HorsesAss.Org

Last week’s contest was won by Liberal Scientist. It was the Costa Concordia docked in Palermo, Italy.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere on earth. Good luck!

1 Chronicles 1:25
Eber, Peleg, Reu,

Discuss.

Here at HA, we’ve been pretty (and deservedly) tough on Rick Santorum. But there’s no animus, no political disagreement, no division that can bring any thing but sadness from this story (h/t).

The three-year-old daughter of Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has been admitted to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the candidate has cancelled his Sunday morning campaign events to be at her side.

Santorum campaign spokesman Hogan Gidley said Saturday night that the former Pennsylvania senator and his wife, Karen, were with Bella at CHOP. Gidley said Santorum planned to return to campaigning as soon as possible in Florida, where the Republican primary is Tuesday.

Bella Santorum has Trisomy 18, a genetic condition in which a child has a third copy of material from chromosome 18, instead of the usual two, causing a wide array of physical and mental problems.

Bella was not expected to survive until her first birthday – half of infants with Trisomy 18 do not survive their first week, according the National Institutes of Health. Some children have lived to their teenage years, but with significant medical and developmental issues.

I can’t imagine how difficult this is for his family. Here’s hoping Bella gets well enough soon enough that we can go back to making fun of her father’s horrible political positions shortly.

Young Turks: Barney Frank to marry his partner.

Darcy Burner: Never Give Up:

Young Turks: Conservative’s more likely low IQ and racist.

White House: West Wing Week.

Countdown with Dan Savage: Same-sex marriage equality.

The GOP Gladiatorial Games:
[Read more…]

One of the things we “learned” this week is that gubernatorial hopeful Rob McKenna is against same-sex marriage.

On Wednesday, McKenna told KCPQ-TV (3:47):

I will vote to maintain the current law and the current definition of marriage.

I guess he has given up on the line, “I hold the same views as President Obama.”

Goldy wrote about this under the headline, “McKenna Finally Admits He Opposes Gay Marriage”. But is McKenna only now admitting he opposes same-sex marriage?

I mentioned last June that McKenna has previously taken a stand on the subject:

In 2004, King County Superior Court Judge William Downing issued a controversial ruling that same-sex couples could marry. The Seattle Times, sprung to action to find out where candidates in state-wide races stood:

…King County Councilman Rob McKenna, criticized the ruling’s wording as too broad and said its argument that there is no compelling state interest to deny marriage to two people in a committed relationship could leave marriage open to blood relatives or those practicing polygamy.

“It threatens to destroy all standards we apply to the right of marriage,” he said.

One might argue that McKenna was only criticizing the wording of a ruling, rather than the effect of legalizing same-sex marriage.

Closer scrutiny reveals that as bullshit. I encourage you to read the ruling for yourself—it’s well-written, and includes some amusing word play. Judge Downing:

…concludes that the exclusion of same-sex partners from civil marriage and the privileges attendant thereto is not rationally related to any legitimate or compelling state interest and is certainly not narrowly tailored toward such an interest.

The ruling doesn’t “open up” incestuous or polygamous marriages. To do so, it would have addressed an additional set of state laws that are narrowly targeted to toward protecting compelling state interests in prohibition of incestuous or polygamous marriages. It didn’t touch on those at all.

No…what McKenna was doing was using a bullshit “legal-like” argument to express his opposition to same-sex marriage, while not quite saying so.

So, I know this is old news, but Rick Santorum is trying to ruin sweater vests. Oh sure, he’d say he’s just wearing them, sometimes. I’m sure he thinks he’s conveying a certain downhomieness, and campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire in winter, it makes sense to wear them. And who knows, he may genuinely like wearing them. But since they’re still fairly uncommon, if he goes far in the presidential nominating process, sweater vests may be associated with him. And that’s pretty terrible for those of us who wear them but don’t share his dipshit politics.

I am wearing one right now. I wear either a sweater vest or a sweater to work for most of the winter here in Seattle. Whoever the GOP nominates will be horrible on policy, but hopefully whoever they nominate doesn’t do to the sweater vest what Tucker Carlson did to bow ties.

That’s right. It is another Republican debate.

They say, debate is what catches de-fish, and what a stinkin’ mess we have here.

So go grab some tartar sauce if you prefer, or a bag of Cheetos and play along.

The live stream can be found on CNN or here.

5:15: The topic has been on illegal immigration. Romney parses classes of illegals and who he is concerned about and who not.

