HorsesAss.Org

Open Thread 12/21

by — ,

– My abortion didn’t make me crazy.

– Your lie of the year, ladies and gents.

– I was as much in the bag for Hillary Clinton in 2008 as anyone you’re likely to find. But the people trying to draft her to run against Obama are awful.

– I’ve generally had good experiences with Seattle Police, but really, when I read a story like this, I can’t help think maybe we need to sack the lot of them and start from scratch.

– Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Internal Organs

– The public hype around Tim Tebow was enough to get me to root for the Patriots last week.

Comments

  1. 1

    To elaborate

    To those focusing on immigration enforcement, however, the inequity runs the other way. “They should not get any benefit from breaking the law, especially something as expensive as organ transplants or dialysis,” said Representative Dana T. Rohrabacher, Republican of California, who contends that care for illegal immigrants is bankrupting American health care and has sought to require that emergency rooms report stabilized patients for deportation unless they prove citizenship or legal residence.
    “If they’re dead, I don’t have an objection to their organs being used,” Mr. Rohrabacher added. “If they’re alive, they shouldn’t be here no matter what.”
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12.....wanted=all

    So illegals should be barred from any form of publicly funded medical treatment. That would cost the tax payers some money that should be spent on Americans (and millionaires and billionaires).
    But if the illegal dies, then the same republican is perfectly fine with the illegal’s valuable internal organs being harvested and used to save the lives of Americans (and millionaires and billionaires).

    Shorter: You can give to us your labor and even your internal organs, but we won’t give you anything in return.

    Even shorter: You are only here to serve us.

    This is the conservative world. Get used to it.
    Vile.

  2. 2

    @1 And I wouldn’t be so irritated with this fool, if he had the moral courage to say, not only did he not want to spend a dime on illegals, he wouldn’t take their organs and he wanted the illegals employees turned in too. But he didn’t say that.

  3. 3

    I’m struggling with the temptation to set up a revised living will stating that any and all of my body parts may be harvested after I’ve drawn my final breath, except for any use which might be of benefit to Representative Rohrabacher.

  4. 4

    What will you not be buying with the money the Republicans will be taking out of your paycheck on January 1st?

  6. 6

    DEMOCRATES IN HOUSE CALL REPUBLICAN BLUFF:

    “WASHINGTON — While House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) held a news conference Wednesday demanding that Democrats return from vacation to extend the payroll tax cut, House Democrats called his bluff, taking to the floor to demand a new vote on the plan that has already passed the Senate.

    With the House in session only for a “pro forma” moment, Reps. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) attempted to interrupt the Republican at the dais and seek unanimous consent to vote on the Senate’s two-month extension of the payroll tax cut.

    But after Van Hollen recited the Pledge of Allegiance, the chair, Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), brought down the gavel and walked out as Hoyer was trying to make his motion.

    “You are walking away just as so many Republicans have walked away from middle-class Americans,” Hoyer hollered.

    The pair then called a press conference to highlight their attempt to forestall the expiration of the 2 percent tax break, which ends Jan. 1.

    “I regret that the Republicans who say they’re here work — we were on the floor to do our work — and they walked out,” Hoyer told reporters….

    Democrats Call for Vote, House Speaker slams gavel and leaves

  7. 7

    With that slamming of the gavel, the Republicans just RAISED taxes on working poor and middle class Americans..

    Americans who haven’t seen their wages or standard of living get any better for over a generation.

    We all know which Americans have done spectacularly well over that time.

  8. 8

    A zero-sum game is one in which one person’s gains exactly equal net losses of the other participant(s). Conservatives will go to great lengths to dispute the fact that the economy is NOT a zero sum game.

    I would suspect that the %’s of the wage stagnation and loss in American society over the past 30+ years would be close to the ‘gains’ made by the uber rich.

    TILT!!! Game reset. By what right do we take one person’s wealth and redistribute it in a more equitable manner? I would refer you all to the Declaration of Independence and the fact that our right to do that is ‘self evident’.

