An emailed comment

This comment was too large for the comment section so it was emailed to me. I am passing it on. The writer lives in Arizona.

Hi,

Good comments. Sarah Palin scares the shit out of me. As far as I'm concerned, she is very dangerous. And her choice of the term "blood libel" was very unfortunate. I realize that that expression doesn't mean what it used to, but many Jews still find it very offensive. How did she come up with that expression anyway? I don't know if she has some advisers who are just bad advisers or if she just doesn't listen to them.

At least Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh who are also a BIG part of the problem seem to be much more intelligent than she. Unfortunately, they are so hell bent for leather to scare voters that they spout their vitriol, half truths and mis-information and so many people don't take the time to understand just how biased Beck and Limbaugh are. They just believe everything Beck and Limbaugh have to say. And to know that Palin has joined those two at Fox News - one of the most biased news organizations in the country is a very scary thought.

There was a study done with the results released recently that was poling people- the study was done by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes. The study’s aim was to determine whether the Citizens United case before the Supreme Court, which allowed unlimited campaign contributions from corporations and unions, affected people’s perception of the truthfulness of the information being fed in the midterm elections.

The study wasn’t intended to be concerned with where people got their information, just how accurate it seemed. But the researchers noticed a peculiar thing: Although some Americans were misinformed, they generally became more informed if they consumed more news — with one major exception. The study found that the more people watched Fox News, the less informed they became.

Add to all this and not that it would have changed anything, AZ just last year made it legal for any citizen to carry a concealed hand gun without a permit. And some people are stupid enough to think they could / would have responded to this jerk fast enough to have made a difference and not to have added to the problem - so more people are buying hand guns since the tragedy - I don't think so!!! At least in the past and in some states, if you want to carry a concealed weapon, you have to pass training every couple of years, be certified and verify that you need to carry. He passed the background check to buy a gun because he was never treated / hospitalized for his mental illness. So now we have a bunch of people running around who have no idea how to handle a hand gun, who don't practice by target shooting and who say having a gun makes them feel more safe. How dumb.

Sarah Palin is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the Safari Club International convention in Reno next week. The group’s website says Palin will address the politics of hunting along with discussing her “past hunting experiences.” Somehow seems fitting. Glad I'm not living there right now.

Let's hope the rhetoric becomes more civil and less vitriolic. Yes, politics have always been contentious, but what people keep forgetting is that with the Internet and 24 hour "news" channels (most of whom are so biased it isn't funny) that anyone's comments start circling the world in a few moments rather than in days or weeks and that the things we say and do have a bigger impact and reach more people faster than in any time in history.

More Fundie "fun"

Speaking only for myself, I have long thought the phrase “he’s a good Christian” referred to great virtue on the part of the person so described, someone who embodied the values of neighbourly love, compassion, honesty, and peace.

Seems it is time for me to revise my definition of a “good Christian”: see below for more examples from www.fstdt.com of what makes a “good Christian” today.

NB: there are a couple of quotes here from fundie muslims, but the mindset difference between them and fundie christians is so small as to be immaterial: they both ascribe to the notion that their interpretations of their own ancient book should be forced upon the rest of us, and those of us who resist or demur should receive horrible punishments, either here or in the afterlife…or both.

“women should dress modestly; if a woman dresses like a whore and gets raped, she is partly responsible herself” (No, she is not. The entire blame rests with the man who makes the choice to force a sex act on an unwilling woman, no matter how she is dressed. The definition of “modest dress” is subjective…what is modest to me might be provocative to you. But let’s just suppose for a minute that a specific immodestly dressed woman actually is a whore: how does this give a man the right to rape her? Even whores have the right to refuse, you know. )

“Of course the Middle Ages were a time of great prosperity, cultural advances, and general well being, as anybody who has cracked open a history book written in the last century should know, it was Rome that was oppressive to innovation and cultural change.” (You’re being sarcastic, right? The Middle Ages…also known as the “Dark Ages”…were a time of ignorance and superstition, repression and cruelty. Rome, as in the Roman Empire, had long been gone from Europe and the British Isles…but Rome had brought such innovations as running water (via aqueducts), paved roads, bathing and cleanliness, things pretty much unknown during the Dark Ages, or repudiated as works of devil. Rome, during the Dark Ages, referred to the Church of Rome (Catholic Church), which was pretty much all there was for Christianity. The Church of that period rejected as heresy any kind of science that did not conform to the bible. Galileo is perhaps one of the more famous examples of this. Thanks to the Church, the Middle Ages were a time of repression, torture, ignorance and superstition.)

