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.

Happy Beltane, the Pagan fertility fest, whose celebration, I believe, in days of yore, included orgies.  How cool is that?  So much better than modern day religions, which, by and large, frown on the bump-n-grind for anything other than grim-faced baby makin’.

It’s also May Day, the big ole, Commie celebration of workers.

And today is the National Day of Prayer, alternately titled, “Spend some time doing nothing while deluding yourself you are doing something.”

The Commies and the Pagans should organize an effort requiring the God bothers to get their own damn day.

Ultimately, even people of faith, provided they aren’t mentally ill, know that prayer doesn’t work.  Yeah, they do.  When an activity nets success with the same random probability of a coin toss (actually, I think the odds are much lower), anybody in their right mind knows it’s futile.  You might as well call up your childhood imaginary friend and ask him for a favor.

But it gives people the illusion of doing something, when there is nothing else they can do.  It gives the illusion of control.  More often than not, it’s a fuzzy-wuzzy, feel good kind of way to avoid actually getting your ass up and doing something useful.

All this kowtowing to imaginary forces likely started as a means of trying to control stuff like the weather.  Imagine you are farmer in some ancient time when people still thought the sun was a flaming chariot being driven across the sky.

Rainfall, you realize, is like Goldylocks’s little break-and-enter adventure at the Three Bears’ house.  Some years, it rains just enough and your crops grow like gangbusters.  Some years it doesn’t rain at all, and you’ve got dust.  Some years, too much rain, and you’ve got the makin’s of adobe, but, alas, no groceries.

One particularly bad year, you look over at your neighbor’s field and see that his crop is doing well despite the drought.  (This is due to variations in soil conditions, drainage, etc., but again, we’re talking pre-science era here.)   Your neighbor tells you it is because he sacrificed three kittens to the rain god.

So you set out to find some kittens.

In years when your crops are good, you credit the kitten slaughter for your success.  Not so good?  Need more kittens.  Or perhaps you didn’t perform the kitty-cide correctly; practice makes perfect.   Sadly, for the kittens, the practice spreads throughout the neighborhood.

Eventually, one enterprising individual (having run out of kittens), uses his brain for something other than gooey, white packing material, and invents irrigation.

Unfortunately, knowing humankind, and our need for rituals, the “tradition” of slaughtering kittens probably continued for centuries hence. ;P

Anyhoo, Happy Beltane.  Go get laid; save a kitten.

Since my beloved sent ABC an expletive laden email this morning, yours truly decided to offset his profane and righteous furor with something moderately cleaner.

****************
(email sent to enough ABC.com addresses to label me a spammer)

To Whom it Should Concern:

Lapel pins. Lapel pins?

Are you kidding? Inane prattle about the patriotic merits of lapel pins and tabloid-style insinuations about the candidate’s childhood acquaintances are Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos’s *very best* debate questions?

Perhaps these two men have been living in a cave with Osama Bin Laden. Perhaps neither is aware that 4,000 of our brave servicemen and women have died in Iraq? (Or that hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens have died as “collateral damage,” sacrifices to Bush’s war on “terra.”)

Perhaps they failed to notice that gas prices are skyrocketing and the economy is in shambles? No doubt, they are also unaware that some 40 million Americans are without access to adequate health care. Or that the current Administration has said it’s okie-dokie to torture people and is cheerfully dismantling the Constitution (the former reported by ABC; does Gibson not watch his own network?).

Perhaps Gibson and Stephanopoulos suffered some mysterious malady, striking both deaf, dumb and blind for the past seven years, until, lo and behold, they were miraculously cured five minutes before the debate.

Otherwise there is no excuse for the debacle last night. Stephanopoulos seemed to be channeling right wing hack Sean Hannity, while Chucky Gibson developed a peculiar version of Tourette’s Syndrome that impelled him to interrupt Barack Obama, and only Barack Obama, every time he spoke. And the ABC camera person had a perverse obsession with Chelsea Clinton, who got almost as much screen time as the two candidates.

What I saw last night wasn’t even “info-tainment,” as it was neither informative nor entertaining.

Given the current state of network TV, I haven’t been watching that much anyway. I can assure you, however, that I won’t be watching any of your programming anytime soon.

P.K.
New Mexico

P.S. I think Charles Gibson needs a medical checkup. He seems to be suffering from dementia and has forgotten most of his basic journalism school training, notably “fact checking.” Specifically regarding his assumption that middle America makes 200K+ a year. Here’s a quarter Chucky (all I can spare); go buy yourself a clue.

