Bi-Partisan stupidity

The Pope is coming! And the imminent arrival of his eminence gives us yet another opportunity to take pride in America! Or not. . .

. . . last week, four House members — Democrats Dan Lipinski (Ill.), Juan Vargas (Calif.), and Republicans Jeff Fortenberry (Neb.) and Tim Murphy (Pa.) sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner and Democratic Leader Nancy  Pelosi, asking them to put out some sort of guidance “to the House and Senate on the appropriate decorum, protocol and behavior. . . .”
Members could use info on “how to greet the Pope, proper attire [no jeans?] . . . among other matters of etiquette,” the letter said.

  

Oh, my Boss. . .

No jean?
Jeans?
You really have to ask about jeans?

I'm not Catholic, so correct me if I'm wrong,  but I'm pretty sure Pope-meeting protocol is not that difficult. I'm pretty sure you are no longer expected to kneel and kiss his ring, although if you are a practicing Catholic, that might be a nice gesture. Basically, he's the head of state of the Nation of Vatican City. You treat him as you would any visiting head of state, except instead of "your highness" or "your excellency," he is generally addressed as "Your Holiness," as befitting his position as Head of a major religion. Same as you would if you met the Dalai Lama.Or Joe Montana.

We are hearing that Boehner and Pelosi are indeed now working on a “guidance card” of some sort to members to, as the letter notes, ensure “proper respect for the Pope” and “avoiding anything that could be construed as politicizing or making a spectacle of his visit.”

Okay, it really doesn't seem like this should have been neccessary, but here are a few do's and don'ts when meeting the Pope:

1. No High-fiving the Pope. Also no fist-taps or chest bumps.

2. You need not kiss his ring, but if you decide to do so, do not look up at him and say "no homo!"

3. It is perfectly acceptable to refer to the pontiff as "Il Papa." Do not, however, point to him and shout "The Ill Papa in the House!"

4. He's German. Don't mention the war!
(Rule no longer applicable since the resignation of Benedict I)

5.  Do not try to ingratiate yourself with His Holiness by telling him "the one about the Jew, the Muslim and the Protestant."

6. Do not nail anything to his hotel room door. (Looking at you, Lutherans!)

7. It is perfectly acceptable to offer the Pope a cocktail. However, should he decline, do not suggest that he "stop being a pussy."

8. It is a grievous breach of etiquette to ask the Pope, or indeed any member of the clergy, if he has been "gettin' any."

9. The Pope speaks fluent Spanish. However, do not attempt to deport him.

10. NO JEANS! You are a member of Congress greeting a foreign dignitary. not some college kid at Bonaroo. Jeezus!






 Full disclosure: The Missus and I did wear jeans when we were granted an audience with His Holiness Francis I, but we are just a couple of humble pilgrims, not representatives of the United States Govenrment, so I think it was probably okay.

Odd choice

Not sure who Alexander Wang is, but this is from his latest "Do Something" ad campaign:






Do something? And your model is Kim Kardashian? The woman who has made a lucrative career out of doing nothing?
Seriously, what has she ever done? She lets cameras follow her around while she flits about her mansion prattling about nothing.

The other folks in this campaign make sense:


 

 Taraji P. Henson: Award-winning actress.

 "The Weekend": I had to Google him, but apparently a successful musician.

Jhene Aiko: I had to Google her, but apparently she's a successful singer and songwriter.

Kanye West: Enormous bag of douche, but very talented and successful rapper.

Maybe Kanye insisted they include Kim?  He does seem to have a lot invested in keeping up the illusion that she has some sort of talent or ability or is in some way not a waste of space.

Flashback Friday - Slick Rick & Doug E. Fresh

Who said the worst thing?

Jeb! Bush -

"As it relates to my brother, there's one thing I know for sure: He kept us safe," Bush said.

Goddammit I am sick of this particular line of bullshit that Dubya's apologists have been spewing out for years. He kept us safe? Oh, except for that one day in September, it was around the 10th or 12th or, oh who remembers? I don't know how this can possibly not be so obvious as to go without saying, but YOU DON'T GET A MULLIGAN FOR 9/11!!!!

It's like saying "I've been a model husband, you know, other than that affair I had." or "I am completely drug-free, except for cocaine." The worst terror attack in our nation's history happened on your brother's watch, while he was asleep at the switch. You don't get to claim that he "kept us safe."

Oh, and also the anthrax letters. That was on his watch, too. And his administration's criminally negligent response to Hurricane Katrina. Oh, and also the 4,000 or so Americans who lost their lives invading the wrong country, they weren't kept all that safe by your idiot brother.

And he even makes it worse by adding:

He kept us safe," Bush said. "I don't know if you remember, Donald -- you remember the rubble? You remember the firefighter with his arms around him?

YES! We all remember the rubble! And we all remember who was President at the time of the rubble. We all remember who ignored the warnings and then thought it was more important to continue reading "My Pet Goat" than to call up NORAD and try to do something, anything, to minimize this disaster.

Kept us safe? Fuck you!


Mike Huckabee -

“I think we ought to get rid of all the taxes on people who produce. Why should we penalize productivity? And it’s why I’m an unabashed supporter of the Fair Tax

Um, you do know that "people who produce" would still have to pay the absurdly mis-nomered "Fair Tax," right? I mean, it's a national sales tax. "people who produce" also buy things. They wouldn't be exempt from buying things. They love buying things. They're gonna buy things. All the things.

They're going to buy all the things and then they'll be charged the tax.


Carly Fiorina -

"...As regards Planned Parenthood, anyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, it's heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.

That's just a huge bald-faced lie. There is no such video. I almost didn't even think it was worth doing any checking, as absurd as this claim is, but I figured what the heck, and Googled it. It is, as I thought, a fucking lie. (politifact)



Rand Paul -

This actually started out somewhat encouragingly, as Paul argued against sending American troops into battle in the Middle East. But then. . . well, it's Rand Paul, so . . .