Terri (Schiavo) was only disabled. Are you telling me that disabled people should be exterminated at for our convenience? If so you would have been great friends with Hitler! (She was not “only disabled.” Her brain had died and it consisted mostly of fluid. She was not disabled, she was dead and being kept artificially alive. Where were you when Tirhas Habtegiris was unplugged from her respirator against not only the wishes of her family, but her own expressed wish? That’s right…under the auspices of a law signed by GW Bush himself (and supposedly a christian), a Texas hospital removed a respirator from a conscious and responding patient against her wishes; she died 15 minutes later. Why did they do such a thing? Because her condition was terminal and she had no insurance. Under the Texas “Futile Care Law,” signed into law by Georgieboy himself, if you are too poor to pay for medical care and your condition is not expected to improve, the hospital can pull the plug on you without your permission! http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/14/151930/63
And where were you and your “only disabled” argument when six-month-old Sun Hudson died the same way and for the same reason? http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/healthlawprof_blog/2005/03/lifesupport_sto.html

Folk singer Eric Schwartz says it so well:
So you’ll execute a person and then protect the single cell?
But mercy kill the terminally ill and you’re going straight to Hell?
Well, I don’t know much about the word of God, far be it from me
But I can tell you what it ain’t, that’s hypo-Christianity.)

i dont see why someone would believe in darwin but not belief in the devil, the devil is real and you can see what evil he reaks on this world everyday. the devil makes war and desease and famine and yet you claim darwin made this? how does darwin explain evil and how it comes to this world? He cant because he didnt know because the devil is real and darwin isnt. Satan was proably working through the devil to test the faith of christians well i stand strong behind my faith, its the only real thing darwin is just made up. (This is one of the better examples of confusion and conflation I have found in the quotes on the site. Not only does this person have the language skills of a poorly instructed child, there is no evidence of reasoning skills at all. She seems to have cast Darwin in the role of a deity with the devil as his opposite number. She then seems to think that evolutionists believe that Darwin created war and disease and that he somehow is responsible for explaining evil and its origins. All of this is followed by her assertion that Darwin doesn’t (and perhaps didn’t?) exist! Not only is she confused about evolution, she seems to be a bit muddled about her own dogma: “Satan was proably [sic] working through the devil…” When did Satan and the devil split into two separate entities? The only thing more sad that the pure waste of this person’s intellectual potential is the fact that she will spread this ignorance to others and one day inflict it upon her own helpless, vulnerable children. )

No convert to Christianity has ever left the faith. The church is a group of believers. (Right…if a person converted and later left the faith, he wasn’t a TRUE convert, so he doesn’t count. Is that how it works? Tell me, when you count christians, do you include these apostates, since they once professed faith? Or do you leave them out because they weren’t TRUE christians to begin with? As far as the church being a group of believers, that may seem true on the surface, but if you’ve ever looked over a congregation and counted the obviously bored, the sleeping, and the daydreaming, you’d know that notion is stone dead.)

There is some Biblical thought that heaven is located in Orion and for the scientist there is a pure white light which comes from this region which cannot be diffracted into the rainbow of colours as normal white light. This would be pure white light from God. Heaven is a real physical place. There is no point to a spiritual heaven. Yes heaven is Gods residence. When probation is up and sin is dealt with, heaven will be relocated to this very earth, isn’t that exciting. (I find it very interesting how many of these people who self-identify as christians have no idea what their book says and just make up stuff they like and say it comes from the book. I promise a reward of $100 American dollars to the first person who can find scripture that clearly states (not your own woolly interpretation) that heaven is in Orion or there is a light from Orion that cannot be separated into the light spectrum of colours, or the physical location of Heaven (need address and directions). Leave the info in a comment and I’ll get back to you.)

The sun circles the Earth because it is smaller than the Earth, as is evident in Koranic verses. Have you ever seen how the sun moves? I have seen the sun moving. The sun makes one move every 24 hours. What I say is based on Koranic science. He bases his arguments on the kind of science that I reject categorically -- the modern science that they teach in schools. This science is a heretic innovation that has no confirmation in the Koran. No verse in the Koran indicates that the Earth is round or that it rotates. Anything that has no indication in the Koran is false. (OK, this is islamic fundamentalism, but if you just substitute the word “biblical” for “Koranic,” you’ll see a statement that closely follows some of the stuff posted in my last blog entry. As said before, I make no distinction between christian and islamic fundamentalism: they are merely different colours of the same garment.)

