Why we're staying the Hell out of New Mexico

Apparently, the various
law-enforcement agencies in the great state of New Mexico have decided that their chief responsibility is to make ray Kelly's NYPD seem reasonable.


New Mexico investigates officers who shot at van carrying five kids

Yes, 5 kids. Police opened fire into a minivan containing five children. It was not, as you might assume, being driven by Pablo Escobar, but by a lady who is the mother of five children. Who was guilty of driving over the speed limit, which is apparently a capital offense in New Mexico now.

And it's not just the unwarranted violence that you might sadly have come to expect from police departments these days, there's also the probing. Apparently New Mexico cops have some sort of sick probing fetish that they're enacting on their citizens against their will.

 

Police academy training, Taos, New Mexico

NM woman comes forward with illegal probing claims

New Mexico Anal Probe: David Eckert Files Lawsuit After Undergoing X-Rays, Enemas And Colonoscopy During Drug Search

Second Anal Probe Lawsuit Being Filed Against N.M. Police

Oh, and also genital torture.

ACLU Files Lawsuit Against New Mexico Police For Allegedly Spraying Mace On Woman’s Genitals

Marlene Tapia says that she was arrested and forced to strip naked for a contraband examination. The officers at the Metropolitan Detention Center (Bernalillo County New Mexico) claimed that she had a plastic baggie in her vagina and, according to the lawsuit, forced her to bend over and as punishment

Absolutely horrifying!

 Almost as horrifying as this:

 

According to the lawsuit and Eckert’s medical records, which were released to KOB, Eckert’s abdominal area was X-rayed twice, doctors performed a colonoscopy on him, an enema was inserted anally three separate times and doctors examined his anus twice with their fingers.

Want to guess what heinous crime Eckert committed to be subjected to this degrading inhuman treatment? He ran a stop sign.

As KOB-TV reports, police stopped David Eckert on Jan. 2 after he failed to come to a complete stop at a stop sign outside a Walmart parking lot in Deming, N.M. Things began to go wrong when the authorities asked him to exit his vehicle.
“They say when he stepped out of his car he was standing in a manner that looked as if he was clinching his buttocks,” Shannon Kennedy, Eckert’s attorney, told KOB-TV, according to CBS Las Vegas.

So, if you do go to New Mexico, obey every traffic rule to the letter. And if you do get pulled over, don't stand with clenched buttocks. The punishment for those crimes is horrific.

Checking In With Former Presidents

Lets' see what former presidents have been up to since leaving the oval office.

What have you been up to since your administration ended, Mr. Carter?

 

 

Oh, Habitat for Humanity, building houses for people, very nice.

 

 

 

 

 

And the Carter Center, curing diseases all over the world, doing diplomacy stuff. Very impressive!

 

What about you, Mr. Clinton? What have you been up to?

 

 

 

 

 

Teaming up with Mr. Bush Senior to raise money for Katrina victims? Very admirable!

 

 



And the Clinton Global Initiative. Doing good stuff all over the world. That's pretty great.



 

 

And what about our youngest and healthiest former President? Surely you have some impressive accomplishments, eh, Mr. Bush?





 

 



Oh, dear God. . .
Yes, that's very good, sir. Very good. I'm sure that nice Mr. Leno will want to put that up on his refrigerator so he can look at it every day!

Credit where credit is due

Palin: God ‘blessed’ with me a platform on Fox News to defend myself

By David Edwards
Sunday, November 24, 2013 11:03 EST 

 

 

 

Noooooooo. . . I had nothing to do with that!

 

 

 

 

But then how. . . ?

 

 

 

 

Achem! You're Welcommmme!!!

I renew my objection

I renew my objection to the veneration of Ms Oprah Winfrey.

I mean, seriously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom? What exactly are the criteria for this award?

According to Wikipedia:
It recognizes those individuals who have made "an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors".

Okay, so giving this award to Bill Clinton? Sure, why not? Not for anything he did during his presidency, but for the humanitarian work he's done since, sure.
Gloria Steinem? Absolutely.
Loretta Lynn? Hell yeah.
But Oprah?