  9. 9

    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

    Case closed.

  10. 10

    “...all men are created equal…”

    Sounds good so far!

    “the pursuit of Happiness”

    Note – it doesn’t say the guarantee of Happiness!

    “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…”

    So, government is supposed to protect our rights, including private property rights, the rights to govern your own bodies, and the right to be left alone by Government! Who knew?

    “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it”

    Absolutely goddam right!

  11. 11

    There’s waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare, alright, but not by government workers. Medicare is being looted by “businessmen” in the PRIVATE SECTOR.

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45.....nd_courts/

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: What are the chances a crooked Cuban-American “businessman” operating out of Florida votes for Democrats?

  13. 13

    @8

    Conservatives will go to great lengths to dispute the fact that the economy is NOT a zero sum game.

    Nah, you liburals just need to wake up and get with the program. It’s a zero sum game and we can either have what we worked hard to get or we can give it all away to the garlic eaters and the mellon pickers, which is what you liburals want to do. White Christian males built this country though hard work, why you liburals want to give that all away is beyond me.

  14. 14

    @8

    I would suspect that the %’s of the wage stagnation and loss in American society over the past 30+ years would be close to the ‘gains’ made by the uber rich.

    Totally.

    Don’t listen to The Dullard, he gets that way when he’s constipated.

  15. 15

    “businessmen”

    Doctors, lawyers (who spend their lives suing doctors), insurance companies and others.

    Don’t forget those guys selling diabetes stuff on TV – they get Medicare to pay for it all. John Stossel pointed out how the Scooter Store sells scooters to those who qualify for Medicare, and Medicare picks up the tab.

    Yes, any government program – Medicare, Social Security, the Dept. of Defense, the Dept. of Homeland (In)Security, etc.- people will all take whatever they can legally and illegally get from government.

  16. 16

    @7 Americans were denied the privilege of watching the hammer brought down upon their heads yesterday. Seems that shortly after Hoyer rose to speak, the CSPAN cameras in the House chamber were turned off on the order of the Speaker. It’ll be interested to see how Boehner’s actions end up being chronicled in the Congressional Record, in which members have always enjoyed the privilege of editing/deleting/embellishing/creating out of thin air the representation of what they actually may or may not have said.

  17. 17

    I think Ron Paul should adopt “Hey Mr. Space Man” as his campaign’s theme song. It would fit right in with most of the policies he’s proposing and he even looks a little like an alien.

  18. 18

    re 10: “Note – it doesn’t say the guarantee of Happiness!”

    It also doesn’t say that a small group of people can grab all of the marbles and state that the rest of us must be content with what’s left over.

    My pursuit of happiness entails making sure that I and my progeny have more access to capital.

    If muddying the waters with your bullshit hairsplitting pleases you, then by all means, go for it. But I’m not buying.

  21. 21

    Greetings, my most excellent Neo-Socialist comrades!

    Politically Incorrect at #10,

    Good for you! It’s a shame that most of the time we ignore the fact that the individual is responsible for his or her happiness and that government is the servant, not the master.

    Dorky Dorkman,

    I take it that you’re one of the people who feel government must control every aspect of our lives. Well, if you’re a younger person, you’ll grow out of it. If you are an older person, it is too bad you never realized that more government in not the answer to the pursuit of happiness. Wealth re-distribution by government is in total opposition to the Constitution. Wealth is fair game for re-distribution, but only by the mechanism of the free market and free people conducting their business in a free society.

  22. 22

    @21 I take it that you’re one of the people who feel government must control every aspect of our lives.
    That is a huge generality.

    Do you hate that government is picking which couples are allowed to get married?
    Or is it that you hate that the government is limiting access to birth control?
    Or is it that you hate that the government is limiting access to naturally growing plants?
    Or is it that you hate that the government is not allowing human cloning?
    Or is it that you hate that the government has rules for who gets to be foster parents, or that there are foster parents at all?
    Or is it that you hate that the government sets speed limits on roads?
    Or is it that you hate that the government has rules against ripping off elderly people?
    Or is it that you hate that the government has rules so you have actually pay people for work done?