***************

Donkey sex. Oh, boy, donkey sex.

Ahem, the above is brought on by my mindless obedience to the overlords at Pharyngula. The goal being to link the creationist propaganda film, Expelled to the site that details the extent of its fuck-whittery.

Scientific American also does a good takedown of Expelled, including Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know.”

Fifteen Answers to Creationist Nonsense is a good place to start if you are one of the misguided souls in the “Why can’t they teach the controversy?” camp.*

Time to feed my three products of selective (and not-so selective, in Gheri’s case) breeding.

Cheers,

P.K.

*Personally, I think people in that camp should be taken out back and beaten with a dead cat, but that was my attempt at civility. Feeble, though it was, I think the effort did me permanent damage.

Whuh-huh? I guess Britney Spears hasn’t flashed her panty-less pink bits at a camera lately and Linsey Lohan hasn’t drowned herself in a bottle of Jose Cuervo. Or maybe there’s a shortage of missing, young white women–all pretty young white women are present and accounted for. (Although the media is mildly distracted by the crazy Mormons white pedophile cult in Texas.)

All the media’s focus is on Barack Obama’s observation that a certain segment of the electorate is a tad bitter (ya think?), and, thus embittered, that segment falls back into the easy comfort religion and guns.

Well, anybody with a functioning brain stem knows Camp Hillary is behind the media frenzy, but it’s stupid, nonetheless.

Because Justin was home this morning and he likes watching the morning info-tainment shows, I caught part of Obama’s response to Hillary’s “Shame on you, Obama,” speech:

“She’s running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, how she values the Second Amendment,” he said, his voice rising. “She’s talking like she’s Annie Oakley! Hillary Clinton’s out there like she’s on the duck blind every Sunday, [like] she’s packin’ a six shooter! C’mon! She knows better.”

Bwah!. Like the MasterCard commercial–”Priceless.” Serious LOL moment. Especially since I immediately pictured Hillary dressed as Elmer Fudd. “Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit.”

South Dakota’s favourite band of anti-choicers are showing their Communist stripes. They’ve managed (not that getting the Ill-informed to agree to The Stupid is difficult) to acquire 500,000 signatures for a totalitarian bill that essentially would reduce pregnant women to wards of the state. And ban most forms of birth control. Details of this latest bit of Pea-nuttiest, from the “what about the bay-bees” crowd here.

What is especially delightful about that blog posting is the astute comparison to Communism. Innit funny how Conservatives love to bray about the evils of the Gov’ment and how freedom is all about keeping the Gov’ment out of the business of…business and private citizens? That is unless, you are a woman, or unless the Gov’ment is protecting you from terrorists. At which point it’s perfectly acceptable to butt into the business of private citizens.

But enact a law that protects the environment (and by default private citizens, cuz clean air and water is nice), oh, boy, and let the bleating begin. Out comes the anecdotal story of cousin Bob, who was prevented from putting a pool in his backyard because some stupid law declared his yard a wetland. “The gov’ment,” whines Bubba, “is keeping private citizens from doing whatever they want on their own land.”

Alternately, there’s my favorite for Stupid. The high gas prices are the fault of the environmentalists who oppose destroying some of our last pristine wild lands in Alaska. (This despite the fact that studies have shown there really isn’t enough oil up there to provide more than a few years of fuel for Security Mom’s SUV. And all oil is a finite resource, so the intelligent approach would be to move to renewable fuel sources. But who needs logic when your are a conservative?)

If you really wanna have some fun with a anti-choicer, ask one this question:

“So, if abortion is murder, then how much time should a women who’s had an abortion serve?”

“Uh. What?”

“Murder should mean jail time, right? How much?”

The question will yield one of two responses, prevarication–”Uh, what, huh?”– or some kind of time frame–”Five years.”

The second answer, usually rare, at least displays a refreshing consistency (not to mention the obvious ass-hole-ness.) If you think abortion is murder, then women who have abortions should go to jail. Que no?

As for the rest, who hem and haw–”I, er, I mean, it’s the doctors who should go to jail. Don’t punish the women, I mean,…uh.”–you’re buying into the usual sexist notion that the little womin is too simple-minded to make important decisions about her body. She must be protected.

