Month: October 2012

Ricky Gervais On Religion and Atheism

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Religious Delusion, Religious Fascism, Ricky Gervais

Ricky Gervais On Religion and Atheism

 

Related articles

Mitt Romney Deliberately Impedes Hurricane Response

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Mitt Romney Impedes Disaster Relief, Right WIng Callousness, Right Wing Crazies

Mitt Romney continues to interfere with Hurricane Sandy response in an effort to use Sandy as an “opportunity” to bolster his presidential bona fides.
 Romney further impedes hurricane response, calls GOP hurricane governors
 by John Aravosis

Czar Romney coordinating Hurricane Response (for GOP states only)

We had reported earlier that Mitt Romney, in an attempt to use Hurricane Sandy for his own political benefit, was “impeding” hurricane relief efforts.

It seems, sadly, that Romney didn’t learn his lesson.

He’s now in a full-blown Hurricane Sandy recovery mode, coordinating relief efforts with GOP governors, even though it’s not entirely clear what Romney knows about disaster relief, or how a presidential candidate who’s not in office can even offer any assistant at all, other than some of millions as a donation to the Red Cross. Romney has found that disaster “opportunity” he was looking for throughout the entire campaign.

Mitt Romney continues to interfere with Hurricane Sandy response in an effort to use Sandy as an “opportunity” to bolster his presidential bona fides.

.@andreamsaul: Gov. Romney has also been in touch with [VA] Governors Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie about storm preparation

Democratic Hurricane Victims Needs Not Apply

Interesting that Mitt Romney appears to only be calling Republican governors.  Oh that’s right, Mitt Romney doesn’t think of the 47% who live in the other half of the country.  But in all seriousness, if this weren’t a political stunt meant to make an “opportunity” out of national disaster, Mitt Romney wouldn’t be calling states based on the political affiliation of the governor – he’d be calling the worst hit states.

Though, it’s not entirely clear what candidate Romney knows about storm preparation, and how exactly candidate Romney can help those states.  In fact, Romney’s calls are taking up the time of governors who should be focusing on saving lives. Romney knows that.  So why is he calling them?  What did they discuss?  Did the campaign come up?

Romney Says Feds Shouldn’t Coordinate Disaster Relief. But Fed Candidates? Okay!

Not to mention, it’s interesting that Mitt Romney wants to close down FEMA, because he doesn’t think the federal government does a good job at disaster relief – it’s “immoral” to spend money on disaster relief when we’re running a deficit, Romney said – yet he thinks that he, as a federal candidate, can be quite helpful at disaster relief.

So, the federal government doesn’t matter for disaster relief, but federal candidates do.

How long until we see Romney in a FEMA jacket offering to help?  Can a Paul Ryan visit to another closed soup kitchen be far off?  (Followed by the inevitable attempt by Romney voters to destroy the hurricane relief center that Romney and Ryan visit.)

Here’s the latest shot of Hurricane Sandy from moments ago:

hurricane-sandy-latest-image

Hurricane Sandy latest image, from NOAA.

Related articles

Related articles

Ayn Rand and Ayn Randists | Psychopaths and Sociopaths Incarnate

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Ayn Rand Cult, Ayn Rand Psychopath, Ayn Randists Sociopaths

Ayn Rand and Ayn Randists: Psychopaths and Sociopaths Incarnate

Posted by  jimcraven10

Mark Ames: Paul Ryan’s Guru Ayn Rand Worshipped a Serial Killer Who Kidnapped and Dismembered Little Girls

Yves here. There is one way that Mark Ames’ underlying post needs a smidge of updating. Sadly, the technocratic elites in Europe are now firmly trying to inflict bone-crushing austerity on ordinary workers, despite visible evidence of its failure (debt to GDP ratios keep rising as the economies contract) and widespread public opposition. There the rationale is a bizarre combination of “punish the borrowers” when countries like Ireland and Spain were held up as poster children of economic success until the bust, and a need to hide the fact that what looks like rescues of the PIIGS is in fact bailouts of French and German banks.

By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted from The eXiled

To celebrate today’s announcement that Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan will in a few months’ time be a heartbeat from the presidency—and to honor this special moment, marking the final syphilitic pus-spasms of America’s decline and fall–we are reposting for your edification Mark Ames’ 2010 article about the man behind the Rand: Ayn Rand’s unrequited adoration of a notorious serial killer, William Edward Hickman. Yes, Vice President-to-be Paul Ryan owes his entire “moral” worldview to a lowly groupie of serial killers, a 1920′s prototype of today’s “Joker” wannabees. Yes folks, in a few months’ time Americans will finally be able to stand up and declare: “We are all serial-killer groupies now.”

There’s something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people go frothing batshit angry at the suggestion that maybe health care coverage should be extended to the tens of millions of Americans who don’t have it; or when they froth at the mouth in ecstasy at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of their population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who plays Charlie to the American right-wing’s Manson Family. Read on and you’ll see why.

One reason why most countries don’t find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of “ideal man” that Rand promoted in her more famous books — ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America’s most recent economic catastrophe — former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox — along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, Rep. Paul Ryan, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

The loudest of all the Republicans, right-wing attack-dog pundits and the Teabagger mobs fighting to kill health care reform and eviscerate “entitlement programs” increasingly hold up Ayn Rand as their guru. Sales of her books have soared in the past couple of years; one poll ranked “Atlas Shrugged” as the second most influential book of the 20th century, after The Bible.

His time has finally come

So what, and who, was Ayn Rand for and against? The best way to get to the bottom of it is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten by Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation — Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street — on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: “Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote, gushing that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”

This echoes almost word for word Rand’s later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: “He was born without the ability to consider others.”

(The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s favorite book — he even makes his clerks learn it, much as Vice President-to-be Paul Ryan tried making his interns read Rand.)

I’ll get to where Rand picked up her silly Superman blather from later — but first, let’s meet William Edward Hickman, the “genuinely beautiful soul” and inspiration to Ayn Rand. What you will read below — the real story, details included, of what made Hickman a “Superman” in Ayn Rand’s eyes — is rather gory reading, even if you’re a longtime fan of true crime “Death Porn” — so prepare yourself. Because you should read this to give Rand’s ideas their proper context, and to repeat this over and over until all of America understands what made this fucked-up Russian nerd’s mind tick, because Rand’s influence over the very people leading the fight to kill social programs, and her ideological influence on so many powerful bankers, regulators and businessmen who brought the financial markets crashing down, means that it’s suicide to ignore her, no matter how dumb, silly or beneath you her books and ideas are.

Rand fell for William Edward Hickman in the late 1920s, as the shocking story of Hickman’s crime started to grip the nation. His crime, trial and case was a non-stop headline grabber for months; the OJ Simpson of his day. Ayn Rand joined the herd of Hickman groupies, and there were lots of them at the time—much like metalhead serial killer groupies today, the types who write letters to imprisoned serial killers. That’s Ayn Rand. Here, for example, is an old newspaper clipping showing how common it was for the growing legions of reactionary waffendweebs of the late 1920′s to sign up for the William Edward Hickman Fan Club:

Is serial killer William Edward Hickman (left) opening one of Ayn Rand’s fangirl letters?

Hickman, who was only 19 when he was arrested for murder, was the son of a paranoid-schizophrenic mother and grandmother. His schoolmates said that as a kid Hickman liked to strangle cats and snap the necks of chickens for fun — most of the kids thought he was a budding maniac, though the adults gave him good marks for behavior, a typical sign of sociopathic cunning. He enrolled in college but quickly dropped out, and quickly turned to violent crime largely driven by the thrill and arrogance typical of sociopaths: in a brief and wild crime spree that grew increasingly violent, Hickman knocked over dozens of gas stations and drug stores across the Midwest and west to California. Along the way it’s believed he strangled a girl in Milwaukee, and killed his crime partner’s grandfather in Pasadena, tossing his body over a bridge after taking his money. Hickman’s partner later told police that Hickman told him how much he’d like to kill and dismember a victim someday — and that day did come for Hickman.

One afternoon, Hickman drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High school in Los Angeles, and told administrators that he’d come to pick up “the Parker girl” — her father, Perry Parker, was a prominent banker. Hickman didn’t know the girl’s first name, so when he was asked which of the two Parker twins — Hickman answered, “the younger daughter.” And then he corrected himself: “The smaller one.” The school administrator fetched young Marion, and brought her out to Hickman. No one suspected his motive; Marion obediently followed Hickman to his car as she was told, where he promptly kidnapped her. He wrote a ransom note to Marion’s father, demanding $1,500 for her return, promising that the girl would be left unharmed. Marion was terrified into passivity — she even waited in the car for Hickman when he went to mail his letter to her father. Hickman’s extreme narcissism comes through in his ransom letters, as he refers to himself as a “master mind [sic]” and “not a common crook.” Hickman signed his letters “The Fox” because he admired his own cunning: “Fox is my name, very sly you know.” And then he threatened: “Get this straight. Your daughter’s life hangs by a thread.”

Photo of Marion (also spelled “Marian”) Parker

Hickman and the girl’s father exchanged letters over the next few days as they arranged the terms of the ransom, while Marion obediently followed her captor’s demands. She never tried to escape the hotel where he kept her; Hickman even took her to a movie, and she never screamed for help. She remained quiet and still as told when Hickman tied her to the chair — he didn’t even bother gagging her because there was no need to, right up to the gruesome end.

Suitcase containing some of Marion Parker’s remains and blood-soaked towels

Hickman’s last ransom note to Marion’s father is where this story reaches its disturbing apex: Hickman fills the letter with hurt anger over her father’s suggestion that Hickman might deceive him, and “ask you for your $1500 for a lifeless mass of flesh I am base and low but won’t stoop to that depth.” What Hickman didn’t say was that as he wrote the letter, Marion was already several chopped-up lifeless masses of flesh. Why taunt the father? Why feign outrage? This sort of bizarre taunting was all part of the serial killer’s thrill, maximizing the sadistic pleasure he got from knowing that he was deceiving the father before the father even knew what happened to his daughter. But this was nothing compared to the thrill Hickman got from murdering the helpless 12-year-old Marion Parker. Here is an old newspaper description of the murder, taken from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on December 27, 1927:

“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he continued, “and I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marian. Then before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly. I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead. Well, after she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”

Another newspaper account dryly explained what Hickman did next:

Then he took a pocket knife and cut a hole in her throat. Then he cut off each arm to the elbow. Then he cut her legs off at the knees. He put the limbs in a cabinet. He cut up the body in his room at the Bellevue Arms Apartments. Then he removed the clothing and cut the body through at the waist. He put it on a shelf in the dressing room. He placed a towel in the body to drain the blood. He wrapped up the exposed ends of the arms and waist with paper. He combed back her hair, powdered her face and then with a needle fixed her eyelids. He did this because he realized that he would lose the reward if he did not have the body to produce to her father.