Witch, you have no idea of what Christianity is. That is why atheists are stupid. You can take your Wiccan beliefs and put em where the sun don't shine. Go ahead and smirk. Satan is jumping for joy because he has so many of you deceived. Worship him, that is what he wants most, is your worship and every time you deny God you are bowing to the devil. I hope you are happy in your self delusions. (Aren’t christians supposed to be loving, kind, help-your-neighbour sorts? Didn’t Jesus tell them to love their neighbours as themselves, and to turn the other cheek? Such hostility! Is this what passes for a christian today? Aside from being horribly misinformed (Wiccans and atheists are not even remotely aligned), this poster does not seem to embody any of Christ’s teachings.)

We took prayer out of schools,The ten commandments out of schools and courts,countless people use God's name in vain...and your shocked we have all of these horrible natural diasters in America?(I have to wonder about all the terrible spelling, grammar and sentence construction that permeates the posts from these fundies. Is it a result of home schooling? Or simply an indication of lack of intellect? This person must have missed the “non sequitur” portion of her English composition classes, not to mention homonyms, punctuation and capitalization.

I attended public school in southern California from 1952 to 1964. At no time did we ever say prayers in class (although the Pledge of Allegiance was mandatory). I never saw the 10 commandments in my schools either, and I can’t recall ever seeing them in a courthouse or courtroom. And my mother could curse to make a sailor blush…and throughout all of this, the closest thing to a natural disaster that befell my community in that dozen years was the typical drought conditions of a semi-arid region and the occasional mudslide when the rains finally came and filled up the drought-caused cracks in the earth. This, of course, was before this malignant, creeping fascist fundyism came along…makes ya wonder, doesn’t it?)

Both of your theories are blasphemy. Gods do not destroy life, but care for it and worry for it.
(It’s pretty obvious that this person has never cracked open the Old Testament or read any part of Revelations…and is woefully ignorant of faiths outside christianity, as well. There are plenty of myths that show gods destroying life from Shiva the Destroyer of the Hindu faith to Jehovah and his floods and fires and plagues and wars. How can a person know nothing of his own holy book and still profess to adhere to its dogma? When did christians get the OK to make up stuff and call it christianity?)

THE U.S. IS A CHRISTIAN NATION UNTIL OBAMA GETS IN..SOON WE WON'T BE ABLE TO SAY PRAISE GOD IN PUBLIC
(Uh, no it is not. The framers of the Constitution were not christians, they were Deists, they specifically repudiated the notion of America as a christian nation in the Treaty of Tripoli, and they wrote into the Constitution language designed to keep the church and state separate. And what does Obama have to do with being unable to say “praise god” in public? Oh, I know, you are one of those stubbornly misinformed morons who think, because he has an Arabic name, he must secretly be Muslim, right? I know a black woman in South Africa named Juanita…does that mean she is secretly a Mexican?)

Whites evolved from the more intelligent chimp, Blacks the more primitive ignorant gorilla and Asians from the orangutan. (I find it impossible to believe than anyone can really be this incredibly stupid…not just stupid enough to believe such nonsense, but to be stupid enough to post it on the internet for the world to see. The only thing stupider would be for this person to tattoo “I am a racist” on his forehead and then take a leisurely stroll in Soweto…or Detroit.

Why is it so hard for some people to grasp the idea that man is not descended from apes but that humans and apes have a common ancestor? Lions, tigers, and house cats all have a common ancestor…house cats didn’t descent from lions, they simply share an ancestor as do humans and apes. Why is this so hard for some people to comprehend?)

The theory of evolution is supported almost completely by atheists...and atheists don't have just a great track record for telling the truth. Lying comes natural for them, as they don't believe in The 10 Commandments and see nothing wrong with lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, etc....because, hey, we're all just dumb machines that operate by random chemicals bouncing into each other. To them, (or many of them) telling lies and killing Christians is a good thing because they hate Christians and wish we were dead. (The last time I looked, the Pope stated that evolution is not incompatible with scripture and that the Catholic Church endorses evolution. No sane person with more than one functioning brain cell is going to say the Pope is an atheist. It is obvious that this poster needs to get the beam out of his own eye before commenting on the mote in the eye of another. The entire statement about atheists is untrue and in violation of the commandment prohibiting bearing false witness. Personal ethics do not require religious prohibitions but emotional maturity: to refrain from bad behaviours out of fear of punishment is the way of the emotionally immature child; to refrain from bad behaviours because of an internalized sense of right and wrong (no punishments threatened or rewards offered) is the way of an adult.)

