Archive for March, 2010
BREAKING: Tim Pawlenty planning "major announcement" on Wednesday. Are you bored yet?
About as much chance of being elected president as Droopy Dog has
Tim Pawlenty took the microphone somewhere today, and told a crowd of less than a dozen that he’d be making a “major announcement on Wednesday”.
A small tow-headed boy, crayons and coloring book in hand, pushed passed his mothers’ skirt and wiggled through three or four elderly people to march right up to Pawlenty himself and tug on his boring blue Brooks Brothers jacket.
Pawlenty, unused to attention of any kind, didn’t know what to do for a good minute, before the little tyke yanked hard enough on his blazer to pull his gaze downward.
“Hey, ‘cuse me, but can I have your automograph thing? I got my crayons and my book here, see? Mamma said I gots to be polite, so I’m saying please now. Please?”
Pawlenty, touched, fumbled for a pen in his jacket, wholly unprepared to sign an autograph for anyone, let alone a small boy. No one, in all his many years on this Earth, has ever asked him to sign anything before — not counting the receipts for his daily deliveries of cottage cheese, mayonnaise, Wonder Bread, and cucumbers. The Piggly Wiggly delivery boy always jokingly asks for his “autograph” when he makes the Governor sign for his favorite edibles, but everyone, even Pawlenty, knows he’s only kidding around.
So, Pawlenty smiled enormously big as he scribbled his name in the margins of the coloring book, careful not to cross the lines into the picture of happily dancing bears on their sunshine-soaked picnic.
Happily patting the tyke on the head, Pawlenty went back to his speech, to discover most of the people assembled had fallen asleep.
“What gives?,” the little kid asked, looking at the signature.
“Who’s T Plenty? This is a gyp! MOOOOOOOOOM! This isn’t Droopy Dog, it’s some man! I was tricked! I wanted Droopy Dog’s autograph, but it’s just some creepy boring guy with a weird sad face!”.
The announcement about making an announcement on Wednesday about his recent PAC endorsements pretty much went downhill from there.
Pawlenty 2012: So Boring and Unattractive You Think He’s Droopy Dog, But Really, Tell Your Children It’s Not To Avoid Disappointing Them When They Realize He Is Just Another Dull As Dirt Vichyssoise Republican
The campaign slogan of a PAC-endorsed winner!*
* PACS including:
- The Mayonnaise Producers’ Guild
- The Assemblage of Greater Midwestern Cucumber Growers
- The Mineral City Big Thinkers Society
- Boring People Helping Boring People Bore People
- The DNC
Whoo-hoo! Ricky Martin comes out, as "a fortunate homosexual man"
Congratulations to Ricky Martin for coming out today, and announcing he is “a fortunate homosexual man”.
Every club in Boystown is blaring La Vida Loca tonight, folks. Martin will now enjoy a career resurgence, especially if he starts shaking it up at Pride festivals and Market Days-type fests across the country this summer. He will be as embraced by the community, and as loved, as Neil Patrick Harris is. Good on him.
We’ve always really liked the guy — and it’s wonderful he’s stepped forward and admitted who he is.
Some of you out there don’t know how important this is, or how destructive the closet can be. The more famous people that come forward, especially men, and admit who they are the easier it is for young gays to be themselves, and to find acceptance in their families.
With entertainers, we believe coming out is 100% their call and we don’t agree with outing actors, singers, and others who make their living off their image, and do everything they can to craft an image to sell tickets, get the best ratings, and otherwise profit in the image-heavy, agent-managed, world of Hollywood.
Guys who are obvious closet cases, who have become jokes in the gay community, are people we, too, joke about. Tom Cruise and John Travolta, anyone? They are the Rock Hudson and Liberace of our time — so we’re not breaking any news there.
However, there are a few actors wh0 we know to be gay that we’ll never talk about, because they’re just becoming stars and we want these guys to succeed…so it’s their call when they want to come out. They’re really nice guys, too, one of which someone here has a brief connection with, so one day we hope they too come out — long before they become jokes like Tom and John.
