Charnel Houses of Reason

The charnel houses of reason are well stocked with Catholic-Church-made skulls—many stacked there as the Church defended itself from the horrors of science and secularism.

Battle lines are being drawn for another, absurd, combat between science and reason on one side—which happens to coincide with medicine and women's health regarding contraception—and on the other side religious fanatics led into the fray by that defender of tax-free fondling of little kids, the Catholic Church.

Just now, the Times tells us Obama may be willing to "accomodate" the monsters, which means do the Obama surrender thing that he loves to call "being an adult", in other words, sucking the cock of the enemy and calling it compromise.

But as the Times points out, this coddling of the anti-science mob is unlikely to change the right-wing rhetoric:

"But administration officials also acknowledged that it would likely not mollify the Catholic bishops who have waged war against the rule or, for that matter, Congressional Republicans and candidates on the presidential campaign trail who have joined the fight."

So, why bother? Well, that way Obama gets to tell the public—hey I tried to make the Devil happy, but you know, he's a tough customer. Yes he is.

And meanwhile, as I wrote yesterday, science, doctors, the health concerns of the majority demographic in the USA, don't count for crap.

No, because the right wing has found their campaign theme—Obama is leading us to the guillotine! No, not this blog, but as Rick Santorum so crazily sounded the alarm the other day, Obama's alleged anti-religious "crushing" of poor Catholic rights in demanding that they actually properly serve a medical commitment to women's health, will lead us down the path of secularism, and that, Santorum alleges, can only end up at the French Revolution's guillotine.

So, now Barack Obama is a new version of "not really an American". He's French. Worse, he's Robespierre—instead of Benjamin Franklin (who seems to have been about as religious as Barack Obama).

The racism and pure hatred of women which forms the anciently-inspired core of modern US conservative political passion and dogma is often dismissed by people on the left as comical, and so not worthy of a thoughtful response. However, as is often the case with effective propaganda, the more outlandish and outrageous the lie, the easier it seems to be for people, who are repeatedly exposed to it, to believe it.

The Catholic Church has practiced that art for 2,000 years. They are certainly masters of it. They have certainly lent their mastery of dishonesty in support of political goals and politicians serving those. 

As I wrote earlier today:

"It is time for women to declare open and total war against the women-hating relics of the ancient world. 21st-century USA should lead the way, and totally push the religious nuts back into their hate-brewing chapels and cathedrals. Let them have all the freedom they want, locked up in those charnel houses of reason."

To do otherwise is to continue to support an intolerable assault on reason, and sound medical practice. which is designed to harm the health of American women.

The First Amendment does not empower religious fanatics to perpetrate that crime.

Priests and Pols and Contraception

Catholics object to the idea of the government being able to force Catholic hospitals to provide coverage for employees for contraceptives. Nobody seems to care what the doctors have to say about it.

In my newest examiner.com article, I explore the problem of medicine and science being pushed out of the debate on Obama's administration ordering employers providing health care to include full and free coverage for contraceptive services. Catholic and other religious leaders object to this, claiming that Catholic hospitals, for example, would be forced to violate their consciences by actually providing women proper health care options.

Mitt Romney And His "Very Poor" Context

Mitt Romney should just pretend poor people do not exist.

My latest story at examiner.com today is about Mitt's latest muttonheaded blunder into class warfare (in his case without a helmet, a map, or a clue).

While Romney has declared the MSM has treated him badly by taking his "I'm not concerned about the very poor" comment out of context, Romney should rather hope that people leave the context entirely alone.

Indeed, when you really think about Mitt Romney's dreadful record trying to explain his unique ideas about rich people and poor people, his campaign handlers should just tell him to shut up talking about poor people at all.

Mitt Romney should in fact pretend that poor Americans do not exist. Every time he opens his mouth to say something about them he just gets himself into trouble. And it isn't as if he's going to treat poor people any differently by ignoring their existence.

The Times tonight has declared the "in context" statement by Romney as "more benign", but what Romney was really saying was that the "very poor", in other words the people he sees no reason to care about at all because they are so well served by public assistance, are just as secure as the very rich, the other class of people Romney says he sees no reason to be concerned about.