Hey be glad I'm not Pope, if I were, I'd call for a general crusade and then when we'd won, I'd ban Mormonism, and JWism, burn down their meeting halls and execute their leaders
(More christian love. Seems this person needs to crack open a history book and look to the results of previous crusades. But there’s always some mindless zealot eager to murder, maim, pillage and burn in the name of Jesus, eh?)

There is NO contradiction whatsoever in The Bible anywhere. Judas hung himself through strangulation via disembowelment (1. So many contradictions there are too many to name here. Open the book and read a few pages and you are sure to find some. 2. How does that work? He disembowelled himself and then used his intestines as a rope to hang himself? You should be very careful here that you don’t strangle on a loop of your own intestines, with your head shove so far up there…)

Nowhere (in the bible) does God condone or encourage genocide. Genocide is the killing of a group of people for who they are, God only commanded the killing of people for what they did. Also, totally innocent people do not exist. (So, what did the babies do that was worthy of the death penalty? Sodom, Gomorrah, Jericho, the flood…what were the heinous crimes of the infants and children too young to yet comprehend good and evil? Totally innocent people do exist, even today. We call them babies. But of those of us who do know right from wrong…are you saying that ANY transgression renders us worthy of annihilation from your god? Makes striving to avoid sin rather pointless, don’t you think?)

Atheism is a religion which is trying to pull the wool over our eyes by pretending its doctrines are affirmed by evolution, thus giving us the FALSE illusion that Atheism = Science. (There is so much WRONG in this sentence, it is amazing! First of all, by definition, atheism is not a religion…it means “without god(s).” So, if an atheist is a person who has no god, how is it a religion since a religion requires a god (or at least a doctrine)? Atheism has no doctrine aside from a lack of belief in gods/supernatural beings. The atheist’s repudiation of the concept of god is not affirmed by evolution…they are totally unrelated. Atheism has nothing to do with science, although atheists pretty much believe scientific explanations for things (as opposed to supernatural explanations). (BTW, a “false illusion” could be defined as reality, since if the illusion is false, it isn’t real.) Atheism and science may be comfortable in bed together, but they are far from the same thing.

[We legally recognise gays. Gays can have a gay marriage here in Britain, there are gay nightclubs all over Britain and the British public are tolerant of homosexuals. Why is it that we don't get these earthquakes? Are we special?] "Why is it that we don't get these earthquakes yet?" the element of surprise in the divine punishment is the most amusing (Wishing harm on an entire population is evil. Delighting in the pain and hurts of others is even more evil. So, if your god derives amusement from toppling brick buildings on little babies and feeble old women, your god is evil. And if you derive amusement from such a thing, so are you.)

A closing thought: "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction." --Blaise Pascal

Just a Huckin' an' a Jivin'

I thought that America could not be more shamed than when Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks came to light and he was forced to resign. Next, I watched the entire Republican Party and their sycophants turn a private, non-political act into a scandal, spending more than a billion tax dollars…money that could have fed hungry children or increased the meagre Social Security stipend to our elderly…and dragging the office of the presidency through the mud because of a brief marital affair…I didn’t think it could get worse than that! Then, the GOP fielded a complete moron whose history was one of profligacy, alcohol abuse, cheating the government, and who displayed the intellect of an amoeba, the compassion of a rock and the ethics of a starving lion. I never believed, especially after the outcry over Clinton’s non-political moral shenanigans, that someone so morally challenged and ethically bankrupt as George W. Bush could be elected to the presidency, but thanks to as little help from his friends…and most especially the friends and appointees of his brother (governor of Florida, the state that decided the election), a brainless, clueless, bumbling moron ended up in the White House.

At that point, I didn’t think it could get worse, but the Idiot Child’s handlers fooled me: They got the moron to lie to the electorate, start a war, and then engage in some sleight-of-mouth to make the citizens believe that the war, which had swiftly become a jungle-free Vietnam, was over despite increasing casualties. Surely, the Greedy Old Party could not top this!

