Intravenous Caffeine

Totally Unfair and Completely Unbalanced

Collateral Casualties should be minimal…

As the machine gun drone sprays the area, Revolutionary Grrl leaps for the rope she swung in on...

It's 3 a.m.--collateral casualties should be minimal--the crooks are all there during the daytime!

Ah-hah, our girl has taken out the drone’s sights with her paintballs. But … the drone sprays the area with bullets? Aren’t they afraid of collateral casualties? Naw, it’s 3 a.m., all the real crooks are there during business hours. There shouldn’t be anyone in the business district except some accountants trying to balance the books for year’s end.

Speaking of collateral damage, yours truly has been down with a horrible cold since Thanksgiving. We hope you all had a great Turkey Day. We did, but then the sniffles began the next day and the runny nose on Saturday and … well, I just haven’t been paying much attention to anything else for a few days. I see the insane wing has been jumping up and down trying to get the war on Christmas noticed again. Fat chance–Hallowe’en candy disappeared ON HALLOWE’EN so Christmas merchandise could be put in place! Black Friday was one of the most successful ever, according to Walmart–there were stabbings, several murders, a woman tasered another one … Just good clean American consumerism at its finest.

The fright wing, in the person of Rush Limbaugh, has continued to jump up and down about the Pope being a Marxist. You tell them, Rush–maybe you can lose any Catholics in your audience, or worse, in your sponsorship. And of course, they’re all aflame about people honoring Nelson Mandela, who died during the break. Another Marxist–he even admired CASTRO! I saw one letter claiming God had sent him to hell. God certainly took his time about it, since Mandela was 92, but then I think that 27 year imprisonment was more likely Mandela’s hell and that if there is an afterlife, he’s certainly in a better one than the injustice under which he’d suffered. Nonetheless, the Westboro Baptist Church has promised to go to South Africa to protest at his funeral. Let’s hope they suffer a little collateral damage when they discover that while free speech is usually guaranteed for citizens and residents, visitors to a country usually aren’t tolerated as well. Or do they think South Africa is part of the USA?

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And This Year’s Award for Biggest Jerks in Congress … The Envelope Please

the sequester--coming soon to a government near you

A shoo-in for a Razzie for 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 ...

Well, the Academy Awards were last night and, just in case the fright-wing had any doubts about the liberalness of Hollywood, Michele Obama was on hand to deliver the Best Picture Award to ARGO. I’m sure Rush et al will be making hay out of that for the next week.

Actually, the reason the FLOTUS was there was to present an award to a movie that celebrated one of the few times when the CIA got one right. With liberal dollops of help from Canada, eh? Hey, Ben Affleck! Canada says you didn’t give it enough credit–how aboot a big “I’m sore-ry.” Teehee–couldn’t resist twitting my Canadian relatives.

The BIG SERIOUS news tho is the dreaded SEQUESTER that is aboot–err, about–to descend upon the American people. Yes, that’s right, once again the American economy is about to be wrecked by the Tea Partiers who love America–unless a last-minute rescue worthy of THE PERILS OF PAULINE gets performed. Said last-minute rescue will naturally screw everyone in the United States except the 1% of the 1%–but that’s OK because the sequester will screw EVERYBODY and push us back into the Great Recession. Might as well save SOME people! Too bad it’s the ones who already have life rafts.

At this point, I almost wish the SEQUESTER gets performed. It will be the first time the Pentagon actually loses money and MAYBE, those damn tax-hating nincompoops will see what havoc their ideology shall wreak. But I don’t have any confidence in that. The one thing that invariably happens when you prove a true believer wrong to his face is that he will retrench and believe all the harder. Sort of like saying “I do believe in fairies” to save Tinkerbell, only screaming it.

In any case, yours truly had a great weekend at Katsucon last week. I didn’t get to see too many friends because the weekend was so good for sales, I did not dare leave the table for more than a few minutes at a time. I premiered a new work based on the HELL GIRL anime which my friend Charles Dunbar showcased in his “Dead Like Us/Remixed” presentation at the con. Thanks to Kevin and Peter of A Kawaii Boutique for their company and for taking care of my table when I needed a break. And thanks to all the cosplayers and artists who dropped by to say hi and especially the ones who bought something!

