ARMAGEDDON

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Start praying hard, folks, because the end is near.  Chompers agrees with Sarah Palin.

SCHADENFREUDE

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Our continuing look at the startling implosion of the American left takes us to Wisconsin where Governor Scott Walker and the state’s Republican legislature pushed through limitations on the state’s public sector labor unions.  Walker faced not only massive protests at Madison but a recall drive that was driven and financed by unions and other leftists from across this country.

How’s the recall doing?  This left-leaning poll has Governor Walker five points ahead of his challenger, Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, unchanged since last month.  This right-leaning poll has Walker up nine points while a Marquette Law poll has Walker up six.

Are people still fired up about this race?  Why, yes.  Yes they are.  The problem for the Democrats, notes Slate’s Dave Weigel, is that these days, all the enthusiasm seems to coming from the Republican side.

OOPS, THERE GOES ANOTHER DEMOCRAT THEME!

Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 37 Comments

If the situation wasn’t so gosh darned funny, I’d actually feel a little sorry for the Democratic Party right about now.  From pandering to homosexuals to their string of Twitter hashtag disasters to concepts that steadfastly refuse to resonate with the masses, the Democrats can’t seem to do anything right these days.

Remember the “War on Women?”  I never for a moment saw this coming but if this CBS News/New York Times poll is to be believed, American women, mirabile dictu, seem to value getting a job, paying the bills and putting food on the table far more than they value the fact that someone else is paying for their birth control pills.  Stupid broads:

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has a slight edge over President Obama in the race for the White House in the latest CBS News/New York Times poll. 

According to the survey, conducted May 11-13, 46 percent of registered voters say they would vote for Romney, while 43 percent say they would opt for Mr. Obama. Romney’s slight advantage remains within the poll’s margin of error, which is plus or minus four percentage points. 

Last month, a CBS News/New York Times poll showed Mr. Obama and Romney locked in a dead heat, with both earning 46 percent support among registered voters. Polls conducted in February and March showed Mr. Obama with an advantage over Romney, while a January poll showed Romney edging out Mr. Obama 47 percent to 45 percent. Another January poll showed the two tied. 

Neither candidate, however, has had more than a six-point lead over the other since CBS News/New York Times began conducting head-to-head in polls this January. 

Despite recent controversies surrounding issues like same-sex marriage, which Mr. Obama came out in support of last week, the poll indicates that the economy remains the most important issue to voters in the presidential election.

The President was leading among the ladies.  He’s not leading among the ladies any more.

Romney took the lead among women voters, who supported the former Massachusetts governor 46 percent to Mr. Obama’s 44 percent, which is within the poll’s margin of error. In April, Mr. Obama had an edge among women voters, with 49 percent support to Romney’s 43 percent.

And that’s not all!!  Actor and fervent Obama supporter Will Smith recently killed off another Democratic talking point.  Do you remember all those rich liberals who publicly declared, “Yeah, tax me even more?”  Will Smith was one of those.  But during an interview in France, Smith learned what the tax rate on the “rich” in France is.  This thing isn’t subtitled but you’ll easily figure out where fiction meets reality:

John?  Your thoughts?

THE NEW MUSLIMS

Saturday, May 12th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 61 Comments

Really, Great Britain?  Really?

Apparently there have been a number of complaints about one of the advertisements His Grace carried on behalf of the Coalition for Marriage. He has been sent all manner of official papers, formal documentation and threatening notices which demand answers to sundry questions by a certain deadline. He is instructed by the ‘Investigations Executive’ of this inquisition to keep all this confidential.

Since His Grace does not dwell in Iran, North Korea, Soviet Russia, Communist China or Nazi Germany, but occupies a place in the cyber-ether suspended somewhere between purgatory and paradise, he is minded to ignore that request. Who do these people think they are?

The advertisement in question is reproduced above. His Grace would like to make it clear to the ASA that he is reproducing this allegedly ‘offensive and homophobic’ advertisement as an educative illustration of allegedly offensive and homophobic advertising; not as an offensive and homophobic advertisement per se. Naturally, His Grace apologises in advance to all those who find this educative illustration offensive and homophobic, for it is never his intention to be either offensive or homophobic. But those of you who do find it offensive and homophobic are free not to visit His Grace’s blog whenever you wish.