Well, it seems they can. After eight years of being manipulated, lied to, and having their best interests ignored by the absolute worst president ever to tarnish America’s image in the eyes of the world, Americans are finally able to vote for a replacement. Unfortunately, one of the frontrunners in the GOP appears to be an even worse version of the brain dead moron who has been sitting in the White House for the last seven years: Mike Huckabee.

From everything I have read, Huckabee is a rigid right winger who not only believes that his personal set of beliefs and prejudices should be the moral compass of the country, he believes that the individual rights of the citizens should be subordinate to those prejudices and beliefs. Herewith a recent news article about Huckabee and my thoughts on the points highlighted:

Now that he's a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, he's being asked anew about some of the views and comments he expressed in the survey by The Associated Press. Over the weekend, he said he wouldn't retract answers in which he advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased funding for finding a cure and said homosexuality could pose a public health risk — though he said today he might phrase his answers "a little differently."

So, he would soft-peddle his delivery without changing his position, a position that has no basis in fact and violates the very freedoms guaranteed by the US Constitution. How does homosexuality pose a public health risk? If I sit next to a person on a bus who has active tuberculosis, I stand a chance of catching the disease…that’s a public health risk. But homosexuality? HIV/AIDS? Not a chance.

What the man wants to do is create ghettos into which HIV+ people and homosexuals, regardless of their HIV status, thrown. Then, he opposes funding for a cure for AIDS. So, in the plainest language possible, he wants to put everyone who is HIV…babies who were born with it, women who contracted the disease from their husbands, homosexuals, people who were infected through a blood transfusion…in a place isolated from the rest of the citizens. Then, because homosexuals might pose a health risk (how? does he think homosexuality is contagious or that being homosexual automatically predisposes one to AIDS?), they get to be unwilling guests of government as well. And then, to top it all off, after all these people are isolated from the rest of the population because of either their sexual orientation or their disease status, Huckabee doesn’t want to spend any money on finding a cure for the disease.

OK…so how are these people to live? Who will care for them as their untreated disease takes them inexorably towards death? And as the disease continues to spread in the general population (you can’t identify them all, HIV doesn’t give you pus-filled vesicles on your face or purple buboes by which you can be easily identified), more and more people will be forced to leave productive jobs and enter the isolation camps, who is going to pay for their upkeep?

Wouldn’t the burden to the tax payer ultimately be less if the homosexuals and HIV+ citizens were left as they are and the government devoted serious funds to finding a cure for the scourge? But, why would a presidential candidate want to think that far ahead? Let’s just throw the faggots, diseased or not, into a ghetto and let them die of their affliction! Oh, and anybody else who contracted “their” disease, regardless of how. Moron.

Some of the words in his answers to the questionnaire are indeed strong.

Asked about gays in the military, for example, he didn't just reject the idea but added: "I believe to try to legitimize that which is inherently illegitimate would be a disgraceful act of government. I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk."

We don’t know any such thing. First of all, the fastest growing HIV+ segment of the US population are heterosexual teens. Secondly, here in sub-Saharan Africa, we know that HIV/AIDS is not a homosexual disease. If you look at the education campaigns, you find that they are universally directed to young heterosexual couples. In fact, in many of the black communities, extremely thin women are shunned as possibly being AIDS victims! Homosexuality poses no public health risk until and unless it can be proven that homosexuals can passively infect people…with anything.

Secondly, one would think that a homophobe of Huckabee’s magnitude would welcome gays in the military…even conscript them. Instead of spending boatloads of money on safety gear and expensive technological toys, just send the gay guys out to find the mines, the bombs, the sniper nests. Huckie could get them out of the general population permanently that way, save a few heterosexual soldiers lives, and a bunch of government money in the bargain.

But the reality is, why shouldn’t homosexuals serve in the military? Is there something inherent in homosexuality that causes the inaccurate aiming of a rifle? An inability to drive a tank? Or perhaps Huck fears that a gay contingent in the military would bitch and moan about the drabness of the uniforms, causing discontent among the troops? It can’t be the fear of the gay men being sexually available to the other men, could it? I mean, there are female soldiers available to the men (and getting pregnant, for crying out loud!), so it can’t be sex between the troops that has him all cranked up, can it?

