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Via.

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I’m sure I’m not the only one whose eye this cub has caught…

But the question is…

Is this the same guy, or merely separated at birth?

And what the hell is he doing in this commercial? Has he moved on from puppets something a little warmer and fuzzier?

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Maybe I was indoctrinated from an early age!

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These still make me laugh.

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In light of the recent Hobby Lobby ruling, I think this excerpt from Robert Boston’s book Taking Liberties: Why Religious Freedom Doesn’t Give You the Right to Tell Other People What to Do bears repeating:

Certain words should not be tossed around lightly. Persecution is one of those words.

Religious Right leaders and their followers often claim that they are being persecuted in the United States. They should watch their words carefully. Their claims are offensive; they don’t know the first thing about persecution.

One doesn’t have to look far to find examples of real religious persecution in the world. In some countries, people can be imprisoned, beaten, or even killed because of what they believe. Certain religious groups are illegal and denied the right to meet. This is real persecution. By contrast, being offended because a clerk in a discount store said “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” pales. Only the most confused mind would equate the two.

Far from being persecuted, houses of worship and the religious denominations that sponsor them enjoy great liberty in America. Their activities are subjected to very little government regulation. They are often exempt from laws that other groups must follow. The government bends over backward to avoid interfering in the internal matters of religious groups and does so only in the most extreme cases.

What the Religious Right labels “persecution” is something else entirely: it is the natural pushback that occurs when any one sectarian group goes too far in trying to control the lives of others. Americans are more than happy to allow religious organizations to tend to their own matters and make their own decisions about internal governance. When those religious groups overstep their bounds and demand that people who don’t even subscribe to their beliefs follow their rigid theology, that is another matter entirely.

Before I delve into this a little more, it would be helpful to step back and take a look at the state of religious liberty in the United States today. Far from being persecuted, I would assert that religion’s position is one of extreme privilege.

Consider the following points:

• Religious groups enjoy complete tax exemption, a very powerful and sought-after benefit.
• Unlike secular nonprofit groups, houses of worship are not required to apply for tax-exempt status. They receive it by mere dint of their existence. Houses of worship are assumed to be tax exempt as soon as they form. This exemption is rarely examined again and is revoked only in cases of extreme fraud (such as someone claiming that the entity he or she has formed is a church when it’s really a for-profit business).
• Houses of worship are free from the mandatory reporting obligations that are imposed on secular nonprofit groups. For example, secular groups that are tax-exempt must fill out a detailed financial form and submit it to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) every year. This document, called a  Form 990, must be made available for public inspection. Houses of worship and ministries are not required to fill out and submit these forms.
• Religious entities are not required to report their wealth to any government agency. The question often comes up about how much money houses of worship raise every year or what the value of the land they hold is. There is no way of knowing this because they are not required to tell anyone.
• The IRS has the power to audit individuals and secular groups at the merest suspicion of wrongdoing or financial irregularities. Houses of worship, by contrast, are very difficult for the IRS to audit. This is so because Congress passed a special law governing church audits that requires the IRS to show heightened scrutiny before initiating such procedures. In addition, church audits must be approved by highly placed IRS officials.
• Religious groups enjoy a loud and robust public voice. They own television and radio stations all over the country (all tax exempt, by the way). They own publishing arms, and they maintain various outreach sites on the Internet. The ability of religious groups to proselytize and spread their theology is limited only by the imaginations of their leaders.
• Across the country, religious groups own a network of hospitals, secondary schools, colleges, social-service agencies, and other entities that often enjoy a cozy relationship with the government. Many of these institutions are subsidized directly with tax funds—even though they may promote religion. In recent years, religious groups that sponsor charitable services have seen themselves open to a host of new taxpayer assistance through the so-called faith-based initiative.
• Religious groups are often exempt from laws that secular organizations must follow. A house of worship or a ministry can fire employees at will if those workers violate (or are merely suspected or accused of violating) some tenet of the faith. A religious school, for example, could fire a woman who becomes pregnant out of wedlock. A corporation or a secular nonprofit would not be able to do this.
• In many cases, religious groups are freed from following even basic laws designed to promote health, safety, and general welfare. Houses of worship are routinely exempted from laws designed to improve access to facilities for those with disabilities, for example. In some states, daycare centers and other facilities sponsored by religious groups are wholly exempt from routine inspection laws.
• Many religious groups engage in extensive lobbying on Capitol Hill and in the state capitals. Under federal law, there is virtually no regulation of their lobbying activities. Federal law exempts from oversight “a church, its integrated auxiliary, or a convention or association of churches that is exempt from filing a Federal income tax return.” This means that, unlike other groups, religious organizations are not required to report the money they spend attempting to influence legislation or to register their lobbyists. In rare cases, some states have tried to impose minimal regulations, such as public financial-disclosure reports, on houses of worship. The religious groups often fight such laws and call them an infringement of their religious-liberty rights.
• Many legislators are quick to placate religious groups and the clergy. The results of their lobbying campaigns are often successful. In the 1990s, when some religious groups began to complain about experiencing difficulties with zoning issues and the ability to build houses of worship where they pleased, Congress was quick to pass a special law called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. This law essentially trumps local zoning regulations with a federal fiat—even though, for many years, zoning had been considered a matter best handled by local officials.
• Religious groups are often treated with special deference in cases of suspected law breaking. Anyone who doubts this need not look beyond the experience of the Roman Catholic Church during the pedophilia scandal. A secular corporation that engaged in such a massive cover-up and acts of deception would have found its top leaders behind bars. Yet in that scandal, only a handful of relatively low-level clergy were held accountable.

