Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Tuesday Town Hall Because Jesus told me to. Rich Lowry All those Passion fans are Clinton's people, leading to speculation (by me) that Bush is planning on dumping Cheney and running with Mel Gibson this year.  The Bush presidency should be stamped: "Brought to you by orthodox Christian believers." Phyllis Schlafly Richard Shelby, Zell Miller, and some other cranks have sponsored a bill called the Constitution Restoration Act, which would make sure that no judges can prevent people from "acknowledging" God in public buildings (well, the God of those Bush supporters discussed by Rich Lowry -- I don't think you'd be allowed to put up an altar to Ba'al in the courthouse).  And all the judges will have to base their rulings on what the legislators says the law is, since the judicial branch refuses to be Republican, like the executive and legislative branches, and this is the only way to keep them in line.  See David Neiwert's excellent piece on this bill, if you haven't already. This legislation would clarify that the federal courts do not have jurisdiction to hear cases brought against a federal, state or local government or officer for acknowledging God.   [snip] The Constitution Restoration Act also orders federal courts not to rely on foreign laws, administrative rules or court decisions. Americans have been shocked to learn that five U.S. Supreme Court justices have cited foreign sources, even though it is self-evident that U.S. judges should be bound by the U.S. Constitution and U.S. laws, rather than foreign ones.  Dennis Prager Last week Dennis explained that women expose their breasts during half-time shows because (1) it's the only way they can "announce they are females," everyone  tending to otherwise get confused about which ones the women are, except when they're actually in the process of giving birth.  Also, (2) there just aren't any nice clothes for women that don't include rip-away bodices and metal pasties. This week Dennis provides even more reasons that women keep exposing their naked bodies to him in his fantasies.  3.  Since women are not men, they find stripping more fulfilling than college teaching or corporate work.  Oh, and they only get fulfillment from being somebody's wife and the mother to his children, but feminism is trying to take that away from them by killing all their role models, so they can't afford to buy clothes.  Or something like that.  4.  Because sexual harassment laws prevent men from raping women at work, the evil temptresses delight in taunting men with their bare breasts and g-strings, and insistn on putting on slutty peepshows during board meetings. 5.  Women dress sexily to attract men.  But that's WRONG, because Dennis is married and shouldn't be having sex with you. 6.  Women today are highly educated, but still too stupid to know the difference between dressing "cute" and dressing "provocatively."  (Dennis gives simple advice to the poor dears: showing skin means you're a whore.) And since all men only want one thing, if you show any skin, they will all think that you're going to put out, and then they'll get really confused when you call the police on them for shoving their tongues down your throats.  "And that includes guys your age, your male teachers, your clergyman, your mailman, and the old man next door."  Omnipresent sexual harassment laws and "consciousness raising" seminars in businesses and schools have frightened men into not making any sexual comments to a woman.  As a result, the normal check on a woman flaunting her body is gone. A woman can reveal her breasts or cross her short-skirted legs near a man, but he is forbidden to say so much as, "You have great legs." In fact, he can be fired or sued for saying nothing and merely "staring." One reason women dressed more modestly in the past was fear of men's verbal reactions. No more. There are vast checks on his sexuality, none on hers.  Cal Thomas Mel Gibson's The Passion of Rambo is a going to do boffo box-office -- not because it's a good film, but so that the righteous can smite those atheistic Hollywood people who think they're better than everyone else. Large numbers of people have ceased going to films, or, like me, rarely buy a ticket, because they don't like paying to witness their beliefs and values. mocked  Cal rarely buys tickets for films like Sexy Stewardesses Have a Layover, but instead sneaks into the theater through the fire exit, in order to make a social statement about not paying to witness his values mocked. Go and see this film. It might change your life. It could change Hollywood if it is willing to receive the message that if you make good movies with good messages, those who now feel excluded and despised will pay money to see the films.  