It’s just his homophobia talking…and he’s so punitive in his viewpoints, so draconian in his beliefs as to what to do with homosexuals (lock them in a ghetto with HIV patients), as to make me wonder just what it is he really fears. Maybe he has these urges…

Called for the elimination of political action committees and campaign contributions from lobbyists. He also said candidates should not be allowed to receive contributions until one year before an election and said there should be limits on the amount of out-of-state money they could accept…As Arkansas governor, Huckabee formed a political action committee based in Virginia to raise money for non-federal candidates that allowed him to travel and raise his profile for a potential presidential run. The Hope for America PAC shut down earlier this year as Huckabee entered the White House race.

OK…so he can have a PAC to make himself visible enough to be able to float his name as a presidential candidate, but nobody else can. Can anybody pronounce H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-T-E?

Said he would not support any tax increases if elected to the Senate. Huckabee's record of raising some taxes as Arkansas' governor has drawn fire from fiscal conservatives in the presidential race.

Well, he can follow Georgie’s footsteps and float the biggest budget deficit in the history of the world. You can reduce taxes to nothing as long as you are willing to increase the deficit. But it would seem Huck’s even more traditional than that…with a history of raising taxes during his governorship, he now asks us to believe that the Huckabee leopard has changed its spots. Either way, it’s a bad deal…either he is lying or he’s looking to increase Georgie’s record-breaking deficit. Perfect presidential material…a profligate or a prevaricator…or both.

When asked whether the U.S. should take any action to kill Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Huckabee replied: "The U.S. should not kill Saddam Hussein or anyone else."

Except HIV/AIDS patients, who should be quarantined and no attempts be made to find a cure for their disease.

Rejected the idea of women in combat "because of my strong traditional view that women should be treated with respect and dignity and not subject to the kinds of abuses that could occur in combat."

His strong traditional view trumps a woman’s constitutional right to self-determination? OK, so what other traditional views about women does he thinks he has a right to impose on the female half of the population? Send them home to stay barefoot, pregnant, and tied to the kitchen sink? Restrict them to “traditional” female occupations like nursing and teaching? Rescind their right to vote? One man’s “treated with respect and dignity and not subject to…abuses…” may well be seen as patronizing paternalism by the object of his “respect.” I’m flesh and bone and have a fully functioning brain…how about letting me make my own choices, Mikey?

Said living together out of wedlock "is demeaning to the highest expression of human love and commitment. I reject it as an alternate lifestyle, because it robs people of the highest possible relationship one can experience: marriage."

Huh? In a country that sees half of its marriages end in divorce, (and nobody with more than two brain cells believes that the other half are blissful), marriage is “the highest possible relationship one can experience”? Not bloody likely. People cohabit for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is a mock-marriage. Who knows why couples live together, sometimes for decades, without formalization? Whose business is it but theirs?

Said he believed no one has a constitutional right to an abortion and supported requiring minors to obtain parental consent. Huckabee also said he supported requiring doctors to discuss abortion alternatives and a waiting period...Huckabee's vocal opposition to gay marriage and abortion have attracted evangelical Christians' support and vaulted him to the top of the field in Iowa.

One of the most precious of American freedoms is the right to freely choose you own religion. But some people seem to think that, hand-in-hand with that right to choose comes a right to impose one’s own religious sensibilities on others. This is the crux of the abortion issue, believe it or not. You see, if your religion believes that personhood is bestowed at conception because the soul is infused at that moment, then you believe the product of conception, regardless of its state of development, is a person and killing it is murder. If, on the other hand, you don’t believe the soul is infused until a later time…or you don’t believe the soul even exists…then abortion is simply a medical procedure. Either way, one’s religious convictions drives the opinion, and none of us have the right to impose our religious convictions…or prohibitions…on others as it violates their religious rights.

Notifying parents of a teen’s abortion? For something that seems so right and so simple on the surface, this really is a knotty issue. The argument goes that if a parent has to be notified and consent taken for something like an appendectomy, why does an invasive surgical procedure like an abortion not require parental consent?

Well, the simple fact is, many teens don’t live in benevolent, understanding, compassionate families ala TV sitcom households. And if you have never been a teen who was legitimately afraid of her parents, then it may be difficult to wrap your mind around the fact that there really are kids out there whose safety…even lives…could be endangered by the revelation of a pregnancy. And, until a reliable crystal ball is on the marketplace, we simply have no way of knowing which teens are just exaggerating the presumed reaction of their parents and which teens literally face terrifying consequences if they tell. http://noon43.com/dearabby So, until that crystal ball is in hand, the safe choice is to allow the person who got pregnant to decide what to do about it…including whether or not to tell her parents.