5:16: Newt says he doesn’t want to grab a grandmother in a church. He goes for young women now. (Older women while in high school).

5:17: Mitt yells at Romney about calling him “anti-immigrant”. Apparent “anti-immigrant” is a “highly charge epithet”. I can think of worse.

5:21: The debate has turned in to a bickering match between Mitt and Newt.

5:24: Paul is pro-Cuba. Santorum is TOTALLY OUTRAGED by Obama’s policy in Central and South America. Nothing he says connects with anyone.

5:25: Santorum again sounds the alarm bells about Iran and al Qaeda in Cuba.

5:29: Mitt was saying something about unemployment and housing, but I was fading out….

5:31: It back to Mitt and Newt are airing dirty laundry. It is very personal and awkward!

5:33: Newt seems to be losing this Fannie-Freddie argument, but it is hard to tell. Ron Paul: the topic doesn’t interest me at all.

5:36: Santorum wants to shrink Fannie and Freddie until it can be drowned in a bathtub.

5:37: Santorum: “If these guys (Mitt, Newt) don’t quit bickering, I’m going to sent them to their rooms without dinner.”

[Read more…]

– Jay Inslee’s piece on marriage equality in Washington State.

– Mitt’s Income vs. Your Income (h/t)

– It’s time to move from a cop hating anarchist dogma centered occupation to what the actual occupy wall street movement was really about, i.e., love, compassion, understanding, a new way of thinking, ending war, empathy, protecting the environment, truth, economic justice, election reform, HOPE.

– I’ve been really grateful for these pieces by Ta-Nehisi Coates debunking the notion that slaveholders could have been compensated before the civil war to end slavery.

– There’s still some off season left, but next season maybe isn’t looking great for Mariners fans.

– SOPA

Mitt Romney has mostly been the G.O.P. front runner for at least the past year. There are transient exceptions.

Most recently, from early November to mid-December of 2011, Newt Gingrich lead the Republican pack in the national polls. But Americans remembered why they despised Gingrich—an arrogant motherfucker, who is mean, nasty, and corrupt. Mitt re-took the lead as the first polls of 2012 came out.

Yesterday, a Rasmussen poll found Newt in the lead by a remarkable +7. And today, the Gallup tracking poll put Newt up by +3.

Once can be a fluke. But not twice in a row. It appears that Newt taken the lead—perhaps for a few days, or maybe right up to the convention.

One of the implications for me is that I should probably start doing state head-to-head matchups of Obama against both Newt and Mitt. When I started this year’s batch of analyses I wrote:

At this point, I am only doing analyses of an Obama versus Romney general election. As much as I would like to see one of the weaker candidates take the G.O.P. nomination, I’m pretty certain Republicans will, as they did in 2008, act rationally, and chose the candidate that performs best against Obama in head-to-head polling. That is currently Mitt Romney. As the Republican primary circus continues, I’ll reassess. If, say, Santorum trickles on up to the front (eww!) or there is a crazy surge for Ron Paul, or the Mittster takes a tumble after unintentionally tweeting a photo of his underwear, or Rick Perry challenges the rest of ‘em to a duel (and wins), I’ll switch do doing analyses for the new front-runner(s).

Mitt didn’t magically Tweet a bulge in his underwear, but he did release his tax forms. That’s pretty much the same thing. So, while I still believe Republicans will ultimately act rationally and pick the candidate who performs best against Obama, I’ll give you the same analyses for the mean motherfucker who thinks knows he is the smartest man in the world.

I started collecting poll information for Newt last night. Perhaps I’ll have the first Obama—Gingrich analyses out by tomorrow.

Day by day it gets harder to defend Republicans against the charge that they are collectively stark-raving mad. I don’t know why I try any more:

An Oklahoma lawmaker files a bill to ban the making and selling of food or products that use aborted human fetuses.

State Senator Ralph Shortey says he’s done research and found reports that companies have used stem cells in the research and development of food.
[…]

“There is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors,” says [State Senator Ralph] Shortey.

Okay, so it’s not really insanity. You see, some of these “concerned” lawmaker types just haven’t yet learned how to filter truth from fiction, fact from rumor, science from made-up-shit-designed-to-freak-people-out that one occasionally comes across whilst doing “research” on the InnerTubes.

This reminds me of a previous State of the Union address where some stark-raving mad indiscriminate presidential speech writer slipped into the speech some InnerTube weirdness about the dangers of human animal hybrids.