This sucks so far, they