Hickman packed her body, limbs and entrails into a car, and drove to the drop-off point to pick up his ransom; along his way he tossed out wrapped-up limbs and innards scattering them around Los Angeles. When he arrived at the meeting point, Hickman pulled Marion’s head and torso out of a suitcase and propped her up, her torso wrapped tightly, to look like she was alive–he sewed wires into her eyelids to keep them open, so that she’d appear to be awake and alive. When Marion’s father arrived, Hickman pointed a sawed-off shotgun at him, showed Marion’s head with the eyes sewn open (it would have been hard to see for certain that she was dead), and then took the ransom money and sped away. As he sped away, he threw Marion’s head and torso out of the car, and that’s when the father ran up and saw his daughter–and screamed.

Marion Parker’s discarded limbs

This is the “amazing picture” Ayn Rand — guru to the Republican/Tea Party right-wing — admired when she wrote in her notebook that Hickman represented “the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should.”

Other people don’t exist for Ayn, either. Part of her ideas are nothing more than a ditzy dilettante’s bastardized Nietzsche — but even this was plagiarized from the same pulp newspaper accounts of the time. According to an LA Times article in late December 1927, headlined “Behavioralism Gets The Blame,” a pastor and others close to the Hickman case denounce the cheap trendy Nietzschean ideas that Hickman and others latch onto as a defense:

“Behavioristic philosophic teachings of eminent philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have built the foundation for William Edward Hickman’s original rebellion against society…” the article begins.

Rand denounced the hanging as, “The mob’s murderous desire to revenge its hurt vanity against the man who dared to be alone.”

The fear that some felt at the time was that these philosophers’ dangerous, yet nuanced ideas would fall into the hands of lesser minds, who would bastardize Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and poison the rest of us. Which aptly fits the description of Ayn Rand, whose philosophy developed out of her admiration for “Supermen” like Hickman. Rand’s philosophy can be summed up by the title of one of her best-known books:The Virtue of Selfishness. She argues that all selfishness is a moral good, and all altruism is a moral evil, even “moral cannibalism” to use her words. To her, those who aren’t like-minded sociopaths are “parasites” and “lice” and “looters.”

But with Rand, there’s something more pathological at work. She’s out to make the world more sociopath-friendly so that people like Ayn and her hero William Hickman can reach their full potential, not held back by the morality of the “weak,” whom Rand despised.

Atlas Shrugging: Paul Ryan’s guru never forgave “the parasites” for hanging her first John Galt hero

That’s what makes it so creepy how Rand and her followers clearly get off on hating and bashing those they perceived as weak–Rand and her followers have a kind of fetish for classifying weaker, poorer people as “parasites” and “lice” who need to swept away. This is exactly the sort of sadism, bashing the helpless for kicks, that Rand’s hero Hickman would have appreciated. What’s really unsettling is that even former Central Bank chief Alan Greenspan, whose relationship with Rand dated back to the 1950s, did some parasite-bashing of his own. In response to a 1957New York Times book review slamming Atlas Shrugged, Greenspan, defending his mentor, published a letter to the editor that ends:

Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.

Alan Greenspan

As much as Ayn Rand detested human “parasites,” there is one thing she strongly believed in: creating conditions that increase the productivity of her Supermen – the William Hickmans who rule her idealized America: “If [people] place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man’s life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite.”

The Russian Bag Lady Who Blew Paul Ryan’s Mind

And yet Republican faithful like GOP Congressman Paul Ryan read Ayn Rand and declare, with pride, “Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism.” Indeed. Except that Ayn Rand also despised democracy, as she declared: “Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom.”

“Collectivism” is another one of those Randian epithets popular among her followers. Here for example is another Republican member of Congress, the one with the freaky thousand-yard-stare, Michelle Bachman, parroting the Ayn Rand ideological line, to explain her reasoning for wanting to kill social programs:

“As much as the collectivist says to each according to his ability to each according to his need, that’s not how mankind is wired. They want to make the best possible deal for themselves.”

Whenever you hear politicians or Tea Baggers dividing up the world between “producers” and “collectivism,” just know that those ideas and words more likely than not are derived from the deranged mind of a serial-killer groupie. When you hear them threaten to “Go John Galt,” hide your daughters and tell them not to talk to any strangers — or Tea Party Republicans. And when you see them taking their razor blades to the last remaining programs protecting the middle class from total abject destitution — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — and brag about their plans to slash them for “moral” reasons, just remember Ayn’s morality and who inspired her.

William Edward Hickman’s wet dream come true

Too many critics of Ayn Rand would rather dismiss her books and ideas as laughable, childish, hackneyed, lame, embarrassing–”Nietzsche for sorority girls” was how I used to dismiss her. I did that with the Christian Right, like a lot of people who didn’t want to take on something as big, bland and impervious as them. Too many of us focused elsewhere–until it was too late and the Christian fundamentalist crazies took over America. So this time I’m paying more attention–late as usual, but maybe there’s still time to head off the worst that’s yet to come–because Rand’s name keeps foaming out of the mouths of the Teabagger crowd and the elite conservative circuit in Washington. Ayn Rand is the guru, and they are the “Rand Family” followers carrying out her vision. The only way to protect ourselves from this thinking is the way you protect yourself from serial killers: smoke the Rand followers out, make them answer for following the crazed ideology of a serial-killer-groupie, and run them the hell out of town and out of our hemisphere.

This article first appeared in Alternet.

Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/mark-ames-paul-ryans-guru-ayn-rand-worshipped-a-serial-killer-who-kidnapped-and-dismembered-little-girls.html#mMdRrpXkWXpSzbeU.99

Related articles

Sensible Libertarians Endorse Barack Obama

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Libertarians For Obama

The Libertarian Case for Barack Obama

Mike Godwin |

Some snippets:-

Regardless of your preferences, you’re going to be looking at the inauguration of Mitt Romney or Barack Obama come January, so if you’re a voter in swing state, you should give some thought to voting for Obama as the lesser of the two big-government, Harvard-educated evils.

On some issues of course, like foreign policy, it’s hard to find daylight between Obama and Romney, although Obama clearly has more mastery of the details of being a head of state. Both guys are willing to deploy American military forces abroad even when there is little compelling reason to intervene. And Romney seems perfectly capable of adopting a liberal government program when it suits him. While Romney officially opposes Obamacare, it’s scarcely different from the health-care reform Romney presided over in Massachusetts. And Romney’s proposed changes to the Affordable Care Act seem designed to capture the inefficiencies of such a system while dispensing with the efficiencies (he would limit the risk pool, which will push individual premiums higher).

That’s the libertarian argument against Romney’s proposed revision of Obamacare, but there actually is a libertarian argument for Obamacare. (Bear with me!) Yes, a truly libertarian system would allow everyone to opt out, including emergency rooms that could opt out of caring for an insurance-free deadbeat who crawls in after a car crash. Given that health care in the U.S. doesn’t work that way – we require virtually all American emergency rooms to provide care regardless of ability to pay – a truly universal system is the best option for maximizing health-care efficiencies. And if we can preserve some aspects of competition among insurers (which Obamacare, mimicking the health-care plan proposed by the GOP to counter Bill Clinton’s efforts at health-care reform, attempts to do), that’s all to the good.

But there’s an even stronger libertarian argument for Obamacare. Namely, it frees more Americans to take better jobs without worrying about losing the health care plan they had in their old jobs. Worker mobility is one of the things that reliably fuels free enterprise, and workers will be more mobile under Obamacare than they would be under Romney’s semi-dismantled version of it.

Defending the Affordable Care Act to Reason.com readers is tough, of course. I doubt I’ve convinced many readers here. But let me underscore three points where Obama is surely closer to libertarians than Romney is. One of these is abortion rights, self-evidently. (If you don’t know about Romney’s current opposition to abortion rights, you shouldn’t be voting.) Another is immigration. Despite his horrible record so far in office, Obama wants to sign the DREAM Act, which needs to get past a GOP filibuster. Obama believes the American economy benefits when immigrants work here, create jobs here, and pay their taxes. Romney is all for cherrypicking educated foreign workers, and hooray for that, but he now heads a GOP that is much more focused on policing the borders than rolling out any sort of Welcome mat.

A third quasi-libertarian position is Obama’s late-arriving but still-welcome stance on gay marriage. Yes, of course, a truly libertarian system would take no position on marriage of any variety – to get there, though, we’d have to undo centuries of American law favoring traditional marriages, which is an interesting project, all right, but not one likely to be tackled anytime soon. Obama’s position – in essence, to end legal discrimination that favors heterosexual relationships over homosexual ones – is the position most in line with liberty interests.

Related articles

Obama Trumps Romney Under Superstorm Sandy Spotlight

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Obama Leads, Super Storm Sandy

Obama trumps Romney under superstorm Sandy spotlight
  • by: Catherine Philp
  • From: The Times
Obama in disaster centre

President Barack Obama visits the Disaster Operation Centre of the Red Cross National Headquarter to discuss superstorm Sandy. Source: AP

President Obama has suspended a third day of campaigning to focus on the federal response to Superstorm Sandy, leaving his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, struggling for visibility before the election next week.

Mr Romney, who cancelled some campaign events on Monday “out of respect” for the storm’s victims, drew widespread criticism for turning a planned rally in Ohio yesterday into a storm relief event – complete with campaign videos and celebrity guests.

Supporters brought canned goods to the rally in Dayton to be be packed up and sent to storm survivors in New Jersey. “We won’t be able to solve all the problems,” Mr Romney said, “but you make the difference you can.”

The event underlined the problems that Mr Romney faces in the wake of a natural disaster that has put Mr Obama front and centre as the nation’s Commander-in-Chief. Mr Romney’s campaign announced that he would return to the stump in Florida today, with rallies in Tampa and Miami.

Mr Obama faces different uncertainties, including the possibility of a botched federal response for which he would be blamed. However, his actions have received lavish praise from one of Mr Romney’s staunchest backers.

Chris Christie, the Republican Governor of New Jersey widely tipped as a potential presidential candidate in 2016, said: “The President has been all over this. He deserves great credit. He gave me his number at the White House, told me to call if I needed anything and he absolutely means it.” Earlier he tweeted that the President’s response had been “outstanding”.

“It’s been very good working with the President and his Administration has been co-ordinating with us great – it’s been wonderful,” Mr Christie enthused. Such praise will have come as an extra blow to the Romney campaign and represents the kind of positive publicity that the Obama campaign millions could never buy.

What Superstorm Sandy’s eventual impact on the election will be remains uncertain. Of the swing states, the worst affected was Virginia, where thousands remain without power, mostly in the more liberal north encompassing the suburbs of Washington DC, on which Mr Obama is relying to help him to win the state. So far, Ohio remains largely unaffected, as do New Hampshire and North Carolina, the only other swing states in Sandy’s path.

But the storm has refocused attention on the gulf between the two candidates’ takes on the role of government. The New York Times published an editorial yesterday reminding readers of Mr Romney’s desire to break up the federal agency responsible for disaster management and devolve its powers to states. Mr Romney’s home-town newspaper, The Boston Globe, drew attention to his decision to veto both federal and state funding for defences for a flood-prone town in Massachusetts while he was governor of that state.

