So, this happened.
Because of wow.
Skeet Truthers Are Dumber than 9/11 Truthers and Birthers Combined
So, apparently the same folks who have been clamoring to see President Obama’s birth certificate — I’m assuming it’s the same people, and even if it’s not the same people, they’re all assholes — now think that President Obama is lying about skeet shooting.
And WaPo’s “Fact Checker” (yes, those are sarcastic quotes) Glenn Kessler was more than happy to provide more ammunition for these crazies.
Get it? Ammunition?
These jokes are happening in real-time, people.
[read full post at ABLC]Skeet Truthers Are Dumber than 9/11 Truthers and Birthers CombinedPost + Comments (117)
Really, There is No War on Women
This shocked even me:
A Republican lawmaker in New Mexico introduced a bill on Wednesday that would legally require victims of rape to carry their pregnancies to term in order to use the fetus as evidence for a sexual assault trial.
House Bill 206, introduced by state Rep. Cathrynn Brown (R), would charge a rape victim who ended her pregnancy with a third-degree felony for “tampering with evidence.”
“Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime,” the bill says.
Third-degree felonies in New Mexico carry a sentence of up to three years in prison.
So the fetus fetishists have gone from tepidly accepting a rape exception for abortion to debating whether rapes are legitimate or not to now deciding to jail rape victims who have abortions.
Open Thread: Zeitgeist 2012
(h/t commentor PsiFighter37)
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And on a less elevated tone, Professor Krugman’s diagnosis of the DC zeitgeist and the “GOP’s Existential Crisis“:
We are not having a debt crisis….
No, what we’re having is a political crisis, born of the fact that one of our two great political parties has reached the end of a 30-year road. The modern Republican Party’s grand, radical agenda lies in ruins — but the party doesn’t know how to deal with that failure, and it retains enough power to do immense damage as it strikes out in frustration…
Since the 1970s, the Republican Party has fallen increasingly under the influence of radical ideologues, whose goal is nothing less than the elimination of the welfare state — that is, the whole legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. From the beginning, however, these ideologues have had a big problem: The programs they want to kill are very popular. Americans may nod their heads when you attack big government in the abstract, but they strongly support Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid. So what’s a radical to do?…
[L]ook at where we are now in terms of the welfare state: far from killing it, Republicans now have to watch as Mr. Obama implements the biggest expansion of social insurance since the creation of Medicare.So Republicans have suffered more than an election defeat, they’ve seen the collapse of a decades-long project. And with their grandiose goals now out of reach, they literally have no idea what they want — hence their inability to make specific demands….
Glenn Beck Pees on an Obama Doll in a Jar and Tries to Sell It
Drip, drip, drip.
Just when you thought blackboard and caliphate conspiracy enthusiast Glenn Beck couldn’t get any weirder, he goes and pisses in a jar, sticks an Obama toy doll in there, and calls it art.
Raving freakazoid nut sandwich (and right wing hater extraordinaire) Glenn Beck has come up with another stunt to try to get his name back in the media, and it’s working, of course: How Can You Buy “Obama in Pee Pee” and Glenn’s Other Works of Art?
It’s supposed to be a lame parody of Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” — without the art or the creativity. This is how far the loony right has devolved, and it’s a pretty nasty sight.
I just.
I cannot.
[via Little Green Footballs]
[cross-posted at ABLC]Glenn Beck Pees on an Obama Doll in a Jar and Tries to Sell ItPost + Comments (109)
Cyber Monday ‘Artists Among Us’
cdmarine – caged pearl bracelet
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muddy102 – Kerameikion Wave
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To repeat what I said on Friday: There are any number of gifted artists and crafters among the Balloon Juice readership. If you are one of them, this is the place to add a comment linking to your jewelry, paintings, needlearts, ceramics, sculpture, photography, music, cooking, house-building, graphic novel/comix, or ebooks website or contacts.
If your highest art form is shopping, here’s your chance to browse for gifts without having to put your shoes on… and you can buy stuff for other people, too!
Thanks to all the artists who sent pictures — now we find out how many FYWP will let me use in a single post…
Rhinestone Coyotes (& Other Urban Wildlife)
Silly click-bait title, but I did enjoy the contents of this AtlanticCities article:
In the 12 years that Stan Gehrt has been tracking a population of coyotes on the Northwest side of Chicago, living not far from O’Hare International Airport, he has watched them adapt to the city in some pretty stunning ways. For one thing, they understand traffic patterns – in fact, better than some people do.
As best as Gehrt and other researchers can tell, these coyotes have learned what cars are and can understand which direction traffic flows. Coyotes crossing a one-way street know that they need to look in only one direction. They’ve even embraced medians. Coyotes crossing large roads in the city are prone to dash across one direction of traffic and sit waiting on the island in the middle for the other lanes to clear.
“We have one animal living in downtown Chicago, and we’ve watched her cross intersections,” says Gehrt, an associate professor of environment and natural resources at Ohio State University. “She’ll sit on the corner and literally wait until the cars are all stopped at the red light. She’ll wait until she’s sure that vehicles aren’t going, and once everyone stops, then she darts across the road. She’s been able to live in that downtown area now for three years without getting hit by a car.”…
Coyotes occupy a kind of carnivore niche, Gehrt says: They’re the biggest predators we have living in our cities so far, but they also sit at the bottom end of a much more imposing range of meat-eaters. “Now coming behind coyotes,” he says, “we have in North America mountain lions, bears, and wolves.”
Try to picture an urban future where truly everyone wants into the city: aging baby boomers, exurbanites, Millennials, wolves….
Of course, Gehrt shoots down that particular fantasy pretty quickly:
… Bears adapt pretty easily to human food out of your trash can. But wolves and mountain lions, Gehrt says, will face one challenge that coyotes haven’t. Their diet requires a lot of straight-up meat, of the kind that may be harder to find in, say, downtown Chicago…
Barring some further extreme disruption, I think we can accept the fact that coyotes have carved themselves a niche in quite a few American cities, just like racoons (or foxes in British cities). We have established coyote populations here in the Boston area, which is about as far from the “traditional” coyote habitat/range as you can get in North America.
Part of it is that we’ve given “God’s dog” the chance to expand out of the Southwest by eliminating wolves across so much of the continent. But my personal suspicion is that the recent urbanization of the coyote has a lot to do with the fact that Americans have decided, over just the past couple of decades, that free-roaming dogs — whether ‘owned’ or semi-feral “strays” — are not an acceptable part of modern city life. Human packs have always attracted commensual species (that’s probably how dogs were “tamed” in the first place). Once unneutered dogs were no longer “allowed” to wander where they would and scavenge were they could, it opened up a niche that coyotes could exploit. I doubt bears can actually follow that path, although they’re well on the way to becoming a chronic suburban pest, because they’re too big to hide successfully; one incident where a human is killed, and the pressure to drop hunting/trapping restrictions swings irresistably.
Rhinestone Coyotes (& Other Urban Wildlife)Post + Comments (88)