What the fuck is wrong with you people?
Politics
Another anti-gay Republican turns out to be a hypocrite.
Mar 4th
I know, I know: Big surprise! Right?
The California Highway Patrol pulled over Senator Roy Ashburn at 2:00 a.m. Wednesday after an officer noticed a black Chevy Tahoe swerving at 13th and L Streets.
Ashburn, a father of four, is a Republican Senator representing parts of Kern, Tulare and San Bernardino Counties with a history of opposing gay rights
When the officer stopped the state-issued vehicle, the driver identified himself as Senator Ashburn. He was arrested without incident and charged with two misdemeanors: driving under the influence and driving with a blood alcohol level higher than .08% or higher.
A male passenger, who was not identified as a lawmaker, was also in the car but was not detained.
via Anti-Gay Lawmaker At Gay Club Before DUI Arrest – cbs13.com.
It only lends more credence to the stereotype that those who are most vehemently anti-gay in their politics are also most likely to be deep in the closet.
The California state Senator has already released an apology:
“I am deeply sorry for my actions and offer no excuse for my poor judgment. I accept complete responsibility for my conduct and am prepared to accept the consequences for what I did. I am also truly sorry for the impact this incident will have on those who support and trust me – my family, my constituents, my friends, and my colleagues in the Senate.”
So now the question becomes: Will he slink away into shameful obscurity or will he change his mind in a day or two and try to claim he’s actually straight and was there offering Christian counseling to the lost souls in attendance? Perhaps he’ll try to blame it all on the booze. “I was so drunk,” he’ll say, “That I didn’t realize I was smoking cock! I thought it was a cigar!”
It all depends on how much self-loathing he has for himself whether he’ll take this opportunity to stop living a lie and embrace who he really is.
SEB Mailbag: “You wonder why healthcare is so expensive? It’s not the Doctors or Hospitals.”
Feb 25th
I’m probably going to get myself in trouble with this one. There are people of a conservative persuasion in my circle of friends and extended family and most of them have learned not to send me email forwards of any kind because I have a bad habit of hitting Reply To All when I don’t agree with the email. This was one of those emails and it had been sent to almost 40 people, including me, so my reply is going out to a lot of people I don’t actually know. That usually results in whoever the friend or family member that forwarded it to me getting rather angry about the fact that I sent my reply on to the other recipients.
The email itself is the usual Republican attempt at bashing the current administration, but it was unusual in that it was mercifully short. It consisted of a video clip of some form of testimony from a hospital administrator about the high costs of providing medical treatment to illegal aliens. Here’s the video clip found on YouTube followed by the terse message that accompanied it:
How did we get to this and why are we continuing to let it go on? Time for new leadership.
Carroll
My reply was not as mercifully short so I’ll include it after the jump.
New Left Media covered the recent Tea Party Convention in Nashville.
Feb 12th
And they brought back video of what they found. As you might expect, it makes for painful viewing. Check it:
From the official synopsis:
After criticism of the convention’s cost, for-profit status, and payment to Palin, multiple national Tea Party organizations withdrew their participation.
But the event went on.
And so did the paranoid, conspiratorial assertions–that President Obama was born in another country, that he has covered up his college transcripts, that he is pushing a communist/socialist agenda, that he is protecting terrorists and endangering our country, etc.
The organizers of the convention made great efforts to limit access to the press, and even held “new-media training” sessions to help the Tea Partiers sound and look better on camera–the more people see inside this movement, the less like it. But we got ourselves into the event, where the right-wing, fringe sentiments were on plain display.
That said, these Tea Partiers–able to pay the cost of attendance–are more affluent than those at the 9.12 DC March, and more self-conscious of [how] they are portrayed in the media. There were fewer signs and homemade t-shirts here, but the attitudes, if more subtle in delivery, were the same.
It’s amazing to think these people can vote. Which is why it’s important to make sure their beliefs and opinions are made as public as possible. Only by exposing the massive ignorance and self-delusion these people have can we be sure they don’t gain power in this country.
John Oliver covers the RNC meeting in Hawaii.
Feb 10th
The Daily Show’s John Oliver travels to Hawaii to cover the RNC’s winter meeting. Republicans manage to reveal their hypocrisy without a hint of having a clue that they’re doing so:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| RNC Meeting in Hawaii | ||||
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It’s amazing how they can stand there and complain about fiscal irresponsibility by the Obama administration while engaging in it themselves. I really wish the legitimate news organizations would question some of them about shit like this.
Episode 1 of The SEB Podcast is now online.
Feb 9th
So here it is: The inaugural episode of The SEB Podcast.
We cover a number of topics starting with Podcasts and moving on to a question from Decrepit Old Fool that we talk about a lot, but never actually answer. That’s followed by tangents galore that are related to DOF’s question by only the thinest of hairs and then a little gushing over the fact that George reads our blogs and some discussion of our religions backgrounds, faith healing, and politics and how we should be the leaders of the world except that we’re too lazy. We close it out with a discussion of James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar which may contain a couple of spoilers so you may want to stop listening at that point if you haven’t seen the movie.
The program I used to record this podcast stuck us in separate stereo channels so I’ll be in your left ear and Dave will be in your right if you wear headphones. This turned out to be a good thing in part because Dave’s audio was much quieter than mine and I spent a good part of the last couple of days learning how to use Audacity to try and bring his levels up without distorting the hell out of it. In the end I dropped my levels down to more closely match his so you can turn up the volume and hear us both a little better. It also took a little time to figure out what data rate to save it as to keep the quality up and the file size down. The final file is 56.7 MB in size and will occupy 1 hour and 22 minutes of your time.You can download it directly by clicking here or you can subscribe to the RSS feed here or you can listen to it at the bottom of this post with the built-in handy flash player. Right now it’s being hosted on SEB’s server so I’m hoping that we don’t suddenly kill our bandwidth allowance with it, but we’ll find out soon.