Both candidates, however, were able to agree on their support of the American Red Cross’s efforts, with Mr Romney’s website directing donors to make contributions to its crisis fund, while the Obama campaign sent out e-mails to its donor list soliciting aid for the organisation.

The Times 

Related articles

Raped By Stepfather at 13 | Forced to Get Illegal Abortion in Mexico

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in God and Rape, God Crazies, God Delusion, God Rape, Mitt Romney, Religious Kooks, Republican Hypocrisy, Republican Loons, Richard Mourdock, Right Wing Nuts

Raped by stepfather at 13, Forced to illegal abortion Mexico

Raped By Stepfather at 13 | Forced to Illegal Abortion in Mexico

By Dawn Hill

I Was Raped By My Stepfather at 13 and Forced to Get an Illegal Abortion in Mexico

I became pregnant, contrary to the “scientific theories” of many modern Republicans. Not only was the experience loathsome and painful, it was also impossible for me to deal with or talk about because abortion was illegal in the 1950s.

This is one of a series of powerful stories from survivors of rape, you will find them all here .

Last week, Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock argued in a debate that women who have been raped should not have access to abortion services because their pregnancies are a “gift from god.” As a survivor of childhood sexual violence, I disagree with him completely.

My name is Dawn Hill. Though I am old now, there was a time when I was young and carefree as you perhaps are now or can remember being in your childhood. Childhood should be a happy and carefree time for all our children, but my mother found her new husband, my stepfather, much more important. He forever took the joy away from my life when I was just 11 years old: He began molesting me and continued until he began raping me when I was 13.

Mr. Mourdock last night said: “I came to realize life is that gift from God, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape. It is something that God intended to happen.”

I became pregnant, contrary to the “scientific theories” of many modern Republicans. Not only was the experience loathsome and painful, it was also impossible for me to deal with or talk about because of the times: in the fifties, abortion was illegal. Illegal in the same way the Republican Party platform states it wants to make abortion now by constitutional amendment and just as Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has suggested casually he would “be delighted” to return to.

Please, take a moment to travel back to the fifties with me.

My mother took me to Mexico, where anyone could get an abortion for a price. I have blocked out many memories associated with this entire experience, but I remember the pain. Illegal abortions are not the simple safe vacuum procedure used today by legal abortion providers. Oh, no: They were a “dilatation and curettage.”

This means that my cervix was mechanically opened by insertion of larger and larger metal “dilators” until it was opened enough to get a sort of sharpened spoon inside my 13-year-old uterus, while strangers looked at my exposed parts that were theretofore called “private.”

It was cold and dirty in the room, and then the true torture started. They shoved this curette into me and scraped away the entire lining of my uterus with the sharp side. I screamed the entire time even though no one had seen so much as a tear out of me before this moment because I had developed a stony stoicism to protect my mind from the molestation.

This pain was, however, like nothing I’ve ever felt before or since. Can you imagine what happened to those women and girls who couldn’t even get this barbaric abortion? They stuck wire hangers into themselves and bled to death or suffered other horrible complications. Then, too, I also got a terrible infection from the filthy conditions.

I can tell you, though, that I would have gotten a hundred illegal abortions before carrying that monster’s offspring and going through labor, even to give the child away. That would have been the unkindest cut of all.

For women and girls, safe legal abortions are essential. While many will choose a different path than I with their pregnancies, having that choice is essential. Any encroachment on that right is an encroachment on the life, liberty, and safety of the women and girls of America.

Related articles
Related articles

Is Mitt Romney The Biggest Liar? | Chrysler Busts Mitt Romney For Lying

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Mitt Romney The Liar

Mitt Romney Busted for Lying by Chrysler
Mitt’s mendacious fantasies
Via Charles Johnson

Mitt Romney’s lies have reached the point where his dishonesty is even being exposed by Chrysler, on their official blog: Jeep in China.

There are times when the reading of a newswire report generates storms originated by a biased or predisposed approach.

On Oct. 22, 2012, at 11:10 a.m. ET, the Bloomberg News report “Fiat Says Jeep® Output May Return to China as Demand Rises” stated “Chrysler currently builds all Jeep SUV models at plants in Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. Manley (President and CEO of the Jeep brand) referred to adding Jeep production sites rather than shifting output from North America to China.”

Despite clear and accurate reporting, the take has given birth to a number of stories making readers believe that Chrysler plans to shift all Jeep production to China from North America, and therefore idle assembly lines and U.S. workforce. It is a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats.

Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China. It’s simply reviewing the opportunities to return Jeep output to China for the world’s largest auto market. U.S. Jeep assembly lines will continue to stay in operation. A careful and unbiased reading of the Bloomberg take would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments.

This was posted a few days ago and they don’t mention Mitt Romney by name, but here’s Romney’s latest television advertisement, repeating the bogus right wing talking point that Chrysler dubbed an “extravagant fantasy:”

Also see:
On the Auto Rescue, Mitt Romney Has Run Out of Answers – the Plum Line
Mitt Romney Releases Auto Ad That Misleads on Facts

Related articles

To Protect a Drug Dealer Jewish Fanatics Coerce Women Into Abortions

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Jewish Extremists, Jewish Fanatics, Jewish Rabbi, Jewish Radical Right, Jewish Religion, Jewish Religious Hucksters, Jewish Religious Right, Jewish Right, Jewish Right Wing, Jewish Sadist, Jewish Superstition, Jewish Superstitions, Jewish Terrorists, Jewish Theocrats, Jewish Ultra Orthodox, Jewish Violence, Jewish Zealots

Crown Heights: A ‘Love’ Story Complete With Coerced Abortions

Alleged victimThe son of a powerful Crown Heights man is an alleged drug dealer who has impregnated two young Chabad women out of wedlock in past few months. How this situation has been handled by Chabad rabbis will shock you.

 

The son of a powerful Crown Heights man is an alleged drug dealer who has impregnated two young Chabad women out of wedlock in past few months. How this situation has been handled by Chabad rabbis will shock you.

This man’s son is an adult, and has been described to me as Crown Height’s Jewish community’s major drug dealer.

The alleged drug dealer’s father is a senior member of a Crown Heights service group I’ll not (yet) name (Hatzolah, Shomrom, Shmira, etc.).

The alleged drug dealer impregnated a young Chabad woman in Crown Heights several months ago and another in North Miami Beach more recently. Both women come from ba’al teshuva families.

Chabad rabbis, including M.B. who is a very prominent Crown Heights rabbi, acting in conjunction with the the alleged drug dealer’s father, allegedly heavily pressured the women and their families to abort the babies.

Both women, especially the North Miami beach women, resisted. But under extreme pressure from Rabbi M. B. and other major rabbis in Chabad, the women each eventually gave in and had an abortion – the one in North Miami Beach allegedly terminated her pregnancy Thursday.

To Protect a Drug Dealer Jewish Fanatics Coerce Women Into Abortions
Related articles

Right Wing Neanderthal Tod Akin | Using Government to Coerce Women

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Abortion Politics, Tod Akin, Tod Akin Militia Ties, Tod Akin Neanderthal, Tod Akin Religious Fanatic, Tod Akin Right Wing Nazi

Todd Akin, right-wing hero

The Republican Senate candidate in Missouri doesn’t just spew anti-abortion rhetoric, he acts on it

BY , THE AMERICAN PROSPECT

Todd Akin, right-wing hero

This article originally appeared on The American Prospect.

The American ProspectTodd Akin, the Republican challenger for Claire McCaskill’s U.S. Senate seat representing Missouri, has made himself a national figure so far this election season by declaring that women can’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape” and claiming that abortion clinics routinely perform abortions on women who aren’t actually pregnant. But what’s garnered less attention, until this week, has been Akin’s history of not just saying but also doing disturbing things. His history shows a lifelong dedication to a misogynist right-wing ideology that flirts with using force to get its way when persuasion fails.

Akin has friends in high places. He spent his time in Congress working with vice-presidential candidate and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, with whom he crafted anti-choice legislation that would—surprise—redefine rape narrowly to eliminate many rapes that don’t involve overt violence to subdue the victim. This would better reflect Akin’s belief that many to most rapes are not “legitimate.” It’s tempting to imagine that radicals like Akin are outside the mainstream but, as I’ve written before, he and his ilk have come to control the party. So, who is Todd Akin?

It’s no secret that Akin used to be part of militant abortion groups that have lulled the public into calling them “protesters,” even though their tactics—taunting abortion-clinic patients and stalking providers in a threatening manner—are better described as harassment that verges on terrorism. We’ve grown to accept these ghouls who’ve become part of abortion-clinic scenery and who clearly long for the days when sexually disobedient women could be put in the stocks.

What’s faded from memory somewhat is how much worse they used to be, before a string of vicious murders and bombings in the 1990s caused Congress to pass federal legislation in 1994, signed by President Bill Clinton, that increases the penalties for using physical force to close clinics and scare patients away from getting abortions. Todd Akin “protested” in those days of extreme anti-choice militancy, and as the liberal research group People for the American Way has reported, was arrested in 1987 as part of a Mother’s Day attack on a St. Louis clinic, when militants tried to physically block patients from entering the clinic. (Celebrating Mother’s Day by trying to physically force childbirth on the unwilling sounds an awful like celebrating Labor Day by strike-breaking.) The Huffington Post revealed Tuesday that Akin had been arrested at least three previous times for criminal trespass in 1985 during invasions of abortion clinics, events that included screaming invective at patients and trying to block access to clinics.

Akin was caught on tape last year bragging to a right-wing group about his arrest, and when People for the American Way confronted him about it, he claimed he would fill them in on the details later. His campaign broke that promise, and little wonder why. The group’s researchers dug around and found that Akin associated with the Pro-Life Direct Action League and Whole Life Ministries, groups that used aggressive action aimed directly at private citizens as the mainstay of their activism.

As reported by Salon, Akin’s aggressive activities didn’t stop with his recorded attempts to force individual women to bear children by blocking access to abortion. Akin once publicly defended a friend who assaulted another woman at an abortion clinic. It was 1989, and Akin was campaigning for Congress and serving as a Missouri state representative. Using official state letterhead, Akin wrote a letter on behalf of the friend, Teresa Frank, who was convicted of battery for shoving another woman to the ground during a July action at an abortion clinic. The language he used further reveals his ugly, outdated view of women, even those he’s defending: “Teresa is a deeply sensitive and caring person,” he wrote, “but along with this, she is also one very frightened little girl.”

At the time, Frank was 41 years old, a mother, and a friend of Akin’s wife. But Akin’s is a worldview in which women don’t ever get to be full adults but are, at best, little girls. That persists even when he’s not accusing them of inventing rape to cover up for having consensual sex, or suggesting they’re so stupid that doctors routinely trick them into thinking they’re pregnant so they can perform unnecessary abortions on them. It’s easy to see how a man with such a low opinion of women convinced himself that he has the power and the right to physically stop them from exercising their reproductive rights. To him, women fall somewhere on the creation scale between small children and wild animals, and the only appropriate response is to exert control instead of letting them make up their own minds about their lives and their bodies.