The ‘Issue’ here is that 24 anonymous complainants, ‘including the Jewish Gay & Lesbian Group’ (doubtless disclosed to give weight to the allegations), challenged whether the claim ’70% of people say keep marriage as it is’. However, His Grace is not required to respond to that point, since he did not conduct the research. But it transpires that 10 of these 24 complainants objected that the ads were ‘offensive’ and ‘homophobic’, and he is requested to respond to these allegations ‘under CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 and 3.3 (Misleading advertising), 3.7 (Substantiation) and 4.1 (Harm and offence)’.

His Grace is further minded to respond that he has neither fear of nor hatred for the gay and lesbian community, though he is a little pissed off with 10 of them. They could easily have emailed His Grace with their complaint, and we could all have had a jolly good chinwag about the whole thing. Instead, they called in the Gestapo to censor the assertion that marriage is a life-long union between one man and one woman, in accordance with the teaching of the Established Church, the beliefs of its Supreme Governor, and the law of the land.

But to say so is now, apparently, ‘offensive and homophobic’.

That’s Britain.  That can never happen here; we’re not yet governed by Britain’s velvet fascism and we have a First Amendment.  If you seriously believe that American homosexuals would never engage in the same kind of behavior or even worse if they were given the legal opportunity, Brendan O’Neill rounded up some reaction to North Carolina’s overwhelming approval of a constitutional amendment defining marriage in that state as strictly between a man and a woman.

Apparently if you oppose gay marriage you are a dumb, ill-informed, brainwashed, knuckle-dragging hick and bigot. At least that’s the message coming out of liberal circles in America this week, as supporters of gay marriage look with disgust upon the people of North Carolina for voting in favour of Amendment 1. A majority of North Carolina’s voters – 61 per cent – voted for the amendment to the state’s constitution, which says: “Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognised in this state.” For doing this, for having the temerity to say that marriage should stay as it is, they have been subjected to extraordinary levels of abuse and ridicule.

The media says they’re all “bigots”. Apparently they were driven by a typically Southern hatefulness. In fact, according to the LA Times, “even by Southern standards, [this was a] remarkably mean-spirited initiative”. The LA Times went so far as to argue that President Obama’s newly stated support for gay marriage is “similar” to Abraham Lincoln’s support for the emancipation of slaves, the implication being that it is massively disappointing that modern-day blacks in North Carolina, those ungrateful beneficiaries of Lincoln’s stance, did not vote to “liberate” gays today. Maybe they’ve been brainwashed into hating homos. According to the New Civil Rights Movement, one of the main pro-gay marriage groups in America, in North Carolina “ignorance and hate has enveloped ordinary citizens”, and the support for Amendment 1 shows how “ill-informed, mis-informed and just plain ignorant the citizenry… truly are”.

The idea that hatred and ignorance have “enveloped” the people of North Carolina is widespread. The gay advocacy group Faith in America said voters had been “duped” by religious leaders; they were “uninformed or deceived”. The only reason Amendment 1 passed, says Faith in America, is because of “the populace’s misunderstanding about sexual orientation”. Of course it isn’t possible that voters simply had a considered moral objection to gay marriage – no, they were clearly all brainwashed by religious crazies. The passing of Amendment 1 shows that voters should not be trusted to rule on sensitive moral matters, says the LA Times. Apparently these kind of “anti-gay” votes will continue until “people of conscience put a stop to it by asserting that tyranny of the majority is wrong”. In short, let’s leave the creation of morality to those good people who act on “conscience” rather than to those “ordinary citizens” who have been enveloped by “hate and ignorance”.

Gay-marriage supporters have even deployed borderline racial lingo to express their fury with the uninformed hordes of North Carolina. The secularist magazine Free Thinker describes them as “knuckle-draggers”. So does Daily Kos, the must-read blog of the liberal set: it slated the “hateful, paranoid, bigoted, right-wing knuckle-draggers” who voted for Amendment 1. Sticking with the idea that opponents of gay marriage are knuckle-scraping specimens, Buzzfeed magazine published a very popular piece this week called “14 Steps That Will Evolve Your Views On Gay Marriage”. It showed a monkey in a cage – your typical opponent of gay marriage, apparently – and invited him to become more “evolved” on this important moral issue. Given the widespread criticism being made of North Carolina’s black communities in particular, many of whom supported Amendment 1, all this talk of unevolved knuckle-draggers whose brains are easily controlled by religious cranks is sailing perilously close to racism territory.