Now, the subject of gay marriage is another of Mikey’s issues. Absent any intelligent debate on the matter, Americans have been herded towards the notion that there is something inherently wrong with same-gender marriages. The reason they have been fed it that it somehow threatens marriage which, in and of itself, is a ludicrous notion. If anything, gay marriage strengthens the whole concept of marriage in a time when many heterosexual couples find no reason to enter the institution. Same sex couples who marry are proclaiming to the world that the institution is desirable, not something to be shunned. Of course, Mike Homophobee may just be wanting to punish gay people by robbing gay “people of the highest possible relationship one can experience: marriage.” http://www.bidstrup.com/marriage.htm

But some of his earlier comments offer a harder-edged presentation of those stances than he has presented as he's tried to portray himself as a conservative who won't "scare the living daylights" out of moderates and independents…I think the model he saw that had been successful in other Southern states was this very hard right message and that's what seemed to be the most natural for him," … “He's become much smarter about successfully using language that expresses views without being hard-edged”…

Can we say “shuck and jive”? Or should that be “Huck and jive”? Cloak the truth in dissembling language but step not back from the punitive, paternalistic platform. Let’s try another applicable phrase: “control freak.”

Huckabee's 1992 comments on isolating AIDS patients run counter to a statement he released last month calling for increased federal funds to find a cure. Huckabee says the earlier remarks came at a time when there was confusion about how AIDS could be transmitted.

If I roll my eyes one more time, I’m afraid they are gonna get stuck up there. Gimme a break here…the man cannot admit he was wrong and make appropriate apologies? I was around in 1992, in fact I was working at a company that was doing research into HIV. Even then we knew that you didn’t get AIDS by sitting next to an HIV positive person on a bus!!

Can’t he just say “I was ignorant, I said stupid things in my ignorance, and I’m sorry. I’ll try to be more enlightened in the future.”? No, the gasbag has to try to rationalize and justify what he said rather than just admit he was wrong and apologize for it.

Said he had never smoked marijuana or "experimented with any illegal drug." In fact, he said he had never used any tobacco products because of "a very sensitive allergy" and would support a smoking ban in public places.

And this is important because?? I also duly note that he is careful to say he has not experimented with any illegal drug. Is this some clever dissembling to hedge against someone alleging he may have abused legal drugs? Otherwise, why bother to make such a clear distinction?

Opposed passing a law that would give workers time off to care for an ailing family member.

So, if your child is dying of leukaemia, or your wife is confined to bed rest during the last weeks of her pregnancy or your father is gasping his last from a brain tumour, tough nougies, buddy, get your nose back to that corporate grindstone or you’ll be unemployed on top of all your other troubles, right? Gee, this shows some serious compassion for the individual American, eh?

When asked about the nomination hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Huckabee said: "I watched or listened to many hours of the Thomas hearings and was firmly convinced that the preponderance of testimony backed up Clarence Thomas."

The analytical portion of his brain must have been on holiday in Thailand when Anita Hill was testifying…

Called the federal welfare system "disgraceful" and said the burden should be shifted from the federal government to local communities.

Oh, that makes all kinds of sense. So, GM or Ford pulls out of a region, taking the majority of the local jobs away. Or a major manufacturing facility sends the work overseas, closing the main source of work in an area. Or a mine is closed or some natural disaster occurs, sending the local economies into a tail spin, leaving the people hungry and unemployed and needing government assistance just to survive. Exactly where is the tax base that is supposed to fund that welfare burden?

The whole concept of a federal system is to allow richer communities to help the poorer ones, a burden which may remain constant in some areas, but inevitably fluctuates with changes in the economy and natural phenomenon. To cast such a burden back onto the local economies, which may have been flattened by a series of tornadoes or desiccated by the jobs being shipped offshore, is to further stratify the society, creating increasing layers of poor and marginalized people while allowing richer communities to increase their wealth. The milk of human kindness clearly does not flow in Mike Huckabee’s breast.

So, the question becomes, does America need another Dubya, this one with a brain and agenda of his own? And will Americans actually elect a rigid, inflexible, unfeeling control freak who will be their friend and supporter only as long as they can continue flowing tax dollars into his government? Will the Republican Party find some ethics and try to field a candidate who will actually be good for America…or will they pick the guy they think will win the presidency by fair mean of foul. I mean, it worked with Shrub, didn’t it?

Since we don’t have those crystal balls yet, only time will tell.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071212/ap_on_el_pr/huckabee_survey