After Clinton signed the law that attempted to squelch the rising tide of violence and harassment against abortion providers—activism that Akin participated in—seven clinic workers were murdered between 1993 and 1998, before the violence receded. In the past decade, only Dr. George Tiller, a doctor in Kansas who performed late-term abortions, was killed by such violence, in 2009. Most anti-abortion militants are limited to yelling invective or trying to shame women who want abortions by passive-aggressively praying at them. Most understand that aggressive actions can result in federal prosecutions. But as Akin’s continued pride in front of anti-choice audiences shows, this doesn’t mean the movement has abandoned the ideologies that justify the use of force to mandate that all pregnant women give birth. They’ve just learned to elect their warriors to political office, where they can use the government to exert the force that militants used to employ directly.

Read more of The American Prospect at http://www.prospect.org.

Related articles

As Hurricane Sandy Strikes, Mitt Romney Wants to Drastically Cut Federal Disaster Relief

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney is Clueless

As Hurricane Sandy Strikes, Mitt Romney Wants to Drastically Cut Federal Disaster Relief
Romney’s policies are dangerous and short-sighted

As Hurricane Sandy prepares to slam into the east coast, threatening disastrous flooding for millions of people, we should mention that Republican candidate Mitt Romney wants to drastically cut federal disaster relief programs like FEMA.

And we should also mention that the Republican Party’s 2011 spending bill slashed the budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, cutting $700 million intended for an overhaul of America’s aging weather satellite system

Related articles

Jewish Right Wing Extremists Suspected of Extorting Tupac Shakur

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Jewish Extremists, Jewish Fascism, Jewish Fascist, Jewish fascists, Jewish Religious Right, Jewish Right, Jewish Right Wing, Jewish Terrorists, Meir Kahane

JDL Suspected Of Extorting Rapper Tupac Shakur, Others, FBI Says

Tupac Shakur

The legacy of Rabbi Meir Kahane continues. The FBI has released files on the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur, revealing that the Jewish Defense League (JDL) was suspected of “extorting money from various rap music stars via death threats, including Tupac and another performer, Eazy-E.

Files show FBI suspected JDL of extorting Tupac

Jewish Defense League threatened famously murdered rapper, provided bodyguards for hip-hop stars, according to released FBI documents.
By LAHAV HARKOV • Jerusalem Post

Tupac Shakur

The FBI has released files on the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur, revealing that the Jewish Defense League (JDL) was suspected of “extorting money from various rap music stars via death threats, including Tupac and another performer, Eazy-E.

“The scheme involves (name redacted) and other subjects making telephonic death threats to the rap star,” the files, declassified this week, explain. “Subjects then intercede by contacting the victim and offering protection for a fee. The victim and their family are taken to a ‘safe haven’, usually a private estate, and are protected by gun-toting body guards associated with the Jewish Defense League.”

After the victims were brought to the “safe havens,” the JDL would allegedly “convince the victim they have worked a ‘deal’ out…and the threats cease. The victim then pays the subjects for the protection services rendered and resume their normal lifestyle with no fear of further death threat.”

An unidentified source identified Eazy-E as a target of the JDL’s extortion before he died from AIDS. Another source, from within the JDL, “had also reportedly targeted Tupac Shakur prior to his recent murder in Las Vegas, Nevada.”

Tupac was shot four times in Las Vegas in September 1996, and died several days later. The circumstances surrounding his murder remain unclear.

Related articles

Jewish Synagogue Gabbai Raped Disabled Boy

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Jewish Child abuse, Jewish Child Sex Abuse, Jewish Pedophiles, Jewish Perverts

Synagogue Gabbai Who Repeatedly Raped A 14-Year-Old Developmentally Disabled Boy Gets Light Sentence – Even Though He Fled The Country To Avoid Prosecution
Israeli FlagIn another example of Israel’s ethically challenged legal system, a synagogue gabbai who fled prosecution for the repeated rapes of a developmentally disabled child gets a short prison sentence on his return to Israel.
Yehezkiel Greenbaum, a 41-year-old Jerusalem synagogue gabbai, was convicted in a plea bargain today to charges of sodomy and indecent assault against a 14 -year-old boy with low mental function and personality disorders, Ynet’s Hebrew website reported.

Greenbaum fled the country in 2010 just before he was to slated to sign the agreement. When he recently returned to Israel, he was able to get some of the related charges dropped or altered, which reduced his sentence.

But Greenbaum also tried to claim that he had not forced the boys, a claim the judges rejected because of the boys’ mental states.

“The age gap and the close relations between the defendant and the complainant, as well as cognitive and emotional state [of the complainant], made the complainant easy prey for the defendant,” the judges said.

Greenbaum was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

The victim was so traumatized by the ongoing sexual abuse that he needed psychiatric hospitalization.

Related articles

“Perish if you wish; I am safe.” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Abortion Politics, American Taliban, Women Haters

“Perish if you wish; I am safe.” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

Russian Abortion Poster

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Perish if you wish; I am safe.” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourse on Inequality, Part One, more than a paragraph after Note 15)

Canada’s Omnibus Bill: ‘There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation’ (The Right Honourable Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1967) CBC* Digital Archives

*CBC: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

“Perish if you wish; I am safe.” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourse on Inequality, Part One, more than a paragraph after Note 15)

These words are uttered by the philosopher or person who uses reason only.  He always sleep peacefully.  He is not endowed with the pity/compassion that moderates self-love (l’amour-propre or l’amour de soi-même) in the savage. (Part One, more than two paragraphs after Note 15)

The Romney-Ryan Team

Allow me to place in the proper mouths, the mouths of extremists in theRepublican Party, Rousseau’s “Perish if you wish; I am safe.”  I may be wrong, but I suspect that the reason these Republicans can speak like choir-boys on the subject of planned parenthood is that they are sufficiently wealthy to fly to countries where birth-control is available and inexpensive as well as to countries where abortions are not criminalized.  They can also pay a doctor the “right” fee.  In other words, I suspect a substantial degree of hypocrisy.  “Perish if you wish: I am safe.” (On rape, see The Washington Post).  On the “Gag Rule,” see The Huffington Post).

In fact, hypocrisy may not be the only sin.  We are also looking atinequality and at an unjust society.  The rich and wealthy will have a freedom that will be denied the poor.  As I have indicated in earlier blogs, the rich and the wealthy do not need health-insurance.  They can pay for medical treatment and medication.  Well, let’s raise that curtain again: the wealthy, wealthy women, need not give up controlling how many children they will have and when these children will be born.  This is again something they can buy.  In fact, they can also afford several children and help galore, in which they are very fortunate (no pun intended).  They are therefore saying: “Perish if you wish; I am safe.”

So it could be that the debate is not about morality

So, if Republicans are against planned parenthood and abortion, I am inclined to think it has little to do with morality.  I hope I’m wrong, but the debate about abortions seems such a convenient  front.  They will attract the votes of persons who are against abortion and who think naively that because a party does not criminalize abortion, members of that party are for abortion.  This is not the case and there are very real drawbacks to criminalizing abortion.  For instance, what are doctors to do when an abortion is an imperative?

Tying up the hands of doctors: unfit women

An abortion may indeed be an imperative.  What does a doctor do, assuming a woman can afford to see a doctor, if a woman’s life is at risk, if the fetus is abnormal, if she is taking medication that can harm the child, if she is taking drugs or is an alcoholic or if she cannot otherwise face a pregnancy, etc.  What can a doctor do if his or her patient is poor or a woman of humble means?  Under privatized health-insurance, it may again be privatized, not only will these unfit women be told that they are suffering from a pre-existing condition, but if an unfit woman consents to an abortion and a doctor intervenes, he or she, i.e. the doctor, and the unfit patient will face criminal charges.  “Perish if you wish; I am safe.”

Worst-Case Scenarios

A few years ago, I met a woman who had not slept since giving birth.  Her son was three years old but she could not look after him.  Nor could she work.  Fortunately, she lived in Canada so all that could be done, medically-speaking, was done at no cost to her.  However, I doubt that a doctor would have allowed a second pregnancy.   She was sick: severe postpartum depression.  Doctors need a little leeway.

Would that matters had been as they are now when my mother was having her babies. My poor mother carried a child every year knowing that the child would probably die in infancy of a congenital blood disease.  Her first children survived.  But she buried all the others.  I will spare you the number.  To make matters worse, in those days, a good Catholic woman could not say “no” to her husband.  Sexual intercourse was a duty (un devoir).  It was called: le devoir conjugal.  I fail to see what was good in having babies that would die.  This was cruelty.  And I also fail to see what was good in our attending a funeral or two every year.

Saying “no” as the only recourse

If Mr Romney is elected to the office of President of the United States, the only recourse women who are poor and “women of humble means” will have is the word “no” both outside and inside marriage.  There are husbands, such asCharles de Gaulle (rumor has it), who will not ask their spouse to engage in sexual intercourse if she is not prepared to carry a child and give birth to this child.

That is rather noble, but it isn’t very realistic in the case of most couples.  After a fine meal and, perhaps, one or two glasses of wine, hormones tend to take over, crippling intellectual resolve, particularly in younger people.  In fact, even we, older folks,  snuggle up from time to time and just may be induced to “play doctor.”

The above poster: reality

The above poster goes a long way into describing the situation poor and raped women will face (there is no “legitimate rape”) if planned parenthood is criminalized.  Before abortion was decriminalized in Canada, women, particularly unmarried women, who could not face a pregnancy, sometimes used tools that killed (metallic coat hangers) or went to charlatans and, in many cases, they committed suicide.  In the Quebec of my childhood, to avoid bringing shame on their family, young girls who got pregnant were sent to special institutions and when the baby was born, it was taken from them.  The babies were raised in an orphanage or adopted.  It would appear that some were sold.

So allow me to say that when it comes to a woman’s right to choose when and if she will have a child and her right to undergo an abortion when an abortion is necessary, I take matters very seriously.  It would be my view that a woman

  • should not be forced into a pregnancy, especially if she has been raped (there are no “legitimate rape”), including rape within marriage;
  • that she should act responsibly when she engages in sexual intercourse, as should her husband or partner.  Pregnancies can usually be avoided.  And I would like to point out
  • that there are cases when a doctor, with the consent of his or her patient, should be allowed to end a pregnancy.

On Day One: shackling women

However, if Republicans get into office, “On Day One,” not only will Mitt Romney call the Chinese “currency manipulators” and end the health-care reforms introduced by President Obama, but he will also shackle women who are poor and women of “humble means.”  Poor women and women of “humble means” will not have access to what is available to the rich.

The Conclusion

So scratch out most of the paragraph preceding the “On Day One,” because the conclusion is that “On Day One” women who are poor and women of humble means will be denied what will be accessible to the rich.  It will again be all about money and appearing virtuous when virtue is not part of the equation, but a convenient means to an end: being elected.  People who are against abortions will be fooled into thinking that are voting for the morally superior party.