If you want to read how gays and their supporters reacted on Twitter, MAKE SURE that your kids aren’t anywhere near your computer.

There are countless other examples of Big Narcissism’s dictatorial tendencies.  Homosexuals have gone to court to try to overturn legislation they don’t like.  People like Jim Naughton, Susan Russell and other Christian leftists routinely refer to people who disagree with them on this issue as bigots who “hate” homosexuals.

Could the situation in Great Britain happen here?   Of course it could although it would be a lot tougher. Although they already have the news/entertainment media and many churches, homosexuals would need a sympathetic and popular president, a majority-liberal Congress and several Supreme Court openings before they could achieve their most cherished dream of criminalizing an opinion. 

Homosexuals would need all three and I don’t see that happening here any time soon.  And even if they somehow got them, more conservative states would probably ignore any dictates Washington attempted to impose.  But I don’t think homosexuals will ever stop trying to get them because, as conservative Episcopalians know better than anyone, the one trait that characterizes Big Narcissism better than any other is patience.

WHERE WE ARE

Saturday, May 12th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 39 Comments

American “journalists” refuse to remove their collective mouths from the presidential manhood long enough to actually cover the current occupant of the White House with anything remotely resembling objectivity so give the European news media this much.  Even a left-wing journal like the Guardian refuses to cover for Barack Obama:

Detailed leaks of operational information about the foiled underwear bomb plot are causing growing anger in the US intelligence community, with former agents blaming the Obama administration for undermining national security and compromising the British services, MI6 and MI5.

The Guardian has learned from Saudi sources that the agent was not a Saudi national as was widely reported, but a Yemeni. He was born in Saudi Arabia, in the port city of Jeddah, and then studied and worked in the UK, where he acquired a British passport.

Mike Scheur, the former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, said the leaking about the nuts and bolts of British involvement was despicable and would make a repeat of the operation difficult. “MI6 should be as angry as hell. This is something that the prime minister should raise with the president, if he has the balls. This is really tragic,” Scheur said.

He added: “Any information disclosed is too much information. This does seem to be a tawdry political thing.”

Robert Grenier, former head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, said: “As for British Intelligence, I suppose, but do not know, that they must be very unhappy. They are often exasperated, quite reasonably, with their American friends, who are far more leak-prone than they.

“In their place, I would think two and three times before sharing with the Americans, and then only do it if I had to. The problem with that dynamic is that you don’t know what you don’t know, and what opportunities you might be missing when you decide not to share. The Americans are doing a very good job of undermining trust, and the problem starts at the top.”

OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG!!!!!

Saturday, May 12th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Is your wife/significant female other unusually…energetic today?

WHITE FLAG

Saturday, May 12th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 10 Comments

I give up:

The Pentagon was inundated with so many studies in 2010 that it commissioned a study to determine how much it cost to produce all those studies.

Now the Government Accountability Office has reviewed the Pentagon’s study and concluded in a report this week that it’s a flop.

The study of a study of studies began in 2010 when Defense Secretary Robert Gates complained that his department was “awash in taskings for reports and studies.” He wanted to know how much they cost.

Two years later, the Pentagon review is still continuing, which prompted Congress to ask the GAO to look over the Pentagon’s shoulder. What they found lacked military precision.

The cost of the study of the study of the studies was not available from the GAO.

Obviously, what’s needed here is a study of…no.  WAY too obvious.

THE BEST POLICY

Friday, May 11th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 19 Comments

It’s always better to level with people than to lie to them.  As I mentioned in an update to my post on Tom Ehrich’s latest psychotic reaction*, the very first comment to it, written by an individual named John Williams, reads as follows:

When even reasonable thinking Southern Baptists (practically an oxymoron) fear the Tea Party and Extremists Nutbags, you know you’re witnessing an American Taliban growing right before your very eyes. Is there anyone with the courage to lead a crusade to destroy this anti-American movement?

I can’t tell you exactly what I wrote since I didn’t copy it anywhere but when I tried to post a comment last evening, I said something to the effect that I hoped Tom got professional help for his shrieking, hysterical paranoia.  And I thanked Mr. Williams for keeping things civil and not letting his rhetoric get the better of him.

As far as I was concerned, my comment didn’t rise anywhere near the level of Mr. Williams’ vitriolic name-calling but Episcopal News Service apparently didn’t see it that way.  Because this is the very next comment in the thread.