With politicians, however, we firmly believe things are different — and Eric Massa proved that. Politicians who maintain a sham marriage, even with kids, and lead a double gay life on the side should be exposed for lying to their constituents. As Nancy Pelosi proved with Massa, everyone in the DNC and RNC knows who these guys are, know what they are up to, and know exactly what pressure to put on them to get them to do what the Party wants them to do.
Massa didn’t play Pelosi’s game, so she and Rahm Emanuel made sure all of his gay scandals came out, and he was forced to resign from Congress at a time when Pelosi needed to make an example of someone — so others out there with secrets could see that if they did not play along, they too would be destroyed.
Why give Nancy Pelosi that power? Why give Speaker Boehner that power when he takes Pelosi’s place next year?
Elected officials lie to their voters when they present a reality to them that is not true. If voters supported someone like Eric Massa because they believed he was a good family man, then we wonder how they would have voted if they had known about his gay frat house escapades.
Or, better question, if he had been out and open, would those frat house antics have taken place at all? Abuse of power like that happens when someone hiding a secret believes he’s getting away with whatever he wants — and people like Nancy Pelosi give them the impression they are untouchable.
It’s just a recipe for disaster, all those secrets.
It’s why we continue to push for Congressman Aaron Schock to just come out of the closet already too. We’ve personally seen him in gay bars here in Boystown. He seems like such a nice, smart, promising young man. We want him to come out and be himself before he ever ends up like an Eric Massa — getting up to who knows what in secret, while villains like Pelosi and others keep building files on him, which will be used to black mail and otherwise pressure him when the time arises.
Schock could be a Senator some day. Who knows, he could even be Vice President. And we think he can do that as an openly gay man in Illinois. The Left will not be able to hold any power over him, and will never be able to intimidate and bully him if he just comes out and tells the public who he really is.
We’d love all the gay Republicans in government to just come out — starting with Charlie Crist in Florida and running the gamut through Illinois’ Congressional delegation. Come out, be yourselves, take away the blackmailing abilities of Nancy Pelosi and others.
Ricky Martin did a great thing today. We wish more entertainers would do the same thing, but we respect their choices not to.
Politicians are different though, as there’s much more at stake with a closeted Congressman or Senator than there is with some singer from the 90s.
Eric Massa proved just how much leverage the wrong people have over the votes cast by closeted politicians — and we always wonder just how much arm-twisting has been successfully done by the likes of Pelosi, when the threat of doing what was done to Massa switched votes and made these men fall into line, when their constituents didn’t want them to and their districts suffered, all because these guys were scared of being outed.
Coming out switches the balance of power and only benefits all involved — while robbing the likes of Pelosi of one gruesome cudgel.
The Religion of Peace Strikes Again: Add Moscow to the "Peace-Loving World Tour"
Islam, the Religion of Peace, proved today, yet again, how peaceful it is…by peacefully murdering 40-some people in Moscow, while peacefully blowing up the subway there.
Michelle Malkin, as usual, has a great take on this.
Personally, we think all the attacks on air and train travel are just a distraction being run by Islam to throw authorities’ worldwide off the REAL attack that’s soon to come.
Our thinking is this: Muslims aren’t stupid. They know that whenever air or rail lines are attacked, the reactionary bureaucracies worldwide automatically shift all of their resources to reinforce air and rail security. This happened here in the US when the “Underpants Bomber” tried to take down the Copenhagen-Detroit flight on Christmas Day.
But, just like with Moscow today, not enough explosives were used, and not enough Muslims were involved in the attack, to completely destroy either the plane or the subway system. Islam sacrificed an operative on Christmas, we think, as a distraction. The same is true with the two female Muslims sacrificed in Moscow today. Why do so little damage, relatively, when they could have easily upped the ante and really done SEVERE damage?