Such is not the case.  If members of that party are elected they will impose on the poor repressive measures that seem virtuous, yet they will be hiding millions and billions, if not more, and demand tax cuts thus acting criminally.  So how can these persons talk about morality?  So wake up; it’s a smokescreen.  What they are saying is “Perish if you wish; I am safe.”

Make sure everyone knows that if the President does not criminalize abortions, it does not mean that he is for abortion.  

Canadians were lucky.  In 1967, future Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau got the Omnibus Bill passed.  One can access the details, including videos by clicking on Omnibus Bill, or CBC* Digital Archives.

Jan Kochanowski over the dead body of his daughter, Urszulka, by Jan Matejko

Micheline Walker©
October 28, 2012
WordPress
 
composer: Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe or Marin Marais
film: Tous les matins du monde (All the World’s Mornings)
performer: Jordi Savall
Sainte-Colombe playing the viola da gamba and dreaming of his wife.
 


RELATED ARTICLES

Related articles

The Guide To Biblical Parenting In a GodNut Shell

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Biblical Parenting, God nuts

The Guide To Biblical Parenting In a GodNut Shell

http://alwaysquestionauthority.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/biblical-parenting-500x500.jpg

Related articles

Catholic Pervert Remains Papal Knight

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in CATHOLIC PEDOPHILES, Catholic Perverts, Catholic Predators, Catholic Sadists, Catholic Sex Abuse, Catholic Sex Crimes, Catholic Stooges, Christian Fascism

Child abuse suspect Savile still Vatican knight

This video from Britain is called Exposure – The Other Side of Jimmy Savile | 2012 | Full Documentary.

Via: -http://dearkitty1.wordpress.com/

From Associated Press:

Vatican says it cannot posthumously remove Jimmy Savile’s papal honor; condemns sexual abuse

Saturday, October 27, 6:24 PM

LONDON — The Vatican said Saturday it never would have given Jimmy Savile his papal knighthood had it known of allegations the British TV star was a child sex predator, but that it can’t rescind the honor now that he has died.

The Catholic Church of England wrote to the Holy See last week, asking it to consider whether it could posthumously remove the honor awarded to Savile because of the many recent child sex abuse allegations against him. Savile, a much-loved BBC children’s television host, died last year at age 84. …

Savile was made a Knight Commander of St. Gregory the Great by Pope John Paul II in 1990 for his charity work. He was also knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to charity and entertainment.

But police now believe Savile to be one of the most prolific sex offenders in Britain in recent history, with a “staggering number” of people reporting abuses by him after his death.

Some 300 potential victims have come forward with abuse allegations, police said. Most of them say they were abused by Savile, but some say they were abused by other people, Metropolitan Police said Friday.

See also here.

Related articles

 

Related articles

Deranged Cultist Glenn Beck a Mormon Charlatan Like His Fake Prophet Joseph Smith

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Glenn Beck Cult Brainwashing, Glenn Beck Mormon Buffoon

Beck: ‘I’m Sorry America, but Your President is a Liar’
SUBMITTED BY Kyle Mantyla on Friday

On Wednesday night’s program, Glenn Beck spent the entire hour laying out a rather confusing theory about how the Obama administration has systemically lied about the attack in Benghazi, Libya as part of an attempt to cover of the fact that has been secretly arming Syrian rebels for the benefit of al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The entire program was an epic performance of conspiracy and delusion driven by an amazing lack of self-awareness as Beck said that someone who will so willingly and unapologetically lie to his audience must either “have deep psychological problems” or be totally insane, eventually getting very serious and quiet to declare “I’m sorry America, but your president is a liar” before dramatically walking off camera:

Mormon Cult Brainwashed Glenn Beck, Charlatan, Shyster, Con Artist and Uber Buffoon!

The GOP Rape Advisory Chart

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Godly Rape, GOP Rape

The GOP Rape Advisory Chart

UPDATE: Volume II of the GOP Rape Advisory Chart can be found HERE and Volume III is HERE.

A week or so ago, someone posted her version of the GOP Rape Advisory Chart to help sort out all of the confusion about the wide variety of rape “flavors” that today’s Republican Party seems so hell-bent on bringing to light.

I thought she did a fantastic job, but, given the latest entries into the “rainbow of rape flavors” yesterday and today by Richard Mourdock and John Cornyn, I decided to create a revised version that plays it straight–I’m just including the actual quotes themselves. Feel free to repost on Facebook, TW or wherever you wish.

So, without further ado, I present the updated Republican Party Rape Advisory Chart:

Anyway, just to reiterate, since I’ve had at least one person contact me directly about it, please feel free to repost the graphic anywhere you wish, and don’t worry about “credit” or “attribution”…the color-code chart idea was someone else’s, as noted above, and I certainly don’t want “credit” for the disgusting statements by the GOP jackasses in the chart.

Also, if you want to attach a link to the chart, I’d recommend either a) ANY of the Democrats running against the scumbags who made the quotes (there’s too many to list again) or, alternately, RAINN or Jamie Leigh Foundation, both of which seem appropriate.

Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network

The Jamie Leigh Foundation

In case the name Jamie Leigh Jones doesn’t ring any bells, here’s a reminder…it’s the 10 most riveting minutes of video you’ll watch today, believe me:

I should probably also note that the chart above is far from all-inclusive. Several additional quotes are listed in the comments, and there’s many (far, far too many) more that haven’t been yet.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Photoshop could handle that large of an image file if I tried to include them all, and I’d quickly run out of background colors to use.

Related articles

Jewish Right Wing Extremist Sheldon Adelson’s Long And Malignant Reach

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Uncategorized

Sheldon Adelson

Sheldon Adelson
Sheldon Adelson

In the organized Jewish world, billionaires – no matter how objectionable – are lauded and courted.

Sheldon Adelson is no exception.

His high profile, embarrassing attempts to buy the American electoral process are reviled behind the closed doors of many Jewish federations and Jewish charities. But publicly, Adelson is praised for his donations to Jewish causes. The criticism he so richly deserves is absent, because the federations and the charities want a shot at getting some of Adelson’s money.

Israel has strict laws governing campaign donations from non-Israelis. The law has been skirted in years past. But to do in Israel what he’s done in America, Adelson would have to hold Israeli citizenship.

So the billionaire found another way to shape Israel’s political landscape, and with it the political landscape of Jewish communities worldwide.

He used the Chinese method of illegal trade to legally weaken and in some cases destroy the Israeli media.

The JTA reports:

…The past few months have seen an implosion of the Hebrew press. Maariv, a tabloid founded in 1948 and for its first 20 years Israel’s largest circulation daily, recently was placed in the hands of a court-appointed trustee and could shut down within weeks, leaving 2,000 people jobless. Haaretz, Israel’s leading broadsheet, did not print on Oct. 4 due to a staff protest of 100 proposed layoffs. Israel’s Channel 10 TV is in deep debt to the government and faces possible closure.

Many in Israel blame Israel Hayom, a staunchly conservative, freely distributed paper funded by American casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, for aggravating the crisis in Hebrew media.

The tough environment “is exacerbated by the fact that in Israel we have the most generously funded free newspaper in the world,” said Times of Israel founding editor David Horovitz, who before starting the site in February was editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. “That’s made life hard for all the publications in Israel.”

The boom in English-language media in Israel is due in part to the limited audience for Hebrew-language news: Israel has fewer than eight million citizens, many of whom prefer the Arabic or Russian press to the Hebrew dailies. Editors of English publications here say Israeli media are looking for audiences overseas to sustain their operations, and there appears to be a limitless appetite around the world for news and opinion on Israel.

“There’s an audience for news coming out of the Jewish world,” said David Brinn, managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. And because most news content is free online, people interested in Israel news will visit any number of news sites — so new publications do not necessarily threaten older ones, Brinn said.…

Adelson put out a free daily newspaper to compete with Israel’s established media, a paper with a real (if very politically slanted) reporting staff, a paper that is not ad driven and has no real pressure to make money.

In effect, he gave away free t-shirts, jeans and hoodies at Walmart until most American t-shirt, jeans and hoodie manufacturers went bankrupt, giving Walmart a near monopoly.

But in this case, Walmart is Israel’s political right wing.

Adelson is an oligarch, a man who benefited from shady dealings with foreign governments, dealings that have made Adelson exceedingly wealthy – and many of his competitors and customers exceedingly poor.

Adelson also allegedly has ties with Chinese organized crime and is alleged to have laundered money for them along with promoting prostitution and violating a slew of American laws in the process.

If Adelson’s money turns out to be dirty – and I suspect that will eventually be the case – that would mean Mob money unduly influenced America’s elections and Israel’s social fabric and political landscape.

But even if Adelson’s money is clean, Adelson isn’t. He may not be a criminal under law, but he is still a malevolent actor seeking to buy election results and manipulate public opinion in a country he doesn’t even live in.

Thirty or forty years ago, someone behaving like Sheldon Adelson would have been almost universally ridiculed.

Today Adelson is treated like a king.

Money buys Sheldon Adelson many things.

Lets hope that the US election and the State Israel are not among them.

Related articles

God’s Gift of Rape | The Real Republican Rape Platform

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in God Rape, Godly Rape, GOP Clown Car, GOP Crazies, GOP Idiots, GOP Wankers, Republican Rape

The real Republican rape platform

It’s no accident GOP candidates can’t stop talking about rape: the party view is women are mere vessels subject to men’s will

    • Via:- Jill Filipovic
Richard Mourdock, Indiana

Richard Mourdock, Republican Senate candidate from Indiana, who has not retracted his debate remark that a pregnancy caused by rape ‘is something that God intended to happen’. Photograph: Michael Conroy/AP

Dear GOP candidates and party members,

I’m going to give you some free campaign advice: stop talking about rape.

The latest Republican rape commentary comes from Romney-endorsed Indiana senatorial candidate Richard Mourdock, who tells us:

“I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

Cue outrage, then cue “apology” from Mourdock – not for his comments, but for “any interpretation other than what I intended”. National Republican senatorial committee chairman John Cornyn voiced his support for Mourdock and added that he also believes “life is a gift from God.”

I would hate for Mr Mourdock to think I’m misinterpreting him here, so let’s be clear about what he said: he did not say that rape is a gift from God. He did say that an unwanted pregnancy is a post-rape goodie bag from the Lord.

And that the Lord intended it to happen that way.

Perhaps God should rethink his delivery system. And perhaps Mourdock should rethink his interpretation of divine will.

What this umpteenth rape comment tells us isn’t that the Republican party has a handful of unhinged members who sometimes flub their talking points. It reveals the real agendas and beliefs of the GOP as a whole.

These incidents aren’t isolated, and they aren’t rare. Sharron Angle, who ran for a US Senate seat out of Nevada, said she would tell a young girl wanting an abortion after being raped and impregnated by her father that “two wrongs don’t make a right” and that she should make a “lemon situation into lemonade“. Todd Akin said victims of “legitimate rape” don’t get pregnant – an especially confusing talking point, if God is giving rape victims the gift of pregnancy. Maybe God only gives that gift to victims of illegitimate rape?