I have created this list not necessarily to criticize or call for changing these policies (although some of them are overdue for scrutiny) but to make the point that the leaders of religious organizations have very little reason to complain. Their position is an exalted one. They are well regarded by lawmakers, and their institutions are not only tax supported in some cases but are also beyond the reach of secular law. What they are experiencing is not persecution; it is preferential status.

Source

 

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Because why not?

From Sunshine.

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You know things are getting bad when one of the 0.01 Percent sounds a warning call to his fellow plutocrats:

Here’s what I say to you: You’re living in a dream world. What everyone wants to believe is that when things reach a tipping point and go from being merely crappy for the masses to dangerous and socially destabilizing, that we’re somehow going to know about that shift ahead of time. Any student of history knows that’s not the way it happens. Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand. That’s the way it always happens. If inequality keeps rising as it has been, eventually it will happen. We will not be able to predict when, and it will be terrible—for everybody. But especially for us.

Read the entire article here.

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Imagine if you will January 1977, the beginning of the second semester of my first year at college. I’d just come out and after that announcement freaked my dorm mate out to such an extent he felt he had to move out, I had the room to myself.

One morning I decided it was time to explore this whole new world, so I stopped at a bookstore (no, not that kind of bookstore) just west of campus and bought my first Playgirl. SO risqué, right? Well, being the young horny guy I was, just thumbing through the pages got me so riled up I couldn’t even make it back to my dorm room before I had to rub one out.

I stopped at the College of Architecture building and scurried upstairs to one of the lesser-used restrooms, thinking this would afford me a bit of privacy.

Wouldn’t you know, about halfway through my stroking, some other guy came in and took up residence in the stall immediately adjacent to mine. (Even when I learned much later about the “hot” spots on campus, this was not one of them, so I doubt he was in there for any reason other than to relieve himself.)

Anyway, almost as soon as my neighbor had dropped is jeans to the floor and sat down, the magazine went flying out of my hands and landed, fully open, right under the divider between us. I immediately scooped it up, pulled up my pants and left so quickly I’m sure I created a vacuum in my wake.

This was the object of my attention. Funny how one’s tastes change over the years…

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Even the horses are admiring dat cowboy ass.

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…if the opportunity presented itself.

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…to never get in a car with a strange man.

But you don’t seem too strange.

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From Salon.com:

Neither the film world nor the political world paid much attention to R. J. Cutler’s Showtime documentary “The World According to Dick Cheney,” released in the dim and distant days of March 2013, when we thought Cheney had departed public life for good. I suppose the general reaction was “Oh Jesus Christ, not that guy again!” Even the tone of Cutler’s film, built around 20 hours of interviews with the most “consequential” vice president in American history – Cheney’s word, but he’s probably right – was faintly elegiac. This guy changed the world, whatever you think of him, and it was time to capture his portrait before he sailed for the other shore.

Leaving aside the question of whether Dick Cheney can ever experience physical death – doesn’t the power of the One Ring more or less make you immortal? – he’s back. This week Cheney was in the news at the head of an army of neocon zombies, seemingly reanimated from the foreign-policy tomb of the Bush II administration, leading the ideological charge for yet more war in Iraq. Or rather, since even Dick Cheney cannot possibly believe that is likely, for the principle that all blame for the actual or impending Iraqi disaster should be assigned to the cut-and-run pussies of the current administration, and none at all to the one that lied its way into the whole catastrophic misadventure in the first place.