Because the goal doesn’t appear to hit the West with air and train attacks.
The goal appears to get the West focused on air and train attacks, while Islam preps for a major attack on a different front.
We think they’re going to hit the power grid, the water supply of a major city like New York, or start targeting shopping malls, schools, or sporting events…places with a lot of people, where Americans feel safe, and which will not be on the radar with all the attention put on the transportation system.
It sure feels like a major attack is being plotted for 2010.
And with the current administration in Washington, and its proven incompetence, we feel Islam has been emboldened to plot something big, using every distraction possible to give that plot the best chance possible to succeed.
Hatemail of the Day: More AIDS wished on us for speaking out against Pope Benedict
So, for the last day or so, we’ve gotten an odd amount of hatemail from religious people that could very easily have been written by the crowd over at Daily Kos and DemocraticUnderground. All in that rambling, crazy, “Hope you get AIDS and die, faggots” style so familiar from Obama supporters.
Only, these are Catholics writing us with this garbage — all because we ran a piece the other day noting Maureen Dowd’s interesting idea for a nun to become the next Pope, after Benedict either dies or resigns in the future.
There are a few things we’d like to say about this.
First and foremost, 4/5 of us grew up Catholic, and there’s not a day that goes by that we don’t appreciate our time in Catholic school and everything nice the priests and nuns in our lives have ever done for us. We are very grateful for the good people we knew through Church, and for the times we spent in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York serving as altar boys, working church Bazaars, running Bingo shifts, and even waitering fundraising spaghetti and roast beef dinners.
We loved Pope John Paul the Great and most of us here had the chance to meet him several times when we were younger. We truly believe he was a living saint, because we’ve never met anyone else as kind and just plain GOOD as him. He was incredibly special, and he inspired so much greatness in many we knew. We also firmly believe, along with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the world owes JP the Great an immense debt of gratitude for defeating the Soviet Union and communism in Europe.
But, none of this means we have to automatically like Pope Benedict.
And, truthfully, we don’t like him. We don’t trust him. We don’t feel inspired by him. We don’t agree with the conclave of cardinals’ decision to follow JP the Great with a former member of the Hitler Youth. That has never set well with us. And it never, ever will.
We also don’t believe for a single moment Benedict, while still Cardinal Ratzinger, didn’t know about the young boys being abused by bad priests in Ireland, Wisconsin, and Germany. We’ve read reports of complaints filed with his office pertaining to abuse claims in those areas, and we’ve heard nonsensical denials of knowledge from Ratzinger’s old clerks, claiming the then-Cardinal didn’t read all of his memos and didn’t realize what was going on because he was too engrossed in medieval theological texts to pay much attention to the real world around him.
That’s just unacceptable.
It’s either willful ignorance, or gross incompetence.
Either way, this man should not be Pope.
The hatemail we’ve received on this topic is very much from people who do not like accepting the fact the Catholic Church has a massive, hideous problem with pederast priests.
It’s a very uncomfortable subject for us to deal with, because we loved all the priests and nuns who taught and mentored us growing up. We never had a single bad experience with anyone in the Catholic Church while we were young. We hate seeing — as noted many times on this site — people in the gay community dress up as lecherous popes, perverted priests, pregnant nuns, and the like…and we’ve gotten into arguments while confronting these people to tell him how disrespectful and hurtful their costumes are. We defend everything good about the Catholic Church to all who would attack it, because while we’re no longer practicing Catholics or religious people in any way, our cultural identity is Catholic and that will always be so.
BUT, you cannot close your eyes to the enormous problem that exists with these pedophiles running parishes. It does the Church no good.
It also does no one any good to have men at the highest levels of the Vatican who don’t seem to believe pederasts in the clergy are all that big of a deal. No matter how much you love reading scribblings from the 13th Century, if a memo comes across your desk regarding little boys asking for help and protection from priests abusing their positions, you need to leave your perch in the library and crack some skulls in the real world, Cardinal.