And if there is found to be a market for movies geared towards the excluded and despised in our society, watch for Mel Gibson's The Passion of Albert Einstein, geared towards nerds and math geeks. William J. Federer Gay marriage would result in pedophiles adopting children and abusing them, because, um, nothing would stop them from doing it. I asked this student if he thought individuals exist who desire to sexually abuse children and wouldn't they be tempted to adopt.   I asked him who is going to police to make sure pedophiles don't adopt.   He said that would be impossible.   "Exactly my point," I answered, "it would be impossible. There would be no way to protect children from sexual predators if homosexuals were allowed to marry and adopt."  Thomas Sowell   There really aren't that many people who work and who are really poor for like, FOREVER, so we shouldn't worry our pretty little heads about them.  If they need food for their children, they can always sell a kidney. By focussing on those who work hard all their lives and still remain poor -- no more than 3 percent of the population -- and telling their personal stories endlessly, liberals can present the Big Lie with a human face.    So, make sure to thank the Mel fans for giving us Bush by voting for somebody else this fall; smack Zell Miller around the next time you see him, for proposing such stupid legislation(and on general principle); outlaw gay marriage, because otherwise who knows what could happen; screw the poor; and wear a Burqa to work, so that Dennis doesn't have naughty thoughts. 8:11:39 AM     comment [] trackback []   The Passion of the Psychlo   An aging actor has a long-held dream to make a film which pays tribute to the religion which he credits for saving his life.  He invests his own money in the project.  People in show biz laugh at him.  But he finally completes the controversial movie, and it is hailed at the year's Show Girls.  Yes, the actor is John Travolta, and the book-based movie is Battlefield Earth.  We just thought you needed to hear about a different vanity project this week. So, here's a movie summary from the Subliminal Cinema chapter entitled "It's the End of the World as We Know It, And I Feel Fine, But You're All Dead" Battlefield Earth (2000) Directed by Roger Christian Written by L. Ron Hubbard (novel), Corey Mandell and J.D. Shapiro A crawl informs us that it’s the Year 3000, and for the past thousand years, Earth has been ruled by Psychlos. How did such an advanced race of space-faring beings wind up with such a stupid name? Well, they’re obviously a nutty bunch, judging by John Travolta’s performance, and they seem to have wiped out every trailer park on the planet, so I’m guessing author L. Ron Hubbard just combined the words "psycho" and "cyclone," hoping to terrify his readers with a name that conjured images of an emotionally unstable amusement park attraction. Anyway, they’re big-assed aliens from a planet where George Clinton is the dominant life form. The Psychlos have been mining Earth’s natural resources for the past millennium (apparently, they get paid by the hour) and teleporting the ore back to the Planet Psychlo. Amazingly, the film predicts that in the future, the most valuable metal will actually be gold! (Unlike now, when its use is largely confined to electroplating the fixtures in Ivana Trump’s bathroom, or decorating the incisors of rap artists.) Humans (represented by pasty white people dressed like Vikings) are confined to pockets of wasteland, where they are rapidly becoming extinct--so I guess all those dead 19th century Indians are having a bit of a laugh. Just so we get the point, the director pans the pristine, snow-capped Rocky Mountains (giving us a glimmer of hope that even in the bleak, post-apocalyptic future, there will still be beer commercials) and a subtitle reads: "Man is an endangered species." Despite this, the Bush Administration still wants to drill in the Arctic National Man Refuge. The survivors of humanity have adopted the usual trappings of barbarism--furs and buckskin clothing, polytheism, and French braids. One courageous lad (Barry Pepper) defies the anger of the gods and boldly ventures forth alone to find his destiny. Within thirty seconds he gets thrown from his horse, and panicked by a miniature golf course. Fortunately, he runs into a pair of hunters, and offers them snacks in exchange for exposition. They take shelter in the Apocalypse Galleria and huddle around a cook fire. But one of the Psychlos turns out to be a mall walker, and he takes exception to their careless use of an open flame so close to Lane Bryant. The alien stuns the two hunters with its ray gun, but Barry is too fast for it, perhaps because the alien isn’t entirely at ease clomping around in Gene Simmons’ platform boots from KISS. Eventually, Barry and the hunters are put in a cage built into the belly of an alien jet. Yes, even though it’s a thousand