Good article until you got to the false equivalency part. Unlike people on the right, who rage against those who disagree with them and take political actions they oppose, the anti-police anger is from being beaten, harassed, imprisoned in cruel conditions falsely, and seeing fellow citizens murdered with impunity. Furthermore, the perception you state sounds like something that came from the mainstream media, not what’s actually happening. Most in the Occupy Movement remain dedicated to non-violent protest. They also are aware that the attacks by the police are part of a cynical tactic by the powerful to foment intra-class anger. Occupiers try to keep their focus on the real culprits, but it is hard for them to 100% ignore the police when they are being shoved around, beaten, or dragged away for exercising their First Amendment rights.

True courage here would not be criticizing them for not always behavior, but standing beside them in solidarity as they fight for all of our freedoms. The more people they beside them, the more successful non-violent will be, and the less the police will be able to suppress Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.

As you argued, it is time for courageous action. You are in NY, so I hope to see you in the streets with those who are also concerned about the way the rich and powerful are corrupting our democracy.

It’s helpful to know that ENS has finally dropped all pretense of objectivity or adherence to the tenets of the Christian religion, for that matter, and I thank them for officially coming clean.  I don’t care one way or the other about the Anglicans any more but ENS’s honesty will make things a lot easier for me from here on out.

*High praise to the first commenter who can identify the band who did that song.

HOW TO TELL WHEN YOU’RE OLD

Thursday, May 10th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 41 Comments

You can remember a time when you didn’t have to send your kids from the room when your copy of Time magazine arrived in the mail(seriously, you’re going to want to make sure your kids aren’t nearby when you click on that link).

BELOW THE WATER LINE

Thursday, May 10th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 12 Comments

John Sentamu’s chances for Lambeth Palace just took a torpedo amidships:

The Most Revd Dr Barry Morgan, Primate of The Church in Wales, has been elected to serve on the Crown Nominations Commission for Canterbury, the body that will nominate the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

Archbishop Morgan was elected by members of the Standing Committee. They had been asked to nominate one Primate to represent the Anglican Communion on the Commission and their chosen Primates were grouped according to the five regions of the Communion. The Standing Committee then voted by single transferable vote—the method agreed by the Anglican Consultative Council for all its elections—and the name of Abp Morgan emerged.

SØREN?

Thursday, May 10th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 19 Comments

Anyone who seriously believes, as does Jennifer G. Bird, Associate Professor of Religion and the Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Greensboro College, that Sodom and Gomorrah were wiped off the map because both were “inhospitable”…

The misunderstanding of the Sodom and Gomorrah passage comes from reading about the men of Sodom wanting to gang rape — for whatever reason — Lot’s visitors. Well-meaning people today will see that as “homosexual behavior,” and the years of having seen it this way do make seeing it purely as an act of cruelty quite difficult. The stories in this part of the Bible are infamous for making their point through rather extreme consequences and scenarios. This is one of them: the Hebrew people were to be hospitable. As a fun side-note, Jesus is said to have referenced this passage in Matthew 10:1-15, where he tells his disciples what to do when they are not warmly welcomed by their own people. The issue is not one of sexual practices, but of hospitality.

…is asked to explain to me why Bethlehem still exists.  And anyone who thinks that Paul’s words shouldn’t be taken seriously because sometimes he was too mean to people…

Paul’s invective, too, is culturally specific. But even if it is not, please pay attention to the libel and name-calling he also engages in in the surrounding verses (he misrepresents the worship practices of others for the sake of denouncing them, and offers a list of judgmental labels — gossips, slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, boastful, disobedient to parents, unloving, unmerciful, etc.). His anger and hatred are assumed to be legitimate simply because, well, he is Paul and his words are in the Bible. Again, my reasoning faculties call the whole passage into question as “God’s truth” given his temperament.

…needs to meditate long and hard on 2 Corinthians 13:5 if she claims to be a Christian.  Because if she does, my reasoning faculties conclude that she’s lying through her teeth.

KLEENEX ALERT

Thursday, May 10th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

“When my husband left on his deployment, our 6-year-old son could not walk on his own. He has cerebral palsy. Doctors originally said that he would never walk or do much of anything. While daddy was away, he learned to walk. For his homecoming, we set it up for Michael to walk to his daddy for the first time ever! We kept the fact that he could walk a secret the whole time his dad was gone!”

JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE PARANOID…

Thursday, May 10th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 17 Comments

…doesn’t mean that conservative Christians aren’t out to get you.  I’m really starting to worry about poor Tom Ehrich.  He’s so stressed out about the “Christian right,” whatever that is, that he’s completely stopped trying to come within a light year of making sense:

The center has been vacated, he said, and rendered uninhabitable. The right wing controlling the party of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower has nothing but scorn for the opposition party and has no intention of cooperating in order to govern. Better to crash the state than to compromise.

Because everybody knows that the way American democracy has ALWAYS worked is that liberals are supposed to propose ideas and “conservatives” are supposed to agree to very slightly watered-down versions of those ideas.  Checks and balances, duh.  The idea that conservatives might seriously claim that a liberal idea is bad for the country shouldn’t be adopted is foreign to everything the United States has always stood for from its founding until the present day.

Right-wing Christians who egg on extremist Republicans and provide their pseudo-intellectual rationale are similarly scornful of other views. God, they seem to believe, is entirely and uncompromisingly on their side.

Which is why Episcopalians took their various rebukes for giving an unrepentant sinner a pointy hat as calmly and rationally as they did and why Episcopalians routinely and reflexively refer to people who believe that the Bible means what it says as bigots.  Tom, of course, is projecting again, something he’s top shelf at.  Dance with the one what brung ya, I always say.

Can a nation survive radical extremism at its helm? Suddenly, scenarios like elections being canceled because Democrats might win, and internment camps being set up to incarcerate protesters like the Occupy movement as “domestic terrorists,” no longer seem conspiratorial paranoia.

The mentally-stable community to Tom Ehrich: want to put a little money on that proposition?  To the modern left, George W. Bush is still the president of the United States and will always be the president of the United States.  Unless Tom thinks that Barack Obama might cancel the presidential election because Obama thinks he might actually be reelected.  Otherwise, I don’t know where Tom’s hallucinating all that.

Instead, we find power flowing to bullies with money to spend, religion to exploit and gun nuts to unleash.

I didn’t know George Soros exploited religion or unleashed gun nuts.  Please get professional help, Tom.  We’re all concerned about you, buddy.

Am I overreacting?

Yeah.  But that’s pretty much all you’ve been doing lately.

UPDATE: ENS keeps it civilized.  This comment to Tom’s article got approved.

PRESSER

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Exclusive footage from today’s White House press briefing.  Must credit MCJ:

#11593-051, 2012!!

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012 | Uncategorized | 37 Comments

Everyone has bad days from time to time.  You’re an incumbent Democratic US president and it’s the West Virginia Democratic primary.  West Virginia is a strongly-Democratic state(former Klansman and longtime-Democratic Senator Robert Byrd used to basically run the place) and the only guy running against you is a convicted felon who got himself on the ballot for some reason.  You win.

But the felon carries 10 counties and gets 41% of the vote: 

In an embarrassment to President Obama, Federal Inmate No. 11593-051 – otherwise known as Keith Judd – won 10 counties and 41 percent of the vote in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary Tuesday.

Mr. Judd is incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas, where he is serving a 210-month sentence for extortion, according to The Charleston Gazette. Judd had paid the $2,500 filing fee and submitted a notarized “certificate of announcement” to appear on the ballot.

But those are just details. The Republicans are having a field day with this slap at the president. Mr. Obama is deeply unpopular in West Virginia and was already certain to lose the small mountainous state in November. But the fact that enough people bothered to turn out in an uncontested primary to register a protest against the incumbent is telling.

Not only that but the state’s Democratic governor and one of its Democratic senators refuse to say which candidate they voted for.

He notes that Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia wouldn’t say whom he voted for in the primary. “Apparently, it’s a smarter political calculation to let people believe you may have voted for the guy in federal prison over the sitting president of your own party. Just saying,” Mr. Pounder writes.

West Virginia’s Democratic governor, Earl Ray Tomblin, has also not revealed his vote. Energy is a big issue in his state – America’s second-biggest producer of coal – and the Environmental Protection Agency’s handling of mining-related permits has angered the local industry, writes the Associated Press.

In 2008, West Virginia voted narrowly for John McCain so one can make a case that this isn’t that big of a deal.  And since the Obama Administration and its minions have essentially declared war on West Virginia, his chances there in November are next-to nonexistent anyway.  But if the Democrats and their lemmings supporters try to spin this vote as anything other than as titanic a humiliation as any presidential candidate has ever had to endure, they’re criminally delusional.