Wisconsin state representative Roger Rivard asserted:

“Some girls rape easy.”

Douglas Henry, a Tennessee state senator, told his colleagues:

“Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse.”

Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly declared that marital rape doesn’t exist, because when you get married you sign up to be sexually available to your husband at all times. And when asked a few years back about what kind of rape victim should be allowed to have an abortion, South Dakota Republican Bill Napoli answered:

“A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.”

Rape lemonade. Legitimate rape. The sodomized virgin exception. A rape gift from God.

Some Republicans, like Mitt Romney, have tried to distance themselves from their party’s rhetorical obsession with sexual violation. What they’re hoping we won’t notice is the fact that their party is politically committed to sexual violation.

Opposition to abortion in all cases – rape, incest, even to save the pregnant woman’s life or health – is written into the Republican party platform. Realizing they can’t make abortion illegal overnight, conservatives instead rally around smaller initiatives like mandatory waiting periods, transvaginal ultrasounds and mandated lectures about “life” to make abortion as expensive, difficult and humiliating as possible.

Republicans bow to the demands of “pro-life” organizations, not a single one of which supports even birth control, and the GOP now routinely opposes any effort to make birth control or sexual education available and accessible. They propose laws that would require women to tell their employers what they’re using birth control for, so that employers could determine which women don’t deserve coverage (the slutty ones who use birth control to avoid unwanted pregnancy) and which women do (the OK ones who use it for other medical reasons).

Mainstream GOP leaders, including Mitt Romney, campaign with conservative activists who lament the fact that women today no longer fully submit to the authority of their husbands and fathers, mourn a better time when you could legally beat your wife, and celebrate the laws of places like Saudi Arabia where men are properly in charge. Senate Republicans, including Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan and “legitimate rape” Todd Akin, blocked the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. And Ryan and Akin joined forces again to propose “personhood” legislation in Washington, DC that would define a fertilized egg as a person from the moment sperm meets egg, outlawing abortion in all cases and many forms of contraception, and raising some serious questions about how, exactly, such a law would be enforced.

Underlying the Republican rape comments and actual Republican political goals are a few fundamental convictions: first, women are vessels for childbearing and care-taking; second, women cannot be trusted; and third, women are the property of men.

Mourdock’s statement that conceiving from rape is a gift positions women as receptacles, not as autonomous human beings. This view of women as vessels – vessels for sex with their husbands, vessels for carrying a pregnancy, vessels for God’s plan – is a necessary component of the kind of extreme anti-abortion legislation most Republican politicians support.

So is the idea that women are both fundamentally unintelligent and dishonest. Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment and Rivard’s contention that “some girls rape easy” rely on the idea that women routinely lie about rape and shouldn’t be believed; blocking VAWA relied partly on similar logic put forward by men’s rights activists, that women lie about being abused in order to secure citizenship and other benefits. Hostility to abortion rights similarly positions rightwing lawmakers as the best people to determine whether or not any particular woman should be legally compelled to carry a pregnancy to term.

Women, they seem to think, don’t know their own bodies or their own lives, and cannot be trusted to determine for themselves whether continuing a pregnancy is a good idea.

Rape treats women as vessels, disregarding our autonomy and our right to control what happens to us physically and sexually. The Republican position is that women are not entitled to make fundamental decisions about our own bodies and our own sexual and reproductive health. When that position is written into the GOP platform and is a legislative priority, can we really be surprised when it’s further reflected in Republican legislators’ comments on rape?

These aren’t a few errant remarks from insensitive politicians. They’re at the heart of the Republican party’s agenda.

Related articles

Obama Mocks Donald Trump on ‘Tonight Show’

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Birther Kook, Donald Trump Mutant Orangutan, Donald Trump Nut Job

Obama Mocks Donald Trump on ‘Tonight Show’
Posted by Nick Chiles

President Obama used an appearance last night on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno to make fun of Donald Trump, who appears obsessed with Obama’s birth certificate and his college records.

Leno asked Obama what had happened between him and Trump to cause Trump to be so fanatical about proving that something about Obama’s background is fraudulent.

In his response, Obama managed to mock Trump for his obsession and at the same time show how silly it is.

“It all started when we were growing up together in Kenya,” Obama said, prompting the audience and Leno to applaud gustily and explode in laughter.

The president’s response was especially biting because Trump has been the leader of the “birther” movement that suggested that Obama was actually born in Kenya and thus ineligible to be president of the United States. So by pulling Trump into an imaginary childhood with him in Kenya, Obama was getting a big laugh at Trump’s expense.

But the president wasn’t done with Trump yet.

“We had constant run-ins on the soccer field,” Obama said. “He wasn’t very good and resented it. When we finally moved to America I thought it would be over.”

Yesterday Trump, the reality show star and one-time Republican presidential wannabe, continued his slide into a national punch-line when his alleged “October surprise” concerning Obama proved much ado about nothing.

“The Donald” had built anticipation of his lunchtime announcement, promising that what he had to say about the president could alter the race between Obama and GOP challenger Mitt Romney.

But Trump’s announcement turned out to be a pledge of $5 million on his part to a charity of Obama’s choice, provided the president makes public his college applications and transcripts and releases his passport history.

Trump released a video via Twitter at noon to much ballyhoo, and his online followers grew by the hundreds in the moments before the video was released.

“I have a deal for the president,” he said. “If Barack Obama opens up and gives his college records and applications, and passport application and records, I will give to a charity of his choice, a check immediately for $5 million.”

Trump has called Obama the “the worst president ever” and briefly threatened to run against him. But Obama destroyed him earlier this year at the White House Correspondents dinner, ending Trump’s supposed White House bid with a series of devastating jokes.

On Leno’s show, Obama didn’t let Republican challenger Mitt Romney off the hook either. When Leno asked the president what was the cure for “Romnesia,” the mocking name that the president has used to label Romney’s penchant for changing political positions, Obama responded that “Obamacare covers pre-existing conditions.”

Romney has promised to repeal Obama’s healthcare plan on his first day in office if elected.

“The real cure is to vote,” the president added.

Related articles

What American Conservatives Say About Rape – Includes Chart

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Conservatives and Rape, God and Rape, Godly Rape, Republican Dumbasses

news
What American Conservatives Say About Rape
Via:- Amelia McDonell-Parry

I don’t know about you, but I have such a hard time remembering which conservative politician said what ridiculously offensive thing about rape.

They’re all old and white and most of them are in some state of partial baldness. They all look the same!

And they all sound basically the same too, given that woman-hating bile spews from their open pie holes.

Alas, they are all individual people, who hold or have held positions of power within government, and aspire to inflict their beliefs upon your life, so it behoves us to be able to keep them straight. Know thine enemies!

Above, a quick overview of the most noteworthy five: Richard Mourdock (running for U.S. Senate in Indiana, current state treasurer), Iowa Congressman Steve King, Missouri Representative Todd Akin, Tom Smith (running for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania), and and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.

You know, there are people who listen to and agree with these terrible concepts and who admire all five of these Republicans. You can bet Mitt and his buddy Ryan are included in these.

I will be amazed when someone comes out with the statistic after the election of how many women voted Republican. It is as if they would enjoy being treated like cattle

Related articles

Barack Obama Labels Mitt Romney a “Bullshitter” in Rolling Stone

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Barack Obama, Mitt Romney Bullshitter, Mormon Cult

Barack Obama Labels Mitt Romney a “Bullsh-tter” in Rolling Stone

by Hilton Haterat

Barack Obama is featured in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, and less than two weeks before the November 6 election, the President opens up to the publication with some choice words for Mitt Romney.

Foremost among them?

“You know, kids have good instincts,” Obama says about the young vote. “They look at the other guy and say, ‘Well, that’s a bullsh***er, I can tell.’”

Barack Obama Rolling Stone Cover

Oh, it’s on! Okay, it’s been on for months now. But still. Strong words.

Among other topics Obama touches on in his interview:

Problems with the rich and poor: There are a whole bunch of millionaires who aren’t paying any income tax, as well as people at the lower end of the income spectrum who may be taking advantage of the safety net we’ve put in place. We should hold everybody accountable who’s not doing their fair share.

Standing up against your own party: If you can’t say no to certain elements of your party, if you don’t have sets of principles that you’re willing to fight for, even if they’re not politically convenient, then you’re gonna have a tough time in this office.

Roe vs. Wade in peril: I don’t think there’s any doubt. Governor Romney has made clear that’s his position. His running mate has made this one of the central principles of his public life.

The future of his health care plan: Just like Medicare and Social Security, as time goes on, as people see what it does, as it gets refined and improved, people will say, ‘This was the last piece to our basic social compact’ – providing people with some core security from the financial burdens of an illness or bad luck.

His first-term achievements: Sometimes folks obsess with gridlock and the ugliness of the process down here in Washington. We passed health care – something that presidents have tried to do for 100 years…We passed the toughest Wall Street reform since the 1930s… We have expanded access to college through the Pell Grant program and by keeping student loans low. The list of things that we’ve accomplished, even once the Republicans took over, is significant.

What Romney should dress as for Halloween: I don’t know about this Halloween. Next Halloween I hope he’ll be an ex-presidential candidate.

Related articles

Pastor Sodomizes Boy

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Pastor Sodomizes Boy, Religious Kooks, Religious Lunatics, Religious Psychos, Religious Sadism, Religious Sadists, Religious Sex Abuse

Pastor Sodomizes Boy

Religious Sex Abuse

Clergy Sexual Abuse

Priests Sexual Abuse

Related articles

RAPE “that’s something God intended” GOP Senate Candidate Tells Women

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in God Rape, GOP Idiots, Wingnuts

 

GOP Senate Candidate Shouldn’t Tell Women God Wants Them To Have Babies From Rape

Richard Mourdock Abortion Rape

 

Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said Tuesday that when a woman becomes pregnant during a rape, “that’s something God intended,” and that she should not be able to get an abortion. Is this shocking to you?

Read More at: http://hollywoodlife.com/2012/10/24/richard-mourdock-abortion-rape-victims-god-intended-pregnant/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said Tuesday that when a woman becomes pregnant during a rape, “that’s something God intended,” and that she should not be able to get an abortion. Is this shocking to you?

Read More at: http://hollywoodlife.com/2012/10/24/richard-mourdock-abortion-rape-victims-god-intended-pregnant/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

Would Desperate Rape Victims Seek Illegal Abortions? Joelle Gomez, executive director of the Women’s Center in Stockton, Cali., which counsels 4,000 rape victims a year, worries that raped women might seek unsafe abortions, as they did in the past. And as in the past, they might die from illegal abortions.

Read More at: http://hollywoodlife.com/2012/10/24/richard-mourdock-abortion-rape-victims-god-intended-pregnant/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

Will Women Have Any Rights? But Mourdock’s position is so extreme that it leads Gloria Feldt, the former President of Planned Parenthood, to believe that the “whole issue of women’s reproductive rights, isn’t about what God thinks, but about not seeing the ‘personhood’ of women.” “If you don’t have the right to own and control your own body, then other rights are meaningless,” she explains. “Also, would God really want women to be punished. It’s so cruel.”