years in the future, and the aliens can instantly teleport across the galaxy, they still use internal combustion engines. Take that, Al Gore! The jet flies to the Psychlo’s capital, Biosphere 2. The humans are issued those little anti-snoring patches for their noses, which somehow helps them to survive the extraterrestrial environment inside the dome. But it’s not only the air that’s different; the entire domed city is perpetually bathed in a dim blue glow, making it clear that the Psychlos can only exist in the atmosphere of a soft-core porn film. The jet lands at the "Human Processing Center–Denver," and we look forward to watching Barry get rendered into a form of alien Velveeta. Instead, he startles his captors by shooting one of the Psychlos with its own gun, and making a break for it. Almost immediately, he slips and falls, for along with man’s loss of art, science, and medicine, he has also forgotten the ancient admonition not to run on linoleum in your socks. Barry slides to a stop at the platformed feet of Psychlos John Travolta and Forrest Whittaker, who were in the middle of discussing how beeswax will help to keep down the fuzz on your dreadlocks. Travolta, it seems, has fallen from favor with the Home Office, and has been condemned to serve as security chief of Earth for another 50 years. All the other Psychlos laugh at John, except for his immediate supervisor, who’s too busy cultivating the largest dewlap in the galaxy. Cut to Planet Psychlo. It’s a grim, inhospitable world; dark urban landscapes stretch to the horizon, studded with towers belching fire and pollution into the perpetual twilight of a purple sky, and inhabited by cruel beings thirsting for wealth and power. So basically, it’s Houston. Cut right back to Earth, where John is getting drunk and working himself into a thick, creamy lather of overacting, which is later harvested, and dispensed as food to the humans with the help of a sour cream gun from Taco Bell. John plans to buy his way off the planet by secretly training "man-animals" to mine a newly discovered vein of gold. First, however, he sets the humans to remodeling his office with pickaxes. But Barry, who is evolving faster than the apes in 2001, turns on John’s stereo and boldly messes with his equalizer settings. The outraged Travolta immediately straps Barry into a dentist’s chair and has a Portuguese Man ‘O War teach him Conversational Psychlo. Then they shoot some pollen in his eye, and suddenly, he’s The Computer Wore Moccasins. John, realizing that Reading Is Fundamental, takes Barry on a field trip to the Denver Library, and tells him that "Man is an endangered species," because Barry was ignorant when the film began, and couldn’t read the opening titles. Later, John takes Barry and his friends out to the forest, and proves his technological superiority by shooting the legs off a cow. Just as he’s about to win the plush toy, he’s jumped by a feral tribe wearing fox pelts on their heads, which menace him with spears. John miraculously escapes, however, when the tribe itself is attacked by PETA. Suddenly, Forrest arrives with Barry’s girlfriend, who they’ve identified because she was carrying a chamois with a face scratched into it. The image looks remarkably like one of Red Skelton’s clown paintings, so the Psychlos immediately deduce that it must be Barry. The Girlfriend is then accessorized with the latest in explosive collars. Back at Biosphere II, John sexually harasses his new secretary, giving us the opportunity to see that female Psychlos have prehensile tongues and male pattern baldness, which I guess is somebody’s fantasy. Suddenly, Travolta discovers that governor Dewlap has been skimming profits, and threatens to report him to the Nevada Gaming Commission unless he does something about that Elizabethan ruffle of loose skin hanging from his neck. Then John activates the first phase of his master plan by making Barry play "Wing Commander." Cut to the Rockies, where Travolta forces Barry to fly the human miners up to the gold vein, since the thin atmosphere at high altitudes don’t supply enough oxygen to support the Psychlo’s spittle-flecked, mouth-breathing acting style. Instead, Barry flies to Ft. Hood, where the illiterate, spear-wielding fox-head guys climb into the flight simulator and learn how to pilot F-16s, while Barry watches the How to Assemble an Atomic Bomb slide show that they always used to make us watch on rainy days in junior high. Then they fly to Tennessee and rob Ft. Knox in a scene that’s not exactly the climax of Goldfinger. Later, Barry manages to sow doubt and distrust between Forrest and Travolta, with the result that John decapitates a bartender, and shoots off Forrest’s hand. Forrest looks confused, and considers reporting John to the EEOC for creating a hostile work environment. Barry riles up all the human prisoners in the