"There will always be a Bush or Clinton for you if you want to go back to war in Iraq. But the thing is the first war was a mistake, and I’m not sending our sons and our daughters back to Iraq. The war didn’t work."

O my God! Someone on that fucking stage actually has some tenuous grasp on reality? Who knew? 

But then. . .

Paul argued that America should "amplify" those who live there to fight for their freedom by, for example, providing arms to the Kurds and using air power.
However, Paul said, "the boots on the ground need to be the people who live there."

"Why are we always the world's patsies where we have to go over there and fight their wars for them? They need to fight their wars, but we need to defend America's interests, and it's not in America's national security interest to have another war in Iraq."

Really? Is that really what you think happens? Like the Iraqi people called us up and said "hey, we can't exactly invade ourselves, would you mind bombing the fuck out of us, killing untold thousands of our people and leaving a huge power vacuum in the least stable region of the world? Thanks. Oh, and if you could maybe decimate our infrastructure too, that'd be super!" 

You think we're fighting "their" wars for "them?"  They didn't want these wars. Iraq, Afghanistan, they weren't exactly itching to be invaded by a foreign superpower. You seriously think we're doing these people a favor when we send our soldiers in to kill tons of people?  My God, if Rand Paul ever offers to do you a favor, run!

Lindsey Graham -

Graham took shots at President Obama’s foreign policy, asking “how do you sleep at night” 

Well, it's a lot easier to sleep when you're not crammed into that tiny closet.

 

But the award for the most ridiculous thing said about last night's debate goes to formerly respected (somewhat) "news" magazine TIME:

It was vintage Lindsey Graham: pragmatic and level-headed, refusing to pander, wisecracking his way to the next political fight.

Pragmatic? Level-Headed? Since when are those attributes ever been attributed to Graham? The Chicken Little of the Senate? Graham wants to bomb everyone he doesn't want to invade, because he's so sure that if we leave any of "those people" alive, they will terrorist our entire country to death with nuclear bombs and chemical weapons that they somehow got from, oh. . .I don't know. . . Obama?  
Lindsey Graham spends more time clutching his pearls than an oyster. And when has he ever been reluctant to pander? 
 

When did we go this far off the rails?

How long was I offline?
Did we really turn into a theocratic police state while I was gone?


Because it seems like America might be really becoming a tough place to be a non-Christian.

liberalsarecool satanic-capitalist

So they wanted to arrest a kid for making a bomb. Then they figured out that it was not a bomb at all, so they arrested him for having something they thought might be a bomb? Something they only thought was a bomb because they looked at a Muslim kid and thought "bomber!" This kid literally got arrested by actual police officers because of the way he looks, his last name, and/or his religion.  In America. In 2015.

Holy shit!

Court forces non-religious mom to get therapy from Bible-thumping counselor or lose custody of sons

According to KRQE Channel 13, Holly Salzman sought court aid in coparenting her 11-year-old sons with their father, from whom she is divorced. The judge ordered a set of 10 sessions with counselor Mary Pepper.

Salzman says that she assumed Pepper would be a regular couples and family counseling therapist, but “I walked into the session and the very first thing she said to me was, ‘I start my sessions by praying,’” Salzman said. “When I expressed my concerns that I didn’t pray she said, ‘well this is what I do’ and she proceeded to say a prayer out loud.”

“We went back to court. I expressed concerns again about the religious overtones and they stated they hadn’t heard any problems concerning Mary Pepper with religion,” Salzman told Channel 13.
She was, she says, so “offended and disgusted” that she stopped attending the courses altogether, at which point the court intervened and took away her sons.

In order to regain custody of the boys, Salzman would have to complete the sessions. Channel 13 and Salzman worked together to covertly record three of the final sessions with Pepper.
“The meaning in my life is to know love and serve God,” Pepper told Salzman in one of the recorded meetings. “If you want to explore how God was in your past, how God was in your life and not in your life… I know you don’t believe in God which is fine but I now at some points he was in your life in some way.”
Pepper frequently handed Salzman religious tracts and gave Salzman a “homework” assignment, to write an essay titled “Who is God to me?”
“Every session there was some sort of religion that was intertwined with the sessions,” said Salzman.
When Channel 13 spoke to Pepper about blending religion with court-ordered sessions, she said, “I’m a private business that people decide to come through or not. The particular person there was interested in analyzing her belief system.”
ACLU executive director Peter Simonson said, “No one should be put in a position where they are forced to accept training or therapy that violates their own religious beliefs and morals.”
.

And when government agents actually decide not to participate in theocracy, it hets maybe even worse:

Oath Keepers armed group offers to protect Kim Davis from arrest 

An armed group called the Oath Keepers has vowed to defend Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis from arrest by U.S. Marshals if she keeps defying a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses in accordance with the Supreme Court’s June ruling legalizing same-sex marriages nationwide.

One of the organizers on the ground for the Oath Keepers’ short-lived Kim Davis mission was Denny Peyman, a former sheriff of Jackson County, Kentucky, and member of the “constitutional sheriffs” movement, which believes that county sheriffs are the nation’s highest law enforcement officers and therefore have the power to unilaterally arrest federal officials.

In an interview with the far-right radio program Liberty Roundtable last Wednesday, the day the Oath Keepers publicly announced their Davis mission, Peyman said that if he had been sheriff when Davis was found in contempt of court for defying court orders to issue marriage licenses, he would have blocked U.S. Marshals from arresting Davis and would have instead personally arrested the judge who found her in contempt.

 There are people out there who think that they have the right to arrest government officials for doing their actual jobs. And those people are heavily armed. And think they have God on their side.