Watching the embarrassing video clip of Cheney, in his Wyoming rancher drag, as he and failed-candidate daughter Liz Cheney announce their hawkish new anti-Obama foreign-policy nonprofit, brought me back to a key moment in Cutler’s film. It’s really just a biographical footnote, midway through Cheney’s extraordinary rise from alcoholic semi-employment in Rock Springs, Wyoming, at age 23 to being Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff at age 34, but it speaks volumes. As unlikely as this sounds, Cheney spent 1968, that watershed year in American political and cultural history, as a graduate student in political science at the University of Wisconsin, one of the most radicalized campuses in the country.

There was apparently a small group of conservative poli-sci types in Madison at that time, and I bet that wasn’t fun. Protests and demonstrations against American foreign policy and the Vietnam War were almost a weekly occurrence at Wisconsin during Cheney’s brief stint there. There was a student general strike in the fall of 1967, and another one in the spring of 1969. May of 1968 saw the first of two campus bombings that were presumably the work of the Weather Underground. This fervid atmosphere of chaos and dissent was unfamiliar and distressing to a crew-cut Young Republican from the Mountain West, and Cheney quietly says that the whole experience pushed him further to the right. It’s as close as he ever comes to a moment of self-revelation in “The World According to Dick Cheney,” unless you count his obvious man-crush on Donald Rumsfeld, his friend, mentor and ideological soulmate.

I think that’s important for several reasons. First of all, Cheney has seen the other side of American political life up close, and he hated it. More important still, like the other architects of the Bush administration’s disastrous foreign policy, he was trying to make up for what he saw as the sins of the past. Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and Bill Kristol and the rest of those shameless clowns who were so profoundly wrong about the initial Iraq war (and everything else) are understandably eager to rewrite history such that they are its heroes and its misunderstood prophets. But the history that oppresses those guys, and the entire imperialist intelligentsia they represent, goes back a lot further than Saddam Hussein and 9/11. They’re still haunted by a different specter: the American empire’s Waterloo moment in Vietnam, more than 40 years ago, and the social discord it produced in places like Madison and Berkeley and Chicago and New York. For them, the entire Iraq conflict was almost a stand-in for the real thing, a delusional salve applied to an old psychic wound. Give them Marty McFly’s time-traveling DeLorean and they’d go whizzing right past Baghdad and head for Hanoi, circa 1969, with a thermonuclear device in tow.

I know exactly how irritating it is to be told that American politics keeps replaying the ideological wars of the 1960s, having been barraged with that rhetoric by veterans of the New Left for most of my life. It’s less and less accurate as time goes on, and the right’s persistent efforts to identify Barack Obama as a ’60s-style radical would be funny if they weren’t acutely painful. Whatever his flaws and merits, Obama was a small child during the 1960s, and one who largely grew up overseas. He genuinely was not molded by the politics of that era. But when it comes to the Bush-Cheney Iraq campaign, the entire enterprise was contaminated from the outset with post-Vietnam stress disorder. American conservatives of Cheney’s generation are caught in an evil and bloodthirsty variation on “Groundhog Day”: They’ll keep fighting and refighting Vietnam until they die, and it’s never going to turn out right.

Of course those who shaped policy and held the levers of power, like Cheney and Rumsfeld, deserve most of the blame for the recycled fiasco of Iraq, and for how it seems to be ending. But as Michael Moore has pointed out, we must also remember that a wide spectrum of so-called liberals and moderates contributed to war fever. As I see it, they too were infected with the same strain of PVSD, and embraced the Iraq war as a chance to repent for their un-American attitudes of yesteryear.

There were “liberal hawks” like Paul Berman or Christopher Hitchens, who had once been ferocious opponents of the Vietnam War. There were 29 Democratic senators, including onetime ’60s activists Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. There were supposedly sober and disinterested journalists, like the editors of the New York Times, the New Republic, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, who eagerly abdicated their roles as watchdogs of democracy and swallowed the Bush administration’s lies.

What all those people shared, I believe, was the conscious or unconscious belief that a foreign war with a plausible-sounding excuse, and one that ended with a clean victory, would be good for America and might restore the sense of national unity and purpose we putatively lost in the ’60s. If it sounds insane to contemplate ordering the deaths of thousands of people as a form of national therapy, you’re beginning to understand the true costs of PVSD, as well as the infantile and solipsistic character of American patriotism. If we see that today in its most diseased form with the renewed warmongering of Cheney, Feith, Kristol et al., the responsible-grownup version is still with us as well, in the pro-imperal windbaggery of Niall Ferguson or in Robert Kagan’s recent New Republic essay arguing that America should reassert itself as the dominant global superpower, despite the obvious fact that we’re broke, politically paralyzed and lack the stomach for any further overseas debacles.