Planet of the Apes Memorial Cellblock, and sparks a revolt, but it doesn’t go very well. Just in the nick of time, however, a tribe of primitive hunter-gatherers arrive, flying jet fighters which are in perfect working condition after a thousand years of neglect. But let my car sit for more than a week, and I can just forget about getting it started again without begging one of the neighbors for a jump. Anyway, face-painted, fur-wearing savages suddenly turn into Top Guns, shouting things like "I’m right on his tail!" as they dogfight the Psychlos. The humans blow up Biosphere 2. Then Barry uses his girlfriend’s explosive collar to blow off Travolta’s right arm, in a ruthless act of attempted irony. Meanwhile, one of Barry’s followers teleports to the Planet Psychlo with an atomic weapon. This is where the aliens really pay for basing their entire economy on the petrochemical industry, since the bomb causes their atmosphere to catch on fire. And even though the film isn’t explicit about this, we sense that as every living thing on the surface of the planet is incinerated, certain cashiered whistleblowers from the Psychlo EPA enjoy a moment of smug vindication. 4:52:52 AM     comment [] trackback []   Full of Bloggy Goodness   Be sure to check out the new issue of Virtual Occoquan, featuring the best of the Salon blogs.  Not only do will you receive mutated photos of Ayn Rand, you also get Susan of Pesky the Rat using spam to fix the economy; Dana of Dr. Omed discussing biblically-correct marriage; Meg of Blog Cabin recounting a junior high date with a memorable twist, and how that date is recalled by her former crush when she meets up with him years late, and MORE!  Fun for the whole family, assuming you have a grown-up family which is literate and fairly cool.  4:02:18 AM     comment [] trackback []   Rush Update   Here's an update to our post "Rush Helps a Crushed Student".  As you may recall, it dealt with a young man who called Rush's radio program to ask for help in dealing with his sociology professor.  The call began: CALLER: I am a 21-year-old college student. I go to Northern Illinois University, and I'm taking a class in sociology called marriage, family, and social change. And the class I'm in, the professor is widely biased, liberal feminazi. The first day of class she wrote up on the board, "there is no single definition of marriage," and underlined it. After sharing their joint indignation about the professor's underlining of a sentence on the blackboard, and her statement "don't call me Mrs.," Rush said: RUSH: [T]his feminazi instructor who has got all this trauma in her past and taking it out on you. What she's doing is burdening you with her shame. She's got some shame because the trauma that's happened to her in her life, and she's dumping it on you, and it's not yours. And so on. Anyway, alert reader Chris Vosburg visited the NIU site and . . . Wouldn't you just know it: Interestingly, there's no course at NIU entitled "Marriage, Family and Social Change," but there is a course called "Families and Social Change." I think the difference speaks volumes about the retentive abilities of the average dittohead.  It's taught by Maureen Sullivan, Ph.D., (from California's own UC Davis), whose "research has examined gender inequalities within families, and the possible solutions offered by alternative family structures." Yep, that's Sociology, all right. Chris felt that Professor Sullivan was entitled to know what was being said about her and her class, and sent her a link to the transcript.  He later heard back from her: she indicated that the student in question ("Joe") gets lots of time in class to air his views "precisely because he is in the minority," and she so is astonished that he would "turn to Rush Limbaugh." Why would Joe whine to Rush about being oppressed in his sociology class?  Well, an obvious possibility is that he wanted attention, and couldn't get any through positive acomplishments.  So, Joe used the currently fashionable "consevatives are being crushed by liberal colleges" victim mentality meme --  and it worked for him, since he got to appear on a national radio show.  The fact that Joe signed up for an elective class which the catalog says will "explore issues related to family life among diverse groups in the population, including variations in gender roles and behaviors" and then complained that it was exploring issues relating to family life among diverse groups in the population, seems to indicate that he took the class just so he could complain about it, and demand that the class not explore these issues any more.  Hardly the acts of somebody seeking an education, but totally in keeping with somebody wanting to be a demagogue like Rush when he grows up.  But maybe there's another reason that Joe called in to Rush's program . . . First, some background.  