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Couldn’t Have Happened To A Nicer Guy

The GOP is sure all this slut business will blow over by November

Headdesk, headdesk, headdesk...

Much as I normally hate to do a subject two weeks in a row, the swift financial retribution against Rush Limbaugh is worthy of an exception. Seems Rush has lost about 90% of his sponsors over the controversy caused by his deliberate slander of an innocent bystander, at least temporarily. As you will remember, Rush called Georgetown student Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute for the horrendous crime of wanting to testify to the all-male committee fulminating over contraception about her friend who was denied contraceptives when she needed them for hormone therapy. Rush leapt to judgment on the girl, in an ass-brained show of ignorance of how contraceptives work, saying she was having so much sex she needed government assistance to pay for her pills. The rightwing ditto heads have repeated these charges ad nauseam and no amount of facts can ever dissuade them from the opinions given them by the Pope of Clear Channel.

This is the way free speech works in the free market. Rush Limbaugh was, is and will be free to make any ass-brained statement he wants to make. The question is whether or not anyone has to pay to allow those statements to be broadcast to the nation and world at large. With sponsors, he can shout it loud and clear to the entire radio audience. Without sponsors, he’s still free to shout them–but unless he or Clear Channel pay for it themselves, his soapbox might be … a soapbox. Seems Clear Channel has had to run Public Service Announcements on many of the commercial spots during Rush’s show this week. Dum da dum dum!

Bill Maher has weighed in on the proceedings and has tried to argue that Rush ought not be censored by the free market. Piffle. Bill is still smarting because HIS former TV show Politically Incorrect got dumped when he expressed an unforgivable truth: that the perpetrators of the cowardly attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center were not themselves cowards. This was in the middle of US war-drum fever. Come on Bill, Americans won’t be ready for that kind of nuance before 2102, the year AFTER the 9/11 centennial. We still have people who said the Japanese deserved the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear meltdown tragedy because of PEARL HARBOR! And besides, what you said was true, just unpopular. That’s a fair distance from maliciously maligning someone by misrepresenting what they’d said or done.

Free speech doesn’t mean we have to subsidize hate speech. As long as someone’s willing to pay for the plug in the socket, Rush will have a platform. But, if no one wants to pay to have a person with that much bile representing their company, screw it. Let him try to get a gig on NPR 🙂

And speaking of Japan, this weekend marked the anniversary of that horrible series of misfortunes. Compounding the tragedy was that although Japan is one of the most prepared nations against earthquakes, the government had let down its guard on tsunami preparedness and had dropped the ball on nuclear safety measures AND spent more time CYAing and following procedures instead of reacting swiftly enough to contain the nuclear danger. But the Japanese people have shown incredible resilience and courage in their recovery. Last year, I did a short video to Yoko Kanno’s song for the survivors and I’d like to post its URL here againhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na60p1P22rg. Links are there for several organizations that were involved in the recovery effort at the time. I’m sure they will accept more donations.

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Rush to Judgment?

Rush prepares to shoot a porno-Satire

OMG ... MY EYES! MY EYES!

Ah, Rush, you did it this time! Not only did you demonstrate no knowledge of how contraceptive pills work (Did you really plug up your ears and go LALALALALALA when they talked about it in school? The sad thing is, I’ll bet your mother and your four wives were all smart enough not to try to tell you about it either!) but you also managed to accuse a private citizen of being a slut and a prostitute for needing so many birth control pills to cover an imagined outrageous sex life! And demanding that she film a porno to help defray the costs! Thanks Bill Maher and others for suggesting that Rush be forced to do the same to pay for his Viagra.

Of course, Sandra Fluke, the young lady in question (and I am reaching that age when almost everyone except the Pope and most American politicians can be described by me as “young” grrrrrrrrr!) was not going in front of Congress to testify about her sex life and how she needed contraception to deal with it. She was attempting to talk to Daniel Issa’s all male panel on contraception about a friend who needed hormonal therapy that could best be delivered via “The Pill” as it was once quaintly known. Did that stop you from, ahem, slander and defamation of character? Never let the facts get in the way of a good innuendo!