What meritorious contribution has she made to world peace, cultural, or any other significant endeavor?

Nothing against Ms Winfrey, who seems like a perfectly nice person, but her show was garbage. And any positive contributions she may have made to the world are surely outweighed by her promotion of the absurd magical thinking of "The Secret."

 

That an intelligent grown woman like Ms Winfrey could be suckered into this "if you wish for something hard enough, it will come to you" claptrap is mind-boggling.

 

Also, if you really really believe in faeries, Tinkerbell will live!

 

 

It would be laughable if it weren't so offensive. And it's offensive in two ways. First, it's offensive because it's a scam, taking money from the gullible and desperate. Second, it's offensive because it's a new form of victim-blaming. Oh, you're poor? I guess you didn't concentrate hard enough on attracting wealth! You're sick? Should have spent more time attracting good health! It's horrible. Also, she's responsible for Dr. Oz.

 

The least gross picture I could find.

 

 





Now here's what a Presidential Medal of Honor looks like:

Debt Ignorance

Dishonest ignoramus Sarah Palin has been getting a lot of shit lately for tossing this word-salad about the debt:

Our free stuff today is being paid for today by taking money from our children and borrowing from China. When that money comes due and, this isn’t racist, so try it, try it anyway, this isn’t racist, but it’s going to be like slavery when that note is due. Right? We are going to be beholden to a foreign master.

People were offended, and rightly so, for her invocation of slavery (for future reference, if you have to preface something with "this isn't racist," just don't say it.) but I was mostly struck by her profound ignorance of how debt works. It's fine to be ignorant about debt, but then you don't get to be passionate about it. I'm completely ignorant about chemistry, and I have no strong opinions on the subject tother than I maintain that meth is bad and I don't care who disagrees!

But I hear this line from the "fix the debt" types a lot lately, this "when the note comes due. . ." The note doesn't come due. The not e never comes due. It's like your mortgage or your car note, you have to keep making payments until it is finally paid off. It's not like you buy a house, take out a 30-year mortgage and then you sit around for 30 years until a guy from the bank shows up and says "okay, time to pay that 200 grand you owe."

There is never going to be a time when China or anyone else shows up at our front door saying "I demand that you pay me that trillion dollars today" and then we don't have the trillion dollars so a judge sentences us to be China's butler and hijinks ensue. (I've been watching Seinfeld re-runs)

Also, we do not need to fix the debt. It will need to be adressed eventually, like say, in the Bill Clinton administration, when we were running a surplus and  starting to pay it down and then George W. Bush completely undid all that progress because Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility, yea!!! But you work on debt reduction during prosperous times, not during a recession. And yes, our debt is very large, but here's a little perspective:








Our debt to GDP ratio is in the same neighborhood as Germany which is the strong Eurozone economy, the one that has to bail everyone else out. And look at Japan! Their debt to GDP ratio is over twice as high as ours. Is anyone panicking over Japan's "debt problem?" (actually, I don't know, maybe they are.)

Anyway, I kind of lost track of my thread of thought. I guess my point is that just as those who thump the Bible the most seem the most ignorant of what Jesus actually said, those who are the most passionate about debt seem the most ignorant about it. Also, God do I hate Sarah Palin. What a fraud!

Richard Cohen is worse than I thought

So I thought that maybe Richard Cohen's "hey, maybe slavery wasn't such a great thing after all" column was some sort of aberration, I mean he does have a regular column in one of the top papers in the country, so I figured he must have some sort of intelligence or insight or something that makes him worth reading.

 

Richard Cohen

Opinion Writer

Christie’s tea-party problem

 And awaaaay we goooo!

The day after Chris Christie, the cuddly moderate conservative,

 Okay, Richard, I've gotta stop you right there. I know you haven't even completed your first sentence, but "Cuddly moderate conservative?" By what standard could Chris Christie possibly be considered "moderate?" I guess if your spectrum runs from Dennis Kucinich on the left to Attila the Hun on the right, Christie might be in the moderate conservative section along with Genghis Khan and Ming the Merciless. But cuddly?