Reader glenstonecottage commented that Professor Sullivan should consider giving Joe a special assignment: Maybe you could assign Joe to do a research paper on his hero Rush's own marriage history. Betch he'd find out that the word "traditional" wouldn't quite apply.When it comes to actually observing "the sanctity of marriage" many of these wingnuts are about as "traditional" as the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart. And that encouraged me to explore Rush's biography.  Here are some highlights from it: 1966-1969: Attends  Cape Central High School, Cape Girardeau, MO.  "Limbaugh was a chubby debating student in high school, and he didn't date much."  1970: Receives a military classification of 1-Y (fit for service only in time of war), thus avoiding the draft.  Per Al Franken, brother David said that Rush "avoided the draft because of a pilonidal cyst at the base of the spinal cord in which excess tissue and hair may collect, causing discomfort and discharge."  1971: Moves to Pittsburgh to work for radio station KVQ, then is fired.  There are allegations that he was fired after being arrested for soliticing sex from a man.  Also, in 2003 a St. Louis man claimed that while a university student in 1971, he had an affair with Limbaugh that lasted for about 3 months.  The man opines that Rush is still gay, and his marriages were all shams. Sep 1977:  Marries Roxy McNeely, sales secretary at radio station WHB in Kansas City. Mar 1980:  Roxy McNeely files for divorce, citing "incompatibility".   No children were born from the marriage. 1983:  Marries Michelle Sixta, a Kansas City Royals stadium usherette. Dec 1988: Michelle leaves him during Christmas weekend.  No children were born from the marriage. May 1994:  Marries third wife Marta Fitzgerald, a 35-year-old aerobics instructor who was taking classes at the University of North Florida; she sent him an e-mail note asking how to deal with a Reagan-bashing professor.  The couple have no children. So, given that there are rumblings about trouble in the Rush/Marta marriage, I think we can see another possible reason why Joe might have asked Rush how he should deal with his traditional marriage-bashing professor . . .  not that there's anything wrong with that.    Oh, and from Roger Ailes we get news of Rush's latest assault on marriage.  It seems that Rush read a story in a San Francisco paper about a lesbian couple who were recently wed.  Here are the highlights fron the news article: From where they sit at their baby's bedside, under the blinking monitors and beeping alarms of UCSF's neonatal intensive care unit, Lara Weiss and her partner, Nora Wynne, have hardly had time to think about getting married. A month ago, after a torturous pregnancy, Weiss was airlifted to San Francisco from their Humboldt County home in Arcata for the premature birth of their twins. One of the tiny baby girls had a birth defect that meant she had to undergo major surgery before she could take a breath on her own. But when a friend called last weekend to say he had gone to City Hall and gotten them a number holding their place in line to join the historic parade of same-sex couples getting married in San Francisco, they had to do it. Last Sunday, they took their other twin, Zea, for her first outing and pulled themselves away from Luna's bedside briefly to make their 10-year partnership official in the eyes of the state.  Luna had surgery two weeks ago, and is "doing better than either mother had allowed herself to hope for," but isn't out of danger yet.  The two women have been spent the time since Luna's operation in the neo-natal ICU, and hadn't thought about getting married until the friend told him he had gotten them a number, and encouraged them to be part of the historic event. "He told us, "Come on. It will be good for the kids to know you're married.'' So, a heart-warming story about two people with a seriously ill child getting the chance to get married.  What does Rush say about ? The ...article tells the story of a lesbian couple that left one of their twin babies at UCSF's neonatal ICU, where she had major surgery so she could breathe unaided, so they could go get a marriage license.  They left this little baby in dire straits so they could put themselves first.  What about the little girl in this story?  What about this baby?  You know, if a heterosexual couple did this, it would be called child abuse.  You could almost read it that way. Well, you could if you were a nutcase, and were burdening the women with your own trauma about being a closeted gay man.  Because no normal, sane person would ever say that a heterosexual couple who left the hospital for a couple of hours to get married was committing "child abuse."  It's sad to see Rush back on the drugs. 2:37:37 AM     comment [] trackback []

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