We had a lot of fun doing it and we hope you’ll be at least mildly amused by the results. If you like it then we’ll do more and try to get better at it both in terms of the quality of the recording and in the quality of our discussions. Let us know what you think in the comments.
Turkish girl buried alive by the family that loved her.
Feb 5th
They say you always hurt the ones you love, but this is taking it too far:
A Turkish teenager found dead in a hole next to her house was probably buried alive, a post-mortem examination has revealed.
Medine Memi, 16, was found in the hole in December. Large amounts of soil were in her lungs and stomach, according to a source who has seen the report.
Her father and grandfather have been arrested, but not charged.
[...] Her hands had been tied behind her back, and they discovered large amounts of soil in her lungs and stomach.
The autopsy has concluded that she was almost certainly buried alive.
The police went to her home after a neighbour reported that Medine had not been seen for a month.
They found her body in a hole, newly covered with concrete, next to the hen-house.
I was going to make this another in the Too Much Faith series of posts I’ve been doing, but the article claims religion didn’t really have anything to do with it:
Medine, who had never been to school, lived in Kahta, a town in the mainly Kurdish south-east of Turkey, where most honour killings have taken place.
The town is known for being very conservative and religious; it is a stronghold of the once powerful Naksibendi Islamic sect, which was banned by modern Turkey’s founding father Ataturk in 1925 but has revived in recent years.
But while it is true that most such killings are carried out in conservative Muslim communities, the practice is linked more to the customs of this region of Turkey, than to religious belief.
When girls or women are deemed to have stained the family honour, by behaviour as innocent as simply talking to boys, there is strong peer pressure from the community on the male members of the family to restore their honour, say groups working on the issue in the south-east.
The only way allowed by their code is to kill the girl or woman – usually a young man is given the task after a family council meeting, and the method and location of the killing are discussed in detail.
It still stinks of delusion to me. Seriously, how fucked up do you have to be to bind one of your own kids, put them in a hole, and shovel dirt in on them until they choke to death on it? I can’t imagine the horror of being the victim of such an act let alone it being compounded by the fact that the perpetrators were people who supposedly loved me. And what horrible thing had this poor girl done to deserve such a fate? She had talked to some boys.
According to the news article, there have been 16 honor killings in the province of Adiyaman, where Medine lived, between 2003 and 2007. It’s the sort of thing you’d think the world would have outgrown by now, but it’s not confined to just Turkey.
Here’s something to think about: According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) there are some 5,000 honor killings yearly around the world with some countries having laws that make it perfectly legal.
This Just In: Teachers not allowed to have a life outside of school.
Jan 22nd
How’s this for being totally unfair:
A Brownsville high school teacher has been suspended for 30 days without pay after she appeared in a picture someone else posted on Facebook that included a male stripper at a bridal shower.
[...] Board member Stella Broadwater says the suspension is appropriate because the photo became public, but member Sandra Chan says it was too harsh because the teacher had no control over the photo being posted.
via Teacher suspended over stripper photo – Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
It’d be one thing if the teacher had printed out this picture and passed it around to her students, but to be suspended because someone else posted the picture on Facebook is pretty stupid. Granted I’ve not seen the picture in question, but I’m not sure it should matter much. Short of staying home and never doing anything outside of work, I’m not sure how she had any control over the posting of the pic.
This also reflects one of the problems with Facebook’s move towards removing the privacy options that it has traditionally made available to its users. As these barriers come down you’ll be reading about more and more news items like this as pictures that were once thought to be limited to family and friends become viewable by the public at large.
There are already a number of sites popping up to chronicle embarrassing Facebook postings including Failbook.com from the folks who brought us I Can Has Cheezeburger? I mean, do you really want wall updates like this one viewable by the whole world?
It’s embarrassing enough that your mom knows you’re brushing up on AMAZING SEX, but what happens when a potential employer is able to do a Google search and has this come up? At least the Failbook.com folks remove last names and blur pics. Google isn’t going to do that.
OK, I’ve gotten off on a tangent here so allow me to wrap this up. The point I’m trying to make is that, sure, the idiot in the above screenshot probably shouldn’t have posted something like that if he didn’t want folks (including his mom) to know about it, but the teacher that got suspended didn’t post the picture that got her in trouble and that’s not fair. Which is basically my point.
The Daily Show on the latest Wall Street bonuses.
Jan 14th
Jon tries to explain why it seems like the only people to have recovered from the economic collapse of the past year are the people who caused the problem to begin with:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Clusterf#@k to the Poor House – Wall Street Bonuses | ||||
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The most upsetting part is that this all seems to be happening with Obama’s blessing. Sure, he’s making some noises about taxing the banks now and the banks are basically telling him to go right ahead and they’ll just pass the cost onto their customers.
Next time one of these too big to fail banks gets itself into trouble, let the fuckers fail. Yeah, it’ll probably leave us in a fucked up position, but at least they won’t be around to fuck us over a second time later.
Red State Update offers a prayer for Tiger Woods.
Jan 8th
How in the hell did I not know about Red State Update? These two are hilarious and I’ll be spending part of my weekend watching back episodes. Here they offer up a prayer for Tiger Woods:
They make me proud of my own redneck heritage.
Keith Olbermann slams Obama and Congress over the Senate HCR bill.
Dec 18th
There’s not much here I disagree with:
There are some out there that argue that the bill still accomplishes a lot, but I’m very worried about the provision that mandates everyone has to buy health insurance or face a fine unless they can prove they can’t afford it. Combined with the lack of controls over prices this sounds like a wet-dream come true for the health insurance companies.
Kill the provision or kill the bill.
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