   

Unless, is "cuddly" a euphemism for fat?

 He's the cuddliest motherfucker ever to scream at a schoolteacher!

The day after Chris Christie, the cuddly moderate conservative, won a landslide reelection as the Republican governor of Democratic New Jersey, I took the Internet Express out to Iowa, surveying its various newspapers, blogs and such to see how he might do in the GOP caucuses, won last time by Rick Santorum, neither cuddly nor moderate. Superstorm Sandy put Christie on the map. The winter snows of Iowa could bury him.

Sure, let's pretend Iowa is relevant. Their whopping 6 electoral votes have been known to be the deciding factor in at least zero past elections.

 

 From a Web site called the Iowa Republican, I learned that part of the problem with John McCain and Mitt Romney, seriatim losers to Barack Obama, “is they were deemed too moderate by many Iowa conservatives.” 

And yet, both of them won their Republican primaries.. And if either of them had carried Iowa in the general election, they would still have lost. And since Iowa went for Obama in 2008 and 2012, it seems unlikely that they would have preferred a candidate further right than McCain or Romney. Either way, If Christie's running for president, which he almopst certainly is, he does not need to worry about fucking Iowa. In 2008 Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucus. How much good did that do him? You know who didn't win Iowa? Ronald Reagen in 1980. Seems to me he did pretty well in the rest of the campaign.

And 2012, how did the Iowa caucus turn out? Just ask President Santorum!

Iowa not only is a serious obstacle for Christie and other Republican moderates,

No. It isn't. See above.

 Iowa not only is a serious obstacle for Christie and other Republican moderates, it also suggests something more ominous: the Dixiecrats of old. Officially the States’ Rights Democratic Party, they were breakaway Democrats whose primary issue was racial segregation. In its cause, they ran their own presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond, and almost cost Harry Truman the 1948 election. They didn’t care. Their objective was not to win — although that would have been nice — but to retain institutional, legal racism. They saw a way of life under attack and they feared its loss.

What an apt analogy! Except that the Iowa Republicans aren't going to break off into their own party or nominate their own candidate. The only real comparison is the racism.

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled 

Not racist? Says who? You can't just make that blanket statement without something to back it up. 

 Gee, where does Belafonte get these crazy ideas?

 So, anyway, up 'til now, it's just idiotic drivel, but here comes the truly awful part:

People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. 

  

Wait, what? What the fuck?

That seriously reads like something you'd see on Stormfront or something.  You think that someone who gags at the sight of an interracial couple is a person with "conventional views?" Blatant racism is a conventional view?

(Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) 

NO. No you shouldn't. Not in this context. If you want to mention that fact in a discussion about the fluidity of human sexuality, then sure, mention away. If you're discussing things that bigots are disgusted by, no. Don't mention.

 Seriously, how long is the Washington Post going to continue to let this ass be a part of their op-ed page? Aren't they embarrassed? Have they no shame?

Just call us mint jelly. . .

. . .'cuz we're on the lam!

 

 

 

We're gettin out of town, layin low til the heat dies down. Should be back in about a week.

Jersey Logic

So the New jersey legislature passed an increase in the state's minimum wage. Governor Chris Christie vetoed it. So the voters put it on the ballot and passed it by a margin of about 60/40. And by pretty much the same margin re-elected governor Chris Christie.

 

 

I know I'm a little confused. I mean, New Jersey's considered a "blue" state. Christie is anti-choice, anti-gay-marriage, anti-stimulus, anti-everything blue-staters generally care about. And yet they returned him to office easily. I could see if maybe he was a charismatic, likeablr Bill Clinton-type politician, bjut he's a loudmouth bully. A real jerk who revels in his own jerkishness. So what's to like?

 

 

 

How dare you question me, schoolteacher?





 

I can only conclude that there is a large swath of the American electorate that just loves a bully.  How else to explain the careers of Gordon Ramsey, Simon Cowell, and the lady from Dance Moms?

 

 

Dance for me, peons!

 

 

The worst fake accents in history

1. Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins



2. Dennis Quaid in The Big Easy



3. Whoever does the voiceovers on those damn Outback Steakhouse ads. For fucks sake, how hard is it to find an Australian person? I'm pretty sure Paul; Hogan is free these days.