And protected is a pretty word for control. I am protective of my little dog Gheri. Which means, I control where she goes, what she eats, etc. Gheri, being a dog, and not vested with any unalienable rights, nor much concern for said rights, goes along rather cheerfully with the business.

Women, being human beings and fully vested with personhood (the latter not a characteristic of fetuses), aren’t cute little dogs who should live their lives in sheltered, cosseted care. Pregnancy doesn’t divest a woman of her rights, or demote her to “pet” status.

Keep in mind that this kind of totalitarian thinking has implications for pregnant women who want to be pregnant. How is giving the state authority over your pregnancy and the medical choices you make to keep yourself and your baby healthy, ever a good idea?

If all pregnant women are wards of the state, then does that mean they get prenatal care from the state, gratis? Heh. One can imagine the furor that would erupt from most conservatives when told their tax dollars would cover prenatal care for all pregnant women, regardless of income status. Most gnash their teeth now, at the thought of “all those welfare types” who get coverage under Medicade and similar programs.

“Grrr. All those slutty, poor women, fucking and having babies on my dime. Why there aughta be a law…”

Hmmm. What kind of law, Bubba? One that forces some pregnant women (low income) to have abortions? Or maybe forced sterilization for anyone deemed (by the state) unsuitable to breed? Sniff, sniff. What’s that smell?

Ah, I love the smell of Communism in the morning.

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?

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):

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.

last year I visited the Creation Museum. Every time someone said god created man from the dust of the earth, I’d yell “I didn’t come from no dirt!” ~borrowed from a comment thread at Pharyngula

Our greyhound stinks. I mean really stinks. Like an old man whose wife has died and now, without anyone to prod him into basic hygiene, rarely bathes or washes his clothes. (For some reason, I always get stuck behind these smelly old fuckers in line at the grocery store.)

A bath might help, but Aries, being old and fragile, makes like the Wicked Witch and melts in the shower. I.e., he falls over and can’t get up. So there he is lies, on his comfy bed in the living room, stinking up the place. Certain times a day, his basic D.O. is accentuated with Eau d’Fart.

Gheri, on the other hand, though blind and deaf, and giving Methuselah a run for his money, can still be bathed. It just doesn’t happen very often. This morning, after I got up to fed the horse and then returned to bed and our dog-reeking bedroom, I decided at least one dog shouldn’t smell like a kennel.

The “easiest” way to wash Gheri is to chuck her in the shower with me. At first, the whole enterprise seems pretty straightforward and I wonder, “Why didn’t I do this weeks ago?” I wash my hair and bits and pieces and then move on to the Rat Dog.

First, getting the Rat wet (She’s been standing in my rain shadow the whole time and is thus far, just damp.) Scoop little beast up and get her good and wet in the shower spray. She snorts, grumbles and chirps indignantly, but accepts the procedure. Next. Switch the water off and lather up the dog.

Here’s where the fur starts to fly. After a few minutes of scrubbing (with cruelty free shampoo, cuz as I’ve said before, I love the irony), she starts letting loose clumps of hair the way a porcupine lets fly quills. Every time she shakes, big, black clots of hair fly off her and stick to every surface of the shower. Including me. I end up with dog hair in all sorts of unmentionable places.

By the time the bath ends, we’re standing in a pond caused by clog of dog hair in the drain. (Naturally, I leave the mess for Justin, under the auspices that he’s been complaining about the stinky little terrier.) At this point, I am reacquainted with my many reasons for not washing the Rat Dog.

But now it’s time for the drying ritual. First, she flings her wet self on the bathroom floor, and squirms around on the floor leaving a trail of hair. “Lookit all that hair. You should be bald by now,” I observe as I scoop her up in a towel. More grumbles and chirping while I start the towel drying. Next is time with the hair dryer. At this point, she’s well and bored with the whole business. She alternate between flinging herself on the carpet and squirming and trying to make a break for it. In the past, the second option was a lot more irritating, but nowadays, the little blind creature just bumps into something. Like a Rumba vacuum, she turns around and heads the other way. Usually, this keeps her in the area for a while until she finds an escape route.

The whole ordeal takes at least 45-minutes and I vow–like I always do–”Next time, I’m taking you to PetsMart where their groomers can torture you.”

When we’re done, she develops a desperate need to go outside, where she makes a beeline for her favorite spot, a patch of dirt where the sun will bake out all the vile shampoo smell.

Estimated time she will stay clean. About a day. Tops.

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.