“From blocking health care reform to gutting environmental laws to busting unions and pushing private prisons, it’s a right wing rapid fire turkey shoot!”
Shoot-em-up Charlie takes a look at the killing of Trayvon Martin and what may be behind the “Stand Your Ground” laws that have spread around the United States. Please be warned, hoodies are featured in this cartoon. Learn all about the NRA and ALEC, that sneaky behind the scenes puppet-master. A Mark Fiore political animation.
Then, if you want to feel even more nauseous, check out my postExtortion: The terrible Citizens United effect. Between that and the above video, you should be feeling pretty motivated to vote for progressive candidates, come November.
Abortion providers have been threatened and killed, radical laws are being introduced, and more recently, a Wisconsin Planned Parenthood building was bombed. Gee, that could be why the term “War on Women” became the Twitter hashtag used to describe the assault on women’s reproductive rights, ya think?
The FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are involved in the latest investigation, and an arrest has been made of a man who placed a handmade bomb on the clinic’s window sill.
There was a surveillance video of someone placing the explosive device at the scene, and of an SUV that was in a crash that occurred not long after the Planned Parenthood explosion. The man involved in the accident was arrested.
New Rule: No more anti-gay rules, like the law they just passed in St. Petersburg. Via ABC News:
The new law penalizes what proponents say is the promotion of homosexual activity among children, but detractors say it is part of a wider effort to persecute homosexuals in Russia’s second largest city.
So “the propaganda of homosexuality and pedophilia among minors” is now against the law in St. Pete. I guess p.r. for pedophiles is big there. And we all know that Teh Gays are all sickos who reject adult relationships but can’t resist children.
What year is this again?
Gay rights activists say it would criminalize even reading, writing or speaking about gay, lesbian, or transgender people.
Yes, that’s right folks, saying, reading, or writing the word “Tchaikovsky” will turn you gay. And doing any of those things could cost you thousands of dollars in fines.
For a very long time now, the GOP has divided America with their self-righteous insistence on legislating religion, their own beliefs, and illogical reliance on what they feel is moral superiority. But their “us vs. them”, our-way-only attitude is destructive, no matter how they label it.
The War on Women, the GOP’s hypocritical intrusive government overreach, under the guise of “our morals are better than your morals”, “our god is more valid than your god (or lack thereof)” have become so invasive, so prevalent, that thankfully, more and more (badly needed) commentary is making its way out there, including by Rachel Maddow (on a regular basis).
But over the last 30 years or so, something has happened to reshape the country’s moral geography. Everyone knows about the rise of Moral Majority-style Christian evangelicals as a potent force in right-wing politics. It injected a certain aggressive moralism into our political discourse and led to campaigns against abortion rights, homosexual rights, sexual freedom and other issues perceived as and then framed as moral matters. As a result, our politics became “moralized”; they were transformed into a contest of one set of values pitted against another. [...]
One can see this division in something as simple as the denigration of the term “liberal,” the “L” word, with its attendant idea that to be compassionate, caring and tolerant — virtues that had been celebrated, if only via lip service, by most Americans — is really to be mush-minded, weak and, more concretely, willing to give taxpayer largesse to the undeserving and lazy. (This was essentially the argument that some Republicans, such as former Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), used when they sought to deny an extension of unemployment benefits. [...]
If compassion is seen as softness, tolerance as a kind of promiscuity, community as a leech on individuals and fairness as another word for scheming, we are a harder nation than we used to be, and arguably a less moral one as well.In undergoing a revolution for the nation’s soul, we may have found ourselves losing it.
And who is suffering as a result? The poor, the middle class, women, minorities, LGBT groups, unions, children, disenfranchised voters… which means, of course, Democrats.
For a very long time now, the GOP has divided America with their self-righteous insistence on legislating religion, their own beliefs, and illogical reliance on what they feel is moral superiority. But their “us vs. them”, our-way-only attitude is destructive, no matter how they label it.
As Rutten points out, California voters are about to decide “whether or not to proscribe one of the central rituals of an entire religious community.” My state has hosted a succession of ballot propositions gone wild, or as the op-ed puts it, “direct democracy has gone stunningly wrong.”
…Americans are the rare people who regularly come to believe that their private moral revelations ought to be ratified in law.
It’s a particularly virulent form of self-righteousness, one that’s been with us since the earliest days of the Puritan settlement, when the legislation of virtue and prohibition of vice was supposed to usher in a new Eden. Good Augustinians that they were, the Puritan fathers shared his delusion that “error has no rights.” Convinced that they alone possess the truth — however eccentric or novel — some among us have gone on believing that to this very day. [...]
What’s at work here is a kind of narcissism empowered by the particular moral authority our current outlook grants to those who count themselves aggrieved. In this instance, the group behind the San Francisco proposition is made up of people who call themselves “intactivists” — you really can’t make this stuff up — and all seem to bear some sort of simmering resentment over a choice they believe their parents usurped from them.
That’s the sort of issue you work out in therapy, not at a polling place.
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