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.

Kim Davis is a hypocrite, but that doesn't matter

This is another one of those arguments we need to stop having.


It doesn't matter how big a hypocrite Kim Davis is.

It doesn't matter that the Bible is much more explicit in its' condemnation of divorce than it is about gay marriage. It doesn't matter that Kim Davis is an admitted adulteress who would have been stoned to death in Bible times. It doesn't matter, because Kim Davis's hypocrisy - amusing though it may be - is not the issue.

Even if the Bible spelled out in exact words "county clerks shalt not issue licenses of marriage to two dudes, thus sayeth the Lord," that Bible passage would have no bearing on the laws of the United States of America or of the State of Kentucky or of Buttfart County or wherever she lives. No one's religion gets to determine whether they have to follow the law. Even if Kim Davis had been married only once instead of four times, and even if Kim Davis hadn't conceived at least one child out of wedlock, and even if Kim Davis hadn't had at least one extra-marital affair, even if she was not guilty of the slightest bit of hypocrisy, she's still wrong. Marriage equality is the law of the land and Kim Davis is in violation of the law. That is the only thing that matters.

Yes, it's humorous how the self-righteous hillbilly has violated so many of the religious precepts she claims to hold so dear, but it doesn't matter. There is no level of sincerity that allows her to deny other people their rights. Even if she followed every rule in the Bible to the letter, she doesn't get to inflict her Bible on the people of Assbutt County or wherever she lives. No one gets to do that. This is America, not ancient Israel.

Back from Asheville

The Missus and I just got back into town after a long weekend in Asheville, NC, which I'm just about ready to go ahead and name "best place in America." It was nice to be out of the loop for a while. It was especially nice to not be online on Sept. 11. I could really do without all the "Never Forget" bullshit and jingoistic flag-waiving that tends to pop up all over social media every anniversary of that awful day.

Anyway, here are a few of the best street musicians we saw in Asheville, a city known for its buskers.

First up, the Shifty Drifters featuring the amazing Spoon Lady, a percussionist not even J.K. Simmons could find fault with.





And here she is again with guitarist/singer/harmonica player Chris Rodrigues


This is singer/songwriter/guitarist/accordianist Rae Herring

And the most fun of all, a band called "Ain't Nothing Much" Featuring another spoons player





These are only a few of the fantastic musicians that can be seen and heard on the streets of Asheville any day or night. There are more here: https://www.facebook.com/ABuskersCollective 
Check 'em out.