Read More at: http://hollywoodlife.com/2012/10/24/richard-mourdock-abortion-rape-victims-god-intended-pregnant/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral

Related articles

Donald Trump Non-Bombshell | Trump Announces He’s A Mutant Orangutan!

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Donald Trump Mutant Orangutan, Donald Trump Nut Job, Mitt Romney

Donald Trump Non-Bombshell  | Trump Announces He’s A Mutant Orangutan!

Donald Trump and this orangutan go to the same hair stylist. Hence, his new nickname is Donald “Orange-utan” Trump

Five Things Donald Trump’s “Big” Announcement Could Be UPDATED
By Chris Joseph
trump.jpg

Donald Trump will be making a “very, very big” announcement today that might change the course of the presidential election but probably won’t because Donald Trump is an attention-whoring dipshit.

But that isn’t keeping us from talking about it because everyone loves to stare at a train wreck. Particularly a circus train with a terrible combover.

So, what could the big announcement be??

Some are saying that Trump will reveal that the Obamas once almost got divorced.

But Trump himself took to Twitter and said that all predictions up to this point are wrong.

So, what will the announcement be? Here are five guesses:

Update [12:40 p.m.] Trump announces on YouTube that he will donate $5 million to a charity of Obama’s choice if the president hands over his college records (see Trump’s video below)

5. Trump will be combing his hair to the other side of his head
In a daring attempt to change things up, Trump has decided to stop combing over his hair towards the front of his head, and will instead comb it towards the back. This will reveal tattoos of his ex-wive’s names next to a drawing of a topless Daisy Duck on his forehead that he’s been hiding for decades.

4. Trump will fire Mitt Romney
“Mittington, my net worth is about 2.9 billion. Yoahs is $250 million. Theafoah because youah not rich enough to represent the Republicans and piss all ovah the middle class, yeh fiahd.”

3. Trump will do the next space jump
Jealous of all the attention Felix Baumgartner has gotten from his freefall spacejump from the edge of the stratosphere, Trump will announce that he too will make a spacejump. From Mars.

“The Donald doesn’t jump from the edge of space like some pansy,” he will say. “And since not even zero gravity can hold me down, I will theafoah, will jump from Mahs.”

When scientists warn him that Mars is roughly 40 million miles from earth, and that he will surely die in the vacuum of space, he will accuse them of not being born in America. And then he will fire them.

2. Trump will announce that he will no longer tweet like a pre-teen girl

These are ACTUAL tweets from Trump:

– “Robert Pattinson should not take Kristen Stewart back, She cheated on him like a dog & will do it again — just watch”

– “I don’t like John Mayer — he dates and tells — be careful Katy”

– “The more Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, etc. you drink, the more you gain weight?”

– “Brooklyn Nets have the worst uniforms ever — Boring”

1. Trump will announce….. nothing

The announcement will either be something Barack Obama did twenty years ago that no one will give a shit about, or will be something having to do with how Obama once visited Kenya so he was OBVIOUSLY born there. Basically, it’ll be nothing with little to no impact on the race whatsoever.

Until his next bombshell announcement!

The very big huge world changing announcement will be made at noon today.

UPDATE: Trump has come out and made his big giant world shattering announcement.

Ready to get your ass blown clean off??

Here it is:

Donald Trump will donate $5 million to a charity of Obama’s choice if the president releases his college records.

It’s not so much an announcement as it’s a ridiculously idiotic request.

Trump released the challenge in a YouTube video.

“If Barack Obama opens up and gives his college records and applications … and if he gives his passport applications and records I will give to a charity of his choice — Inner City Children of Chicago, American Cancer Society, AIDS Research … a check immediately for 5 million dollars.”

Trump was right! This will definitely sway voters and rock the election! Those people who already hate Obama and believe he’s a secret Kenyan Muslim are totally going to vote EVEN HARDER for Mitt Romney now!

Well played, Combover McDipshits. Well played.

Related articles

Romney Grasps The Hand of Birther Lunatics | How Low Will Romney Sink With a Trump Anchor Around His Neck?

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Birther Cult, Birthers, Mitt Romney Birthers, Wingnuts

Romney Grasps The Hand of Birther Lunatics | How Low Will Romney Sink With a Trump Birther Anchor Around His Neck? To The Bottom?
Romney surrogate Trump takes another swing at proving his party has gone completely off the rails
Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (L) shakes hands with businessman and real estate developer Donald Trump at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada February 2, 2012. Trump re-injected himself and his wealth int

Today appears to be the day the Republican Party goes out of their way to remind us all that yes, they are indeed completely nuts. Nearly lost in all the Mourdock news: Donald Trump’s latest Biggest Announcement Evah, which turns out to be very bold offer from Dr. Evil Trump to pay five million dollarsif Barack Obama releases the college transcripts that Trump is absolutely convinced will show that Barack Obama is really not very bright, and therefore never really got elected president, or maybe is in reality a shady character named Buford T. ForeignGuy who travelled from college to college, during those years, collecting bad grades and becoming president of the Harvard Law Review and such. As blockbuster stories go, this one ranks somewhere in the category of “I will pay somebody $5 million to come up with a blockbuster story for me. Or an average story. Or to merely validate my worn-out existence for a while longer.”A reminder: Mitt Romney has had to absolutely kowtow to this man. When last any non-Republican, non-reality-show watcher gave a damn about Donald Trump, Trump was deeply engaged in the publicity stunt of pretending he might possibly run for the presidency himself—a pretense that, Lord help us all, a goodly number of Republicans were actually excited about. Because Bachmann, Santorum, Gingrich, Cain and Ron Paul were not nearly crazy enough, or were crazy, but not in the right way, or merely because in the current era Republicans seem to not be able to tell the difference between a political contest and a three-ring-circus filled from bleacher to crowning flag with nothing but clowns. So here was Donald Trump, making a good Republican name for himself by (1) being rich and (2) stoking racist-premised theories about how the black president was probably not even a true American after all, and here was Mitt Romney, seeking his endorsement in front of a Trump-branded podium. Romney and Ryan then went on to happily use Trump as one of their many cash cows, holding private fundraising events with the clown, and saying nothing at all about Donald Trump’s sole political or campaign policy position, which was that the black man was unqualified for an ever-shifting set of reasons. The Republican Party did not need Donald Trump to push their little racist conspiracy theories, but Donald Trump became the self-declared king of them and, in exchange, holds the position he holds today.

Does Mitt Romney—or any Republican, for that matter—care in the slightest that Trump is a rotten boil on the political landscape? Do they give a damn that the Republican brand has so thoroughly been reduced to pandering to the lowest common denominator of their base, all the rest of reality be damned? Of course not. No matter how big a fool this dimwitted, Palinesque publicity hound makes himself, Mitt Romney will still shake his hand, and Paul Ryan will still hold private fundraisers with the man.

Just like Mourdock. Just like Akin. And Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and the ridiculous Steve King, and Paul Ryan himself, the king of unicorn-based math and fleecing the poor to make the rich a bit fatter, and just like Mitt Romney himself, the poster child for the very sons of bitches that wrecked the economy by putting casinos within casinos, shoving those casinos in bigger casinos and claiming the whole thing was so goddamn patriotic and freedom-loving that you were practically un-American if you chastised them for it.

Welcome to the modern Republican Party. These are the people who are chosen not to be shunned, but to speak for the party, and guide the party, and raise money for the party, and appear on television for the party, and hold the reins of party leadership. Congratulations, Republican Party. Whatever depths of vapidity and grifting you might have been aiming for, I’d say you’ve managed to get there and then some.

Related articles

Mitt Romney IS the Economic Crisis

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Economic Crisis, Mitt Romney Divorce Trial, Mitt Romney Scandal

Mitt Romney IS the Economic Crisis

Robert Reich says the attacks on Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital miss the larger point, one which even the White House is not prepared to acknowledge: Mitt Romney is not simply a callous vulture capitalist, he is the living embodiment of the financial catastrophe that brought this country to the edge of ruin.

[T]he real issue here isn’t Bain’s betting record. It’s that Romney’s Bain is part of the same system as Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase, Jon Corzine’s MF Global and Lloyd Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs—a system that has turned much of the economy into a betting parlor that nearly imploded in 2008, destroying millions of jobs and devastating household incomes. The winners in this system are top Wall Street executives and traders, private-equity managers and hedge-fund moguls, 
and the losers are most of the rest of us.

The thousands of job losses caused by Bain’s “bad bets,” while providing rich fodder for the Administration’s campaign ads, are really just a microcosm of a self-perpetuating, labyrinthine tax system geared to rewarding the wealthiest with the privilege of betting their fortunes on money they’ve neither earned nor done anything to deserve, with little or no personal risk. Reich calls it “casino capitalism:”

The biggest players in this system have, like Romney, made their profits placing big bets with other people’s money. If the bets go well, the players make out like bandits. If they go badly, the burden lands on average workers and taxpayers.* * *

The fortunes raked in by financial dealmakers depend on special goodies baked into the tax code such as “carried interest,” which allows Romney and other partners in private-equity firms (as well as in many venture-capital and hedge funds) to treat their incomes as capital gains taxed at a maximum of 
15 percent. This is how Romney managed to pay an average of 14 percent on more than $42 million of combined income in 2010 and 2011. But the carried-interest loophole makes no economic sense. Conservatives try to justify the tax code’s generous preference for capital gains as a reward to risk-takers—but Romney and other private-equity partners risk little, if any, of their personal wealth. They mostly bet with other investors’ money, including the pension savings of average working people

.So when Romney touts his business acumen, he’s really bragging about his ability to take advantage of a tax code rigged by himself and others like him to skew the playing field in such a way that in reality poses very little personal risk to himself. For example, another “loophole” in the Tax Code permitted Romney, as a private equity partner, to place virtually unlimited amounts into a tax-deferred IRA by allowing Romney and his partners to grossly underestimate the “value” of their contributions, because the Code only considers a partnership interest in terms of its “future value.” You and I (and ninety-nine percent of Americans who did not have the good fortune and connections to work for a private equity firm) are limited to deferring a few thousand dollars per year from taxes. Mitt Romney’s IRA, according to Reich, approaches 100 million dollars.

The Tax Code also makes interest on debt tax-deductible, fostering a huge incentive to substitute debt for equity, leading to debt-fueled bets made by banks and financial institutions intent on “leveraging America to the hilt,” and culminating in the economic catastrophe that the Bush Administration was forced to finally confront in 2008, and that we still find ourselves mired in today.

But for the banks, private equity firms, hedge funds and other financial institutions who brought on the crisis–and for Mitt Romney– there was no catastrophe. Two-thirds of all income gains realized between the mid-1980’s and 2007 were in the financial sector, showered on the people who made their livelihood playing with other people’s money. People like the folks at Bain Capital, who structured their deals so they would always profit, even though some of the companies they funded ultimately collapsed under the weight of excessive debt. And when the collapse ultimately occurred, the same people who had profited mightily from leveraging the rest of the country were given a massive bailout. The fact is that the economic crisis directly felt by nearly all “ordinary” Americans was never really felt by the people who caused it. That’s the benefit of playing with other people’s money.