    What aspects of life do you object to government intervention?
    Give some specifics.

  23. 23

    Probably wrong of me to look at this and think “yeah, that’s hot.”

    For First Time, Women Share ‘First Kiss’ At A Navy Homecoming
    “It’s a time-honored tradition at Navy homecomings — one lucky sailor is chosen to be first off the ship for the long-awaited kiss with a loved one. Today, for the first time [according to the Navy], the happily reunited couple was gay.”
    http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw.....#038;cc=fp

    Nice to see the Navy being grown up and moving on with life. Now if only some other folks could grow up as well (lefties that can’t get their minds out of the gutter Inc.).

  24. 24

    @Carl, re your 3rd link:

    Ostensible Democrats Pat “Crazy Eyes” Caddell and Doug “Stupid Motherfucker” Schoen are back with their insipid Vilify Obama Draft Hillary campaign.

    I got a robo-call from these cretins last night. Thanks for filling me in on who they are.

  25. 25

    Libertarians? Eh. Anarchists without balls. Anarchists? Eh. Mindless twits. I can’t say that I cotton to those losers any more than I do commies and fascists.

  27. 27

    Via Ross Hunter’s website and Andy Billig’s Face Book page:

    Washington State and local taxes drop to lowest level in 50 years
    Posted on December 16, 2011 by Ross
    The DOR released this as part of their “Revenue Update” for the month.

    Washington’s state and local taxes (as a percent of personal income) dropped to their lowest level in 50 years in Fiscal Year 2009, according to new figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau.
    http://www.rosshunter.info/201.....E.facebook

    We need to raise taxes. There’s no other way about it. And we know from Ireland’s experience that, what austerity plans are good at is turning those places that live under them into very austere places. Austerity is not the answer.

  29. 29

    It’s The War On Cars and I say it’s about fucking time!

    Everyone freak out: Carmageddon is back. Right now, several U.S. cities are scheming to shut down major freeways — permanently. In the push to take back cities from cars, this is what you’d call throwing down the gauntlet.

    The drive to tear down the huge freeways that many blame for the inner-city blight of the ’60s and ’70s is one of the most dramatic signs of the new urban order. Proponents of such efforts have data to show that freeway removal is not at all bizarre, that we can return to human-size streets without causing a gridlock apocalypse. And that may be true. But pulling down these shrines to the automobile also feels like a bold rewriting of America’s 20th-century urban script: Revenge of the Pedestrian. This time it’s personal
    http://www.salon.com/2011/12/0.....singleton/

  31. 31

    @28 You beat me to it tonight, but you can’t beat me at it — the best you can do is tie, “catch” me, as you put it — because I post a perfect score every night. (At least I have so far. But even rabbits fuck up, although not nearly as often as you humans, so it’s probably just a matter of time before I’m forced to post a beatable score.)

    You have to go really fast to get every answer right within 1 second. That isn’t enough time to think, so you’ve gotta do it reflexively. As I said the other night, the trick is treating this as an object-recognition test, instead of reading the words. You don’t have time to do that. Train yourself to see the word as an image and then zing the cursor down the list to the most similar image.

    I’m not sure to what extent IQ plays a factor in playing this quiz; I enjoy the advantage of having been born with a very high IQ (I’m definitely in the top 1/2 of 1% on the curve), but I suspect a person with near-average IQ could do this if s/he has good mental and physical reflexes. There are a couple of other players who consistently post perfect scores every day. You get better with practice; I couldn’t do it right off the bat, it took a while before I got the technique down pat.

  32. 32

    re 21: Yawn………… Same BS I’ve been hearing from you idiots for decades.

    If I walk into a govrnment building, I can still pretty much say what I want. Not if I walk into a corporate office though. Free speech ends when you cross the portal — and you want to ‘privatize’ everything? You are the first person who would be silenced in a privatized world.