The Church should have tackled all of this head-on in the 80s when the sexual abuse cases first started making news. It was a critical error on the part of JP the Great not to raise absolute Hell on a global scale over those abuses — seizing the opportunity to purge every abusive priest from all parishes on the planet, as well as all Bishops, Cardinals, and Vatican officials who knew what was going on and did nothing about it.
The hatemail we’re getting keeps claiming Benedict has no culpability in all of this, because he was never fired by JP the Great…so the logic, what little there is, goes that since the last Pope didn’t have a problem with Benedict, and in fact made him his theologian, then the rest of us should have no problem with him either. SO, all of this should just be swept under the rug the way it always has been, and none of it should be dealt with. Ever. Say your rosary!
We could not disagree more.
This needs to be dealt with, once and for all. It will be incredibly painful for the Church. This is a public relations nightmare. It is a real trial of faith for a billion people, because they need to take a good hard long look at their Church and root out the true evil that’s taken hold in some of its parishes.
If Pope Benedict can not take charge and become the brutal reformer the Church needs right now, and he can’t step forward and purge the Church of the sick, deviant, criminal men who have been abusing children — and those who enabled them — then we need a new Pope who can do just that.
We have absolutely ZERO tolerance for pederasts. A good friend of ours was a cop back in Cleveland, and he worked the child sex crimes division. The stories he used to tell us literally made us cry, then kept us up late at night too revved up and angry to sleep, knowing what monsters lurked out in the world who preyed on the innocent and abused little boys.
So, we’re coming from a place where we know we could never in a million years ignore even the slightest HINT of a child being abused somewhere…not when we could do something about it. As private citizens, we’ve reported a few parents to social services when we noticed what we believed were signs of child abuse in neighborhood kids. Not sexual abuse, but signs of beatings, neglect, and children running wild at all hours of the night because their parents were too drunk or on drugs to mind them. So, it’s unfathomable for us to imagine being Cardinal Ratzinger, getting about 1000 memos a year, but being too busy in the scholarly archives to peek his head into reality for 15 minutes a day to read about 3 memos daily…especially ones pertaining to the abuse of little boys.
Writing us to tell us how terrible it is that we don’t auto-support this Pope, or how we are just gays attacking the Church, or how we “should get what’s coming to us and suffer AIDS” because we do not defend “the Holy Father”, just makes us see you the same way we see the Leftists who send us their own brand of hatemail for speaking out against Obama and the wicked things he’s doing to this country.
We love America.
We love the Catholic Church.
Both are currently led by men we do not agree with…men we feel deserve all the criticism we give them, because their actions are not keeping with what we expect of the offices they hold.
The Left will never bully us into keeping quiet about what we think of Obama, their Lightbringer.
Religious zealots will never berate or intimidate us into keeping quiet about the Church’s shameful failings regarding the abuse of children, and this current Pope’s flimsy excuse for never putting a stop to as much of this as he could, when he had the chance.
If you don’t like this simple truth, the person you really need to be mad at are the priests who committed these crimes, and those in the Vatican who protected them all these years. Don’t shoot the messenger…or shoot off nasty, AIDS-wishing hatemail because we’re gay, non-practicing Catholics who have always defended and supported the Church in every other way…just not in the area where innocents were harmed and their abusers were lovingly defended.
We will not be bullied by anyone.
If you love the Church, truly love it, then your ire is much better directed at those who enabled this recent sex scandal, not guys who merely comment on it…and long for the day when the Vatican shows the leadership we expect of it and roots out and purges all clergy involved in the abuse of children, once and for all.
We’d gladly say as many rosaries as it would take for that to happen. Just give us a number, and watch us go…then tell us what YOU are going to do to summon that glorious day.
Why did Brad Ellsworth choose the "Bear Pride" colors for his campaign website?
Brad Ellsworth is the Indiana Democrat who hopes to take Evan Bayh’s place in the Senate.