The Tax code is an opague behemoth, unfathomable to most Americans. When Americans think of tax issues, they think of income tax rates, they think of how their tax money is spent. They generally don’t think in terms of whether interest on debt obligations may be deductible, because your average American doesn’t have the wherewithal to get his hands other people’s mortgages. But the folks who are attempting to buy the election for Mitt Romney think of nothing else. While people like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers have their pet social issues to amuse themselves, the real issue here is and has always been taxes, or, more correctly, ways to avoid paying taxes.

We’ve entered a new Gilded Age, of which Mitt Romney is the perfect reflection. The original Gilded Age was a time of buoyant rich men with flashy white teeth, raging wealth and a measured disdain for anyone lacking those attributes, which was just about everyone else. Romney looks and acts the part perfectly, offhandedly challenging a GOP primary opponent to a $10,000 bet and referring to his wife’s several Cadillacs. Four years ago he paid $12 million for his fourth home, a 3,000-square-foot villa in La Jolla, California, with vaulted ceilings, five bathrooms, a pool, a Jacuzzi and unobstructed views of the Pacific. Romney has filed plans to tear it down and replace it with a home four times bigger.We’ve had wealthy presidents before, but they have been traitors to their class—Teddy Roosevelt storming against the “malefactors of great wealth” and busting up the trusts, Franklin Roosevelt railing against the “economic royalists” and raising their taxes, John F. Kennedy appealing to the conscience of the nation to conquer poverty. Romney is the opposite: he wants to do everything he can to make the superwealthy even wealthier and the poor even poorer, and he justifies it all with a thinly veiled social Darwinism.

So in response to the greatest Economic crisis since the Depression, the Republican Party has coalesced behind the crisis’ own walking, talking, living embodiment. The mantra that such a person represents the class of “job creators” is just a newly packaged form of Social Darwinism: survival of the “fittest” at the expense of economic “inferiors.” This philosophy was embraced and expanded by 19th Century “thinkers” such as William Graham Summer (cited by Reich), and now channeled by the Republican Party in foisting upon us its nominee for the Presidency:

In 1883, Sumner published a highly influential pamphlet entitled “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other”, in which he insisted that the social classes owe each other nothing, synthesizing Darwin’s findings with free enterprise Capitalism for his justification.[citation needed] According to Sumner, those who feel an obligation to provide assistance to those unequipped or under-equipped to compete for resources, will lead to a country in which the weak and inferior are encouraged to breed more like them, eventually dragging the country down. Sumner also believed that the best equipped to win the struggle for existence was the American businessman, and concluded that taxes and regulations serve as dangers to his survival.

It’s hard to find a better description of the Republican Party platform or Mitt Romney’s campaign, wouldn’t you say?

When Romney simultaneously proposes to cut the taxes of households earning over $1 million by an average of $295,874 a year (according to an analysis of his proposals by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center) because the rich are, allegedly, “job creators,” he mimics Sumner’s view that “millionaires are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done.”

Reich believes too few in the Democratic Party are willing to acknowledge the obvious, either because they are similarly tethered to Wall Street’s millions, or because to acknowledge that Romney is in fact the perfect face of the economic crisis would be to acknowledge the overwhelming pervasiveness of the problem. And to acknowledge the scope of the problem would require them to come up with solutions. Circling above all of this discussion, of course, is the haunting shadow of Citizen’s United. But for Reich, the “clear and present danger” facing this country is the plutocrat about to accept the Republican nomination for the Presidency–

at the very time in our nation’s history when these views and practices are a clear and present danger to the well-being of the rest of us—just as they were more than a century ago. Romney says he’s a job-creating businessman, but in truth he’s just another financial dealmaker in the age of the financial deal, a fat cat in an era of excessively corpulent felines, a plutocrat in this new epoch of plutocrats. That the GOP has made him its standard-bearer at this point in American history is astonishing.

The face of every foreclosure, of every job loss, of every dream of retirement or a secure future wiped out by what we euphemistically call the “financial crisis” will mount the stage at his Party’s convention in Tampa Bay this August

Related articles

Why Austrian Economics Fails

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Uncategorized

Parable of the ship: why Austrian Economics fails.

From Critiques Of Libertarianism

Many libertarians and other conservatives look to Austrian economics because they find their preferred positions explained with clear moral stories. But the great fault of Austrianism is that it is not scientific. Science is a better way of knowing than philosophy, because scientific theories have to explain close to all the scientifically collected data. For all the faults of conventional economics, it is far closer to a science than Austrianism because it relies heavily on data. Austrianism has a methodological disrespect of data. It is structured as a medieval philosophy based on authority, rather than systematic adherence to real-world data.

I’ve collected criticisms of Austrian economics for many years in my index Austrian Economics. But a sheaf of miscellaneous criticisms may not be as clear as a parable.

The owner of a ship noticed that his ship was filling with water. Being an educated man (if not nautically trained) he knew there were many possible causes for water in a ship: leaks in the hull, the bilge pump being broken, waves washing over, condensation, and even the crew urinating in the hold. He heard the bilge pump running, he saw water from waves pouring in the open hatches, but worst of all he smelled urine in the hold! Being sensible, he ordered the crew to shut the hatches and then gave them a lengthy, stern harangue on hygienic use of the head. While he was lecturing the crew, his ship sank due to a combination of causes: large, unobserved leaks in the hull, a bilge pump that was running but not pumping correctly, and condensation that had shorted out warning circuitry.

Now, it’s easy to write a story to justify or ridicule any course of action, any philosophy. Indeed, that described Ayn Rand’s fiction. But my purpose here is to illustrate ways in which the owner failed to think correctly. Ways which are STRONGLY analogous to Austrian economic methodology.

In every theory-rich subject, there can be a multitude of explanations of cause. For example, there might be 5 possible causes for a specific problem, be it inflation or disease or whatever. All or none of those causes might be valid. If all of them are valid, some might be unimportant because they cause very little of the problem or cause the problem very infrequently or cause the problem only under specific circumstances. But more than one of the causes might be quite important, singly or in combination. Economics is just such a theory-rich subject.

There is no way to identify from philosophy which of these might be the case. You need to be able to observe enough to quantify these factors. However, Austrianism is staunchly against measurement: indeed, it is innumerate because it does not use measurement. Rothbard, Mises, and Hayek railed about how measurements were philosophically invalid.

In the parable, the owner did not investigate condensation; he presumed the pump was working correctly without measurement; he did not attempt to measure leaks; he presumed (again without measurement) that the water sloshing in the hatches was the right amount to explain the filling; and he distracted the crew from finding the real problems with his own assumptions and moral haranguing.

Since Austrians are innumerate, instead they must rely on their assumptions, which needless to say tend to have a very right wing bias. Science does not work that way. Nor can Austrians really defend their assumptions: no assumption about the real world is totally true which means that there is fallacy in all their logic about the real world. They make up for this in bluster and old-fashioned appeal to their own authority.

When confronted with real-world problems that could have multiple causes, logical verbal models are insufficient. You MUST introduce measurement and mathematics into your models if you want to have any hope of valid answers. Logical verbal models are sufficient to specify possible chains (or networks) of causation, but telling which are significant is a quantitative problem that requires measurement.

This is not a new position: it is basic to science and ought to be basic to philosophy. Hume said it very clearly 260 years ago:

[…] Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
David Hume, “Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding“, 12, “Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy” p. 176.

Related articles

The Romney Lexicon

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Mitt Romney, Vulture Capitalist Mitt Romney

The Romney Lexicon

KEVIN CARSON

As Thomas L. Knapp observes in a recent column, Mitt Romney — famous for complaining about the 47% who expect to be taken care of — “whined that the Obama administration has been insufficiently charitable with ‘public’ land (and taxpayer money) toward the oil companies.”

He notes that “for every dollar a timber company paid in leasing fees, the US government spent $1.27 on road-building and other projects to enable the exploitation of those timber leases.” The same applies to oil drilling in places like the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve: “the next time a natural resources extraction company offers to cover the entire cost of its own operations on ‘public’ land, let alone deliver a net profit to the US government on the deal, will be the first time.”

Extractive industries are among the biggest welfare queens in human history. Much — probably most — of the oil and mineral wealth of the planet is still in the hands of transnational corporate beneficiaries of centuries of colonial looting. Oil and mineral companies routinely use their pet states to politically guarantee access to mineral resources. Just look at the overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran — then read the Wikipedia article on BP. The politics of oil is the central factor in the slaughter of millions in the Congo, Zaire, and Angola since WWII. The same goes for the Suharto coup in Indonesia and the democide in East Timor. I think Shell actually has a Vice President for supervising death squad activity.

Most production of cash crops for corporate agribusiness, under the neoliberal “export-oriented development model” the Washington Consensus forces on the Third World, takes place on land from which peasants were either outright evicted, or reduced to at-will tenancy and then evicted, under colonialism or post-colonialism. The fastest way for a left-leaning regime to bring those “Washington Bullets” down on itself is to try putting that land back in the hands of its rightful owners — the peasants who originally cultivated it. Just ask Jacobo Arbenz.

It’s hilarious that self-described defenders of “free enterprise” like Mittens, who come down hardest on boondoggles like Solyndra, are also the biggest advocates of nuclear power and projects like the Keystone XL pipeline.

Nuclear power is the most extreme example of the phenomenon Tom Knapp described. Every step in the production chain, from the government building roads to the uranium mines on federal land to the disposal of nuclear waste at government expense — and the government indemnification against liability for meltdowns in between — is heavily subsidized by taxpayers.

As for Keystone, it’s just another example — although much smaller in scale and bloodshed — of the kind of corporate looting the fossil fuels industry carries out around the world. Never mind the fact that the extraction itself couldn’t take place in Alberta if government approval didn’t constitute a de facto indemnity, essentially preempting any potential tort action in the courts for harm from pollution.

The pipeline is being built on stolen land. From Montana to Oklahoma and Texas, TransCanada is using eminent domain to steal land — often falling afoul of treaty guarantees with Indian nations — and using local police and sheriffs as mercenaries in pitched battles against activists. Even when it crosses federal land, it amounts to a subsidy to the project. “Vacant” land — actually occupied by human beings with the legal liability of having brown skin — was originally preempted by the Spanish crown, passed into the hands of the Mexican Republic, and thence into the hands of the U.S. government via the Guadalupe-Hidalgo cession. The American state held all this land out of use, in blocs of tens and hundreds of millions of acres, so that it could eventually be handed over to favored timber, mining, oil and pipeline companies without the need to buy it up piecemeal from individual homesteaders, small forestry cooperatives and the like.

So now when you hear Mittens talk about “free enterprise,” you know what he means by it.

Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society and holds the Center’s Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory.

Related articles