But, rich people are the base of the Republican Party, so Romney is hardly going to firm up that base by being taken seriously on a statement he finds their concerns of no concern. And of course Romney will not be taken seriously on that part of the context, because everyone knows the rich are going to be his first and likely only concern if he should be become POTUS.

That leaves the poor, but as Romney said, they're OK—right? After all, they have all that generous public aid, being slashed and burned at every turn by Republicans who despise the very poor almost as much as they love the very rich.

Speaking of love—the thing you have to love about Mitt Romney is that he is so much a product of his class he really cannot for the political life of him manage to understand how pinheaded he is about issues of class. And that is because, contrary to what he claims, indeed exactly contrary to his calculations, Romney has spent most of his life being utterly unconcerned with the struggles and plights of 99.9% of other Americans.

Yet, he expects those people to think he is a good choice to look after their interests, instead of his own and those of his tiny, super-rich, class.

The SOTU

Obama promised a bunch of things, just like always, and the great thing is nobody listens to or recalls the promises anyway.

My article on examiner.com this evening looks the promises President Obama made in his 2012 SOTU address last night. One of the things I discuss is how, contrary to what you're hearing from rightwing pundi-critics, Barack Obama actually did not recently co-opt the inequality issue, or the politics of resentment as Mitt Romney resentfully puts it.

In fact, in 2008, Barack Obama was arguing and promising pretty much the same things as he said last night in the 2012 SOTU. So, what that also means, is that not much got accomplished by Obama to fulfill those promises. Or at least that would be one inference from the fact the rhetoric is unchanged.

In fact, so reliable is this populist, inequality sucks, rhetoric is attacking rich pols, that Republicans have adopted it for their own attacks on each other. Newt Gingrich could be channeling Larry Summers, or hell Jesse Jackson circa 1988.

Main thing, you really don't want to be the fantastically rich job-eliminator candidate with the 13.9% effective tax rate. Not in 2012.

Newt's Ethics and the Men of God

Seriously, you think the Western image of God has any feminine aspect to it at all? It's the image of God as an adolescent boy, tinkering with just the right(eous) way to destroy the world (again). Speaking of adults in the room, this god is not that guy. And that's because this god is the creation of oafish, bigoted, male humans. They use it like a cudgel, or a nuke, to beat out a tattoo of hate across the globe.

Let us start with a simple, basic, proposition:

Putting men in charge of God is always a bad idea.

And that is especially true when God is just a character created by oafish men to more effectively lord it over other idiot men—and especially to better manage their second-class livestock, women.

Men do things for example like imagine, as Newt Gingrich obviously does, that "ethics" is something one makes sure other, lesser, people are beaten with, but it is certainly nothing the beater needs to bother himself with. More to the point, it is nothing Gingrich has bothered to adopt and express in any Christian fashion. Most likely Gingrich has ethics, those of any resolute megalomaniac.

At that link you will find Newt being quoted saying: "I first talked about [saving civilization] in August of 1958." Newt was fifteen, and clearly did not have any problem defining a mission for himself.

While demonizing the poor, minorities, and especially black people, pointing out their shortcoming in ethics, Gingrich has demanded that public benefits for the poor should be tied to forced labor. So enthusiastic is Gingrich for this cost-saving "reform" of welfare, he wants child labor laws modified so poor children can be hired to replace unionized school personnel.

That way, the whole operation of schools for poor kids can be conducted much more cheaply, and what expertise is currently being provided to these most vulnerable children can be eliminated, as they will increasingly be asked by goons like Newt to teach and support themselves.

And goons like Newt come in all shapes and sizes and nationalities and religions.

For example, over in Israel, what are described as "ulta-Orthodox" Jewish men assaulted a young American girl, spitting on her and abusing her with the usual manly address to women that offend their bigoted, psychotic ethics—"WHORE!!"

She is eight years old and didn't wear a fucking burka. Oh wait! She was in Israel, not Afghanistan!