His campaign website is Ellsworth for Indiana, but instead of running with the traditional red, white, and blue motif, Ellsworth opted for a highly unusual combination of browns, tan, gold, cream, gray, and black.
Which happens to be the colors of the “Bear Pride” flag.
This is an instance of someone in the straight world not realizing something seemingly innocuous has a second, alternative meaning here in Boystown.
Just like Robby’s sister Ann-Louise, who used to put “watersports” on her resume under “Personal Interests” — never realizing “watersports” doesn’t conjure images of SCUBA, water skiing, or waverider racing in the LBGTQ community. Not in the least. Look it up on Bing if you’re curious, but let’s just say it’s something we can easily picture Rahm Emanuel doing to someone in the Congressional showers, either after yelling at him, or just old-fashioned coming on to him.
Ellsworth’s website is just so strange to use the “Bear Pride” colors, which are a dramatic departure from the branding of most political campaigns.
We remember John McCain’s original campaign site, during the primaries, was black and gold and very militaristic-looking. It was softened and rebranded in red, white, and blue for the general election, though.
Perhaps Ellsworth will rebrand as well.
Or, maybe he wants to tell the world he’s secretly a hunter, if not a bear himself. You can look those terms up on Bing too, if you like.
What wonderful things you learn from us here at HillBuzz.
Monday Open Thread: March 29th, 2010
What’s on your minds this Monday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
Putting Big Government First and Patients Last
Dear HillBuzz,
There’s been a lot of spin since ObamaCare passed. Below are some resources I have collected and created to help you counter the blarney. MOLE FOOD: Be the FIRST to claim the PRIZE Congressman Lewis has gotten a lot of sympathetic LameStreamMedia mileage out of his claim that anti-ObamaCare protesters in Washington last week-end yelled the N word and spit at him. When Andrew Breitbart challenged anyone to produce actual evidence, the Leftie media booed him for having not proved that it didn’t happen. Speaking of lame …. To date, the only “evidence” is a video showing someone yelling “Kill the bill!” at Lewis in a very “say it don’t spray it” way. So “spitty” but not “spitting” … if you get my meaning. But the Left isn’t interested in facts or reason, just agenda. Anyway, Andy has their number. He just upped his reward from ten grand to a hundred grand! LOL
MOLE FOOD: Final Votes on Major Social Legislation Nancy Pelosi has supposedly claimed that all important civil rights legislation has been highly partisan, which is just not true. I couldn’t find a source for the Nancy Pants quote, but I did find this very nifty graphic showing what a buncha hoo-ha the claim is.
ATTACHED: 2010_03 26 Seattle Times supports review of healthcare by courts One of the ways the majority who opposed ObamaCare is pushing back is by challenging the constitutionality of the requirement to purchase health insurance. Interestingly, the Seattle Times, which supported Obama and says, “We still like him,” published an editorial supporting the legal challenges.
MOLE FOOD: What could possibly go wrong – March 2010 Let me count the ways …
ATTACHED: 2010_03 21 Premiums likely to keep going up ObamaCare is going to INCREASE premiums for millions of families. This isn’t Republican propaganda. Associated Press, hardly a bastion of conservative thought, reported on March 17, “If cost controls work as advertised, annual increases would level off with time. But don’t look for a rollback.” This article includes a list of items Republicans proposed that actually would have worked to bring premiums down, but they also would have increased individual freedoms and decreased government control, so naturally the Democrats nixed them.
MOLE FOOD: ObamaCare is RAISING the cost of medical devices Obama promised no new taxes for ordinary Americans. ::snort:: ObamaCare is imposing an across-the-board tax on all medical devices that are not specifically exempted. So far, the only exemptions are for hearing aids, eyeglasses and contact lenses. Everything else that is legally classified as a “medical device” is going to cost everybody more. EVERYBODY. “Medical devices” covers the kind of specialty stuff that hospitals use, like heart monitors and catheter tubes, but it also refers to things like the test kits and syringes that diabetics use every day and even the absolutely ordinary, everyday stuff healthy folks use on a regular basis. Stuff like band-aids, tampons and condoms.