Now that sponsors have finally seen how poisonous you can be and started dumping your show, you have fallen on the bully’s defense and said you chose the wrong words in an attempt at levity. Ye olde “What’s the matter, don’t you have a sense of humor?” refrain. Well, tough bananas Rushbo. We ain’t buying it. It’s one thing when you make exaggerated claims against a public figure-it’s quite another thing to make totally unfounded accusations against a private citizen.

It wasn’t just that you used the wrong words, Rush. It was that you made up something out of whole cloth and broadcast it to all the world so that your listeners would think that Ms. Fluke was a slut and a prostitute.

Now the dittoheads are all making idiotic statements about “freedom of speech” without knowing what it is. Sure, Rush is free to LIBEL somebody. But if he does, then he is also free to accept the consequences of that. Like lawsuits. Like losing sponsors. Freedom of speech generally excludes little things like perjury or yelling FIRE in the middle of a crowded theatre when there is no fire present. It also takes a dim view of what are generally known as “fighting words.” And in the world that RUSH would like us to live in, calling a woman a prostitute who was not engaged in the profession would generally justify his being shot by a male relative or friend of the maligned. Or run through with two feet of steel.

Now, as everyone who’s seen The People vs. Larry Flynt know, the test of whether a satire is slanderous or not is whether any reasonable person would believe it to be true or not. So far, I haven’t seen one dittohead who did not write the various forums saying how outrageous it was to have to pay for this woman’s sex life. Just as you said she was doing. There you have it–proof that reasonable people would actually believe Rush’s twisted statements to be the literal truth. Or that none of Rush’s listeners are reasonable people. Take your choice 🙂

Unfortunately, the correct answer is BOTH OF THE ABOVE.

BTW check out this article, Rush, so you can slander your most vocal critic:

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Is this what it takes to get Christine O’Donnell to accept evolution?

A monkey is evolved into Rush Limbaugh by a magician, proving evolution to Christine O'Donnell.

Christine O'Donnell is finally convinced about the validity of evolution.

Still a little bit under the weather here, but definitely nowhere quite as bad as last weekend, so I’m gonna take it easy on the commentary this week. Anyway, it seems as if one of the many great quotes from Christine O’Donnell concerned evolution. “Evolution is a myth. Why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?” Why indeed, when devolution is so apparent, with people making monkeys out of themselves all the time?

I could blame the schools for not teaching an accurate summary of what evolution actually is. I could ask the evolution deniers “just what part of millions of years don’t you understand?” But that’s like shooting fish in a barrel. You can’t blame someone for not understanding millions of years in a culture that thinks “oldies” were top 40 six months ago.

Instead, I’m going to put the blame squarely where it belongs. On the science fiction TV shows of our youth. How many times on “The Twilight Zone” or “The Outer Limits” did we actually witness evolution taking place–RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR EYES? “Oh, my god, he’s evolving–he has SIX FINGERS AND TWO THUMBS!” Not just evolution, but devolution with men turning into men in gorilla suits. “Oh, my god, he’s reversed evolution–if we don’t stop this right now, he’ll become an amoeba by the last commercial!”

In many ways, the “science” we were presented in movies and on TV was just magic with a different mumbo-jumbo. If so many people cannot accept the realities of science, is it because they’re expecting magic and they don’t get it? Millions of years? What good is that? If something’s evolving, I want to see it right NOW. Christine O’Donnell will not believe in evolution until she sees a monkey turn into a person right in front of her eyes.

Worse than that, in science there’s no one to bribe. “O Science, grant me this promotion and I’ll give up sinning for the rest of my life.” Nope, don’t work that way. Far better to have someone to entreat who might answer than to have no one to talk to at all. God is someone who will answer your prayers. Usually with a “no”. But “no” is an answer, isn’t it?

So maybe the scientists should practice pulling a few rabbits out of hats to get people to believe. After all, it worked with the loaves and the fishes. It all depends on whether you have the right basket.

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