But what difference does that make when idiot men are busy making sure everybody suffers according to their stupid comicbook idea of God as a lunatic child beating the crap out of "his" toys because he didn't make them right.

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THE MORAL CHOICE IN 2012

Yeah, I know, Barack Obama doesn't seem like a very good president.

His idea of managing the problem of state has been to plod along carefully, making absolutely sure he has been demonstrably conciliatory to the monsters on the other side, before caving in to them. He has betrayed pretty much every promise he ever made. At the same time—we're out of Iraq, and that's something. And there are other somethings that do add up to a lot more than nothing. That's another thing about Obama. He's been lousy so far at selling his accomplishments to the nation.

So, yeah, he's not the ideal president.

But, I would ask you to consider the alternatives, in this campaign and in this life. Barack Obama believes "adult" means cooperating with evil people to avoid having the roof cave in on the whole government, and presumably the whole world.

The alternative is to toss out the adult compromiser and replace him with one of the puerile evil people. In that way, the horribly right-shifted political burlesque of Washington D.C. would stop its absurd pretense of being democratic or civilized and would don the swastika and shout the Sieg Newt! openly and unashamedly and in unison.

It is a rotten choice, yes. But it is also a very clear choice. You should vote for life. You should vote against the men of God and their immoral ethics.

Romney's Free Enterprise

You see, if you have the nerve or the concern to criticize Mitt Romney's style of capitalism, then the problem must be, according to the people on the right reacting in horror to Newt Gingrich's turning of his conservative coat, that you just don't love capitalism—which in the GOP's view of things is a word synonymous with "America".

Of course Romney and the Republicans are afraid to use the "c" word—and no, we're not talking about "communism"—but that other "c" word "capitalism".

In some focus group somewhere, Republicans have figured out Americans don't actually feel all that warm and fuzzy about the word "capitalism", nor especially about the idea of a capitalist personified.

A funny thing about being rich and privileged...all the luck seems to come to you and not to the people who really need it. Probably because the rich are good people and the poor are not. 

At best, that idea is reducible to a derisive stereotype, like Rich Uncle Pennybags.

Kids in America grow up with a game, Monopoly, that almost everybody plays. It is a zero-sum game, where the idea is to bankrupt all the other players. 

Having ALL the money at the end of the game, while the other players have tickets to homelessness is what is counted as an instructional and entertaining kid's game in the USA—where government (or collective) concern for the welfare of ALL the citizens instead of just the rich ones is called "socialism"—as if that's a bad thing.

While kids are supposed to play Monopoly and learn about how things would be if people's worst motives were made the means to success, the rich grow up knowing this backwards way of thinking is just another layer or irony to the American system, which of course is based on the very principles of predatory capitalism Monopoly teaches us.

The rich kids are taught that everyone else (than their class) must be reduced in wealth, or better yet impoverished (relatively speaking anyway). Otherwise, what value is there in having more money than everybody else?

The 1% view the split on the capitalist take pretty much this way: the 1% get everything there is except the trickle-down crumbs.

And you get to have "free enterprise" using those crumbs. And what is free enterprise?

Oh just go read the "Little Match Girl". She is one of the best-known examples of what Romney means when he says there have to be losers in capitalism in order for people such as himself to thrive.

King of Bain—and Pain

One of the compelling, damning graphics in "King of Bain", talking about large job losses profitably inflicted by a Bain Capital takeover.

As I write about today in examiner.com, the new Gingrich attack ad—really more of a suicide-bomb ad—is called "King of Bain", and it paints a picture of that King, Mitt Romney, as a happy King of Pain too. Pain unleashed profitably against thousands of workers fired by Romney's company, Bain Capital.

While Romney has for almost twenty years now tried to posture himself as a "job creator" in his various political campaigns, the new ad undermines that view, showing Romney almost gleefully talking about how people will suffer (i.e. the losers in capitalism) when a capitalist economy is thriving. Romney of course is one of the people whose privilege and riches have assured him of always being a winner—which often means inflicting losing on thousands of poor people.