Rand Paul is a whiny little crybaby

Ever since Rachel Maddow and a few others pointed out that Rand Paul just cuts-and-pastes large chunks of other people's works into his speeches and columns, Rand Paul has totally manned up and faced his critics and . . . oh, of course he didn't! He's turned into a whiny little crybabay!

First, there was this:

On “This Week” Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., dismissed charges of plagiarism in his speeches and writing made in the last week, saying he was being “unfairly targeted by a bunch of hacks and haters” who he wishes he could challenge to a “duel.”
 

Yes, the real hacks ared those who point out your hackery!

Then this:

"I'm being criticized for not having proper attribution, and yet they are able to write stuff that if I were their journalism teacher in college, I would fail them," Paul told Costa.

Because writing poorly and stealing someone else's work are exactly the same thing.

But my favorite Rand Paul whiny baby moment is this quote:

"I feel like if I could just go to detention after school for a couple days, then everything would be OK. But do I have to be in detention for the rest of my career?"

 

 

Okay, first of all, what the fuck are you talking about? Detention? You mean being criticized? Yeah, you're going to be criticized for the rest of your career. That's part of  a career in politics. Ans also, you're whining about being "in detention" for the rest of your career? - Because it's been like a week. Get used to it, you fucking baby. If you're going to be a public figure, you're going to be criticized, especially when you make it soooo easy!

 

 

"What we are going to do from here forward, if it will make people leave me the hell alone, is we're going to do them like college papers," he said. "We're going to try to put out footnotes."

 

Or, and I'm just spitballing here, you could maybe try doing your own writing. Then you wouldn't have to worry about attribution. Also, you can't really run for Senate and win and make overtures about wanting to be President and then expect people to leave you the hell alone. You want to be left the hell alone? Go back into private life, we'll all be glad to never speak your name or think of you ever again.



"To tell you the truth, people can think what they want, I can go back to being a doctor anytime, if they're tired of me."

We are.
We were all sick to death of you a year ago.

 

Headlines that shows that maybe things are changing.

Just a week after brilliant musician Laurie Anderson was referred to in news articles as "Lou Reed's wife,"

Kerry Washington's Husband Nnamdi Asomugha Waived By San Francisco 49ers

That seems like a bit of progress.




Meanwhile, at Pope & Associates:

 

 

Okay, people, we have a new client!

Holy shit, Richard Cohen is a moron!

Richard Cohen Opinion Writer

 What art says about the past

I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life. For instance, it was not George A. Custer who was attacked at the Little Bighorn. It was Custer — in a bad career move — who attacked the Indians.

Wait, really? You really didn't know that? Did you get all your Amercan history knowledge from 1950's Westerns? And are you telling me that maybe those movies fdidn't portray Native Americans fairly?

Much more important, slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks. Slavery was a lifetime’s condemnation to an often violent hell in which people were deprived of life, liberty and, too often, their own children.

Holy. . . well, you know. How is this possible? How is it that a man intelligent enough to read and write could ever have thought that slavery was a "benign institution?' I mean, it's called "slavery!" There's no real secret to what it is. It's not like they called it "fluffy bunnies" and then in your research you discovered that "holy shit, fluffy bunnies means ensving people!" How could a sentient human being see the word "slavery" and think "well, that sounds pretty benign?"

So what was it that finally convinced you that slavery is, in fact, a terrible thing?

Steve McQueen’s stunning movie “12 Years a Slave” is one of those unlearning experiences. I had to wonder why I could not recall another time when I was so shockingly confronted by the sheer barbarity of American slavery.




 A movie?
You really had to see a movie?
You had to see a movie IN TWO THOUSAND THIRTEEN to fnd out that slavery was bad?
Seriously?
So up until YESTERDAY, you thought that "mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks?" For SEVENTY TWO YEARS you were under the impression that slavery was a harmless arrangement between benevolent slaveholders and grateful slaves? You were sixty-one years old when it suddenly occurred to you that, "hey, based on what I've seen here in the cineplex, maybe black people weren't all that grateful to be enslaved!" I sthat seriously what you're telling us?