MOLE FOOD: It didn’t work in Massachusetts A national survey* of over 1,000 physicians suggests that as many as one-third of American physicians will quit as a direct result of the mandates in the ObamaCare bill. In one swell foop, the Leftists have increased the number of people who will expect free health care as a right, while decreasing the number of people qualified to provide that care. [That’s really gonna work. Not.]
Survey online: http://www.themedicusfirm.com/pages/medicus-media-survey-reveals-impact-health-reform
MOLE FOOD: Troop Buildup
ATTACHED: 2010_03 18 Dem health plan massive expansion to IRS power The good news is that there will be a whole lot of NEW JOBS created by ObamaCare. The bad news is that they’re all government jobs in the IRS. An important feature of ObamaCare is requiring every American* to purchase and maintain health insurance coverage that meets the federal minimum allowed and they’ve designated the IRS as the enforcer. *Illegal residents, the Amish, some Muslims and a variety of high ranking Democrat government officials are not included in this mandate, but so far as I can determine, these people are all still eligible for free health care. To cope with the new workload, the IRS may need to hire as many as 16,500 additional auditors, agents and other employees to investigate and collect fines of up to $2,250 or 2 percent of your income (whichever is greater) for failure to prove that you have purchased “acceptable” health care coverage. The IRS will have the authority to determine what “acceptable” means and confiscate your tax refund if they feel like it.
ATTACHED: 2010_03 19 159 new govt agencies won’t improve health care ObamaCare is also going to create a whole bunch of new bureaucratic boards to decide on what is considered “quality” health care. It’ll be a one-size-fits-some system where individuals and doctors will have no freedom to make choices about what is defined as “best” … and you know that with this level of centralization, the opportunities for corruption, bribery and graft will be nearly unlimited. Already, in exchange for support for ObamaCare, Big Pharma scored much greater government protection for their expensive name brand drugs from competition from generics and the health insurance industry scored a right to deny or refuse coverage to expensive sick people in exchange for paying a piddly fine to the government. Nancy Pelosi crowed that “no money changed hands” to get this bill passed. Maybe so … but only because Leftists never spend their own money on anything if they can get taxpayers to foot the bill. The most recent analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says the version of ObamaCare that has been passed into law will cost $69 billion MORE than the previous version that, as I recall, President Obama said was too expensive … or something. Even worse, it’s going to siphon even more money out of Medicare, make even further cuts to Medicare Advantage, and levy even higher taxes and fines on the American people.
Report at: http://weeklystandard.com/blogs/cbo-obamacare-would-cost-over-2-trillion The CBO also says that health insurance premiums would rise by 10 to 13 percent in the individual market and the percent of GDP spent on health care will increase from the current 17 percent to 21 percent in 2019, at which time they expect there will still be 23 million people in America lacking health insurance. [Aren’t you just feeling the love?]
The GOP has compiled a list of what ObamaCare is expected to cost: http://www.gop.gov/policy-news/10/03/19/health-care-takeover-by-the E.g., “$52 billion: The amount of new taxes on employers who cannot afford to pay their employees health care, imposed at a time when unemployment is 9.7 percent.” [That’s really gonna help create more jobs. Not.] In the midst of the Obamacare nightmare comes the chilling story of a Minnesota nurse who was known to be abusive and incompetent. Now it’s come out that he has also been actively encouraging depressed people to commit suicide on camera for his amusement.
Report at: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/03/this_nurse_no_angel_of_mercy.html
How did he remain employed in the healthcare field? Simple. The increasing power of Obama’s BFFs in the SEIU* has made it difficult to remove unfit persons from positions in the field. *SEIU leadership has had more access to the White House and the president himself than any other special interest on the planet.
Hugs,
Chrissy