The Iraq war was specifically conceived as an antidote to Vietnam – as a brief, low-intensity, high-impact military victory that would make us feel better about ourselves. Ultimately it became a distorted replica or parody of Vietnam instead, a set of familiar mistakes in a new setting. It was shockingly expensive, grotesquely mismanaged and politically divisive, and its biggest success lay in unifying and empowering a nationalist opposition and turning the civilian population of the invaded country against us. There was widespread surprise that it didn’t work; Cheney, Rumsfeld and their allies have more or less continued to insist that it did work and we just haven’t noticed.

We can debate whether Cheney and his neocon brain trust really believed their own moronic-utopian domino theory about bombing the entire Arab-Muslim world into a set of pseudo-democratic American satellite nations “floating on a sea of oil” (in Paul Wolfowitz’s phrase). I guess somebody must have believed it, but I see that as pure ideological superstructure out of the Leo Strauss playbook, or in plain English as hokum designed to draw the suckers into the tent. That prospect was about as realistic as all the virgins in Paradise that are promised to jihadist suicide bombers, or the Soviet leadership’s pronouncements that one day pure communism would conquer the earth and the state would wither away.

If we don’t quite know how the Iraq endgame will play out, it’s not pretty. The prospect of helicopters lifting embassy personnel off the roof, Saigon-style, does not seem terribly far away. Last week Obama announced that he would order military advisers into the country to pep up the Iraqi army, which seems to be collapsing before the Sunni insurgency. At least that’s an intriguing departure from the script: It’s like the beginning and the end of the Vietnam War at the same time! Obama must feel as if his presidency has been cursed by a malicious wizard; the principal foreign-policy pledge that got him elected, and that he more or less fulfilled, is unraveling as if by magic.

We know who the dark wizard is who cast that spell, but it’s the rest of us who granted him his power. Dick Cheney yearns to fight the Iraq war over again – or fight another and another in Iran or Syria or somewhere else – in the vain hope that things will turn out differently, America’s virility will be restored and his legacy redeemed. That’s not going to happen; rancher togs or not, the Cheney of 2014 is an old and broken man with a fading constituency. But that’s small comfort to the rest of us, not to mention the people of Iraq. He destroyed their nation, bankrupted ours and did his damnedest to transmit the toxic effects of Vietnam to a new generation. One day we’ll be free of that past, presumably, but that day has not come.

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Dan Gill. Woof.

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“No elite voice in this country seems capable of coming to terms with the fact that the Iraq war was “lost” the moment it was launched. It was lost because it was based on lies and deception.” ~ Iraq and the Neocons: The Sequel | Joseph A. Palermo

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“So while the NRA may be a bloated, possibly corrupt, excessively powerful lobbying force, partly staffed by horrible racists, it’s also the mouthpiece of a fandom more widespread than Bronies, Trekkies, and Furries combined and multiplied by a hundred. Gun ownership is almost inarguably the single most popular hobby in America, and the NRA is a consequence of that.

Even popular gun-control efforts that failed, like the 2013 bill, would have been nothing more than tiny, symbolic changes, such as making background checks more ubiquitous, or eliminating high-capacity magazines. Elliot Rodger passed his background check and didn’t use high-capacity magazines. The presence of the NRA makes real reform so far-fetched, nothing has even been proposed, let alone voted on, that will get us anywhere close to Richard Martinez’s “Not One More” promised land.

And meanwhile, there’s shooting after shooting. When these things happened, the president used to fly out to the grieving town and give a speech. Now we don’t even fly our flags at half mast. They’ve become an ongoing problem we can’t take the time out of our day to be individually upset about, like Adam Sandler movies.
Matching shooters gun-for-gun isn’t a solution anyone takes seriously, not even the NRA. The real answer is that we, the American people, see that there are school shootings, and we all agree that they’re tragic, but then we’ve done the David Foster Wallace thought experiment in our heads: Gun control would mean an America with fewer school shootings, but we would lose some of our gun freedom.

And apparently we don’t want to live in a place like that.”

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And to think there are people in this country who want to cut NASA’s funding.

If it were up to me, I’d increase it a hundred-fold.

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…combined into one image that are forever burned in my memory that sent my 19 year-old imagination to overdrive and launched me on a spiritual journey that lasted for the next 30 years.

 

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“Republicans, almost entirely steeped in hatred and bigotry and brainwashed by Hate Talk Radio, no longer have that sense of responsibility for a fellow countryman—or for anything else that benefits America or Americans. Nothing gets beyond the hatred and white rage. And there are no lies too outrageous for them to perpetrate in the service of their goals. The Republican Party has turned itself into a party of sedition and madness.” ~ Down With Tyranny

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