Also, had you never seen ROOTS?

beginning with school, I got a gauzy version. I learned that slavery was wrong, yes, that it was evil, no doubt, but really, that many blacks were sort of content. Slave owners were mostly nice people — fellow Americans, after all — and the sadistic Simon Legree was the concoction of that demented propagandist, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Really? Because according to your Wikipedia bio,  you attended Far Rockaway High School in New York City, not Jefferson Davis Memorial High in Cousinfuck Holler, Arkansas. Were New York City teachers really referring to Harriet Beecher Stowe as a "twisted propogandist?"

 

Faculty photo day, Far Rockaway High School, 1957

And of course, slavery was not only incomprehensibly cruel — it had to have had consequences. You can see those consequences in this marvelous, harrowing and concussively powerful movie.

Or you could just be a conscious human adult and have the common sense to know that slavery had consequences. It's like you don't have to watch The Poseidon Adventure to know that ships sinking have consequences.

Anyway, his column goes on and on in this vein (did you know that Gone With The Wind was not a realistic portrayal of black-white relations in the antebellum South? oops-spoiler alert!) and somehow does not conclude with Richard Cohen resigning his position at the Washington Post.

Goddammit, Janelle Monae, Really?

What the hell are you doing posing with this fraud?


Why loan your "cred" to this misogynist hack?


You do know you're well-respected, right?Why blow that by associating yourself with this talentless novelty act?

What the hell are you thinking?

Read this:
Robin Thicke really is that gross

Anatomy of a right-wing argument

It all started when I happened to see this little statistic:



Which I then "Tweeted" with the caption "Fuck you, NRA" in reference to the fact that the NRA is the primary reason why every state doesn't have these background checks.

  Professor Chaos ‏@akaProfessorCha 
Fuck you, NRA. Photo:. http://tmblr.co/Zcae-xyg7lsR

Then about a day later, I get a "reply" or whatever from someone calling himself "Libtard=Derp" which is a pretty good indication of the kind of flawless arguments that are to come.

Libtard = Derp ‏@CobraTheCdr
Better idea? Women use their brains and stop dating psychopaths. #derp @akaProfessorCha

So, there's step one in the conservative argument technique. Blame the victim(s). The problem isn't the guys who murder their wives or girlfriends, the problem is the wives and girlfriends being foolish enough to get themselves murdered. Or something.


So, I was dumb enough to respond.


Professor Chaos ‏@akaProfessorCha 
@CobraTheCdr Sure, if women were just smarter about dating, we'd have no reason to keep guns out of the hands of psychos! *eyeroll*

So I was treated to step two: the straw man.

Libtard = Derp ‏@CobraTheCdr
You make it sound like women are too stupid to know a psychopath. Are you sexist? @akaProfessorCha

Because if you can't refute the actual argument, make up a different argument that you can refute, even if it has nothing to do with what the other person has actually said!





Professor Chaos ‏@akaProfessorCha
@CobraTheCdr I didn't say anything that sounded remotely like that. I think you know that. I'm assuming you're not stupid.

Libtard = Derp ‏@CobraTheCdr
Aren't there better ways to stop this besides gun control? @akaProfessorCha

Ah, changing the subject and going with the completely baseless assumption that gun control is a sort of extreme radical approach to gun safety that really shouldn't even be considered until we've exhausted all other options like "doing nothing" and "getting women to only date non-murderers."

And for some reason, I opted to continue the discussion:

Professor Chaos ‏@akaProfessorCha 
@CobraTheCdr No.

And when all else fails: bullshit.

Libtard = Derp ‏@CobraTheCdr
Of course not, using a failing method is the best method. @akaProfessorCha

Of course, if you remember how this whole discussion started, it was with a statistic that indicated that background checks are pretty much the opposite of a failing method.

  Professor Chaos ‏@akaProfessorCha 
@CobraTheCdr I would refer you back to the original statistic, background checks are absolutely not failing.

And I have yet to hear back from him.