  34. 34

    @21.
    And the silence from libertarian is deafening. Looks like he’s just here to do drive by sniping, afraid to argue for his ideas.

  35. 35

    @34

    “Looks like he’s just here to do drive by sniping, afraid to argue for his ideas.”

    And with good reason. Once you get down to specifics, it becomes increasingly clear that a libertarian is someone who would put property rights ahead of human rights.

  36. 36

    @21 How, exactly, is government “redistributing wealth”? Economic data show a massive transfer of wealth from the 99% to the 1% over the last 30 years. So, if you want to find evidence of too much government interference in our lives, you’ll have to look somewhere other than the economy and patterns of wealth distribution in this country. Also, let’s not forget that ALL of our country’s wealth is created by WORKERS, not by the owners of capital or the managers who stand around supervising workers (and figuring out creative ways to take more away from the wealth-producers on the assembly lines and behind the service counters).

  37. 37

    Well, the LGBT community is finally coming clean and fessing up. Bout Time!

    via Gay community apologizes to Amy Koch for ruining her marriage

    “An Open Apology to Amy Koch on Behalf of All Gay and Lesbian Minnesotans

    Dear Ms. Koch,

    On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage. We are ashamed of ourselves for causing you to have what the media refers to as an “illicit affair” with your staffer, and we also extend our deepest apologies to him and to his wife. These recent events have made it quite clear that our gay and lesbian tactics have gone too far, affecting even the most respectful of our society.

    We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry. And we are doubly remorseful in knowing that many will see this as a form of sexual harassment of a subordinate.

    It is now clear to us that if we were not so self-focused and myopic, we would have been able to see that the time you wasted diligently writing legislation that would forever seal the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman, could have been more usefully spent reshaping the legal definition of “adultery.”

    Forgive us. As you know, we are not church-going people, so we are unable to fully appreciate that “gay marriage” is incompatible with Christian values, despite the fact that those values carry a biblical tradition of adultery such as yours. We applaud you for keeping that tradition going.

    And finally, shame on us for thinking that marriage is a private affair, and that our marriage would have little impact on anyone’s family. We now see that marriage is more than that. It is an agreement with society. We should listen to the Minnesota Family Council when it tells us that marriage is about being public, which explains why marriages are public ceremonies. Never did we realize that it is exactly because of this societal agreement that the entire world is looking at you in shame and disappointment instead of minding its own business.

    From the bottom of our hearts, we ask that you please accept our apology.“

  39. 39

    Larry Craig, the toe-tapping in bathroom stalls former Senator, has emerged as a paid lobbyist for the largest coal minining company in the U.S. His job is to delay attempts to enact better mine-safety regulations until more time has passed since the deaths in the Murray mines in August 2007. The more time passes, the more impossible reform becomes.

    Larry Craig is back as a lobbyist

  40. 40

    Unlawful Delivery of Controlled Substance/Arrest: On Dec. 9, police arrested a 15-year-old boy for selling about 2 grams of marijuana to another student for $20 at Gig Harbor High School.
    http://gigharbor.patch.com/art.....ter-dec-20

    Maybe the federal government needs to declare a war on gas and food. Their war on drugs seems to have frozen the price of pot at mid 1980’s levels.

Can’t Bring Yourself to Type the Word “Ass”?

Eager to share our brilliant political commentary and blunt media criticism, but too genteel to link to horsesass.org? Well, good news, ladies: we also answer to HASeattle.com, because, you know, whatever. You're welcome!

Follow Goldy

[iire_social_icons]

HA Commenting Policy

It may be hard to believe from the vile nature of the threads, but yes, we have a commenting policy. Comments containing libel, copyright violations, spam, blatant sock puppetry, and deliberate off-topic trolling are all strictly prohibited, and may be deleted on an entirely arbitrary, sporadic, and selective basis. And repeat offenders may be banned! This is my blog. Life isn’t fair.