? Or maybe it was serving in the Marines, and coming home to be spit on and denied even the pretense of equality, in a country where the watchword was “Know your place.”
There are links to Reverend Wright’s “offensive” sermons in the diary. Justin, my hunka-burning-love-atheist, watched both sermons, and noted that the media, by only playing snippets, the inflammatory snippets, has, as usual, provided the usual skewed (and racist) slant. Watching the entire sermons is enlightening.
On a different tangent, like a good little atheist, I’ve been enjoying how poorly received the movie Expelled has been (except by mouth breathers who think God is some kind of super-duper Dumbledore who “poofed” the world into existence.) Julia Sweeney’s blog has a cute response to the creationist propaganda that is “Expelled,” in which she notes that Ben Stein is a IDiot.
I really like this bit about the stupidity that is the Idiot Design / Evolution “debate.”
To be honest, this shouldn’t even be something that is even being debated. It only continues to be in the public discourse at all because of the lack of sophisticated science education amongst the general public, coupled with groups who have a vested interest in keeping people confused on these matters, mixed with a darker push from elected officials (and some judges and those in power, funded by the more conservative religious groups) who use issues like this to rile people up and make the more complicated, truer view of life’s nature and origins seem as though it’s a debate between those who are moral and good and those who are cruel and heartless. So that when people skim the issue it appears as though those people (on the side of God) are the moral and just ones. They’re nicer. Cause, y’know, they believe in God. They are “open” to a God implanting and guiding life to it’s crowning glory, human beings! ARGH.
Argh, indeed.
We’ve received a few mailing about “Expelled” showings at the church. Which I shredded. Which, isn’t all that unusual–except for the shredding. You would not believe the amount of junk mail that the church gets. Most of it is just junk, and some of it might encourage the elders to spend money we don’t have, so I chuck most in the recycle bin. (The current meme is Narnia-related merchandising.) Anything IDiot Design related, however, wins a trip through the shredder.
It’s so satisfying to watch the metal teeth devour Ben Stein’s face.
Cheers,
P.K.
Hee Haw
Mayor Marty “I’ve never passed up a chance to waste taxpayers’ money” Chavez is an ass. No, not a jackass. I live right next door to a little herd of donkeys and I can assure you, they are superior, intellectually and morally, to Albuquerque’s mayor.
Ass, as in “asshole.” Mirroring the desperation of Hillary Clinton, like a good little minion, he’s whining about Gov. Richardson’s endorsement of Obama. At this point, you can smell the desperation of the Hillary camp from space. What iota of respect I had for HRC has evaporated in the hot air given off by her campaign. (As of late, she’s still flogging the “Obama’s pastor is a scary black man, so, uh, guilt by association,” meme.) If she steals the nomination, I guess I’ll have no choice but to vote for her. But it’ll go way beyond holding my nose and voting. I’ll need a HAZMAT suit to cast that vote.
Meanwhile, Huckabee, of all people, actually said something reasonable regarding the Wright fiasco. Who-da-thunk it?
And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.
MIKA: I agree with that. I really do.
Wright is Right
So the media, like a pack of melanin-obsessed dogs, has leaped on Reverend Wright’s, Obama’s pastor, sermons, proving, once and for all that racism is alive and well in the U.S.A.
What? It doesn’t? Really? So why haven’t we heard much about McCain’s best buddy, Hagee the Hateful. Nary a peep from the media about the Hagee/ McCain lovefest. Guess pudgy, white preachers always get a pass when it comes to hate.
But if a black man has the audacity to speak what is essentially the truth, in a loud scary voice, expect a media firestorm. Unlike Hagee, Robertson, and all the other hate mongers, Wright has a point.
America is run by rich, white men. And we do meddle, stirring up ant hills and then whining when we get stung.
Wright’s comments are incendiary because the truth hurts. (Unlike the kind of stupidity that usually comes from preachers, asserting that the gays and abortion caused 911 or the flooding of New Orleans.)
The question is whether this will give the closet racists a reason not to vote for Obama. Will they whine, “He hates America,” and vote for Hillary, thus assuring McBush the presidency?
Election ‘08, never a dull moment.
Whistle While You Lie
(Testing, testing, testing…moving over a post from the stoopid, annoying LJ.)
A couple of days ago, I was sitting here, futzing around on the computer. In the living room, the morning infortainment was on–because I hadn’t gotten around to turning it off. Matt “Mangy Scalp” Lauer was interviewing John McCain. I couldn’t hear most of what McCain was saying–mostly because my selective hearing turns off most of what Repugs say–but after a few seconds, something became blatantly obvious.
McCain sounds like an old man–his voice feeble, cracked and wavering. Actually, just a few steps away from (or out of) the grave is more accurate.
A second later, something else became apparent. He whistles when he talks! Every word he uttered was accented with a raspy little whistle as air moved over his teeth.
All the money being spent on his campaign and he can’t get a set of dentures that fit? Perhaps someone on his staff could spring for a tube of denture adhesive?
What’s with Republicans and their undead presidential candidates? At least the Democrats are able to field candidates who still have heartbeats, and are, presumably, warm-blooded critters. With the exception of the Mormon Ken Doll, the Republican field looks like a bunch of shambling extras from a zombie movie.
And it seems, they sound like zombies too. “Brainszzzzzz.” Whistle, whistle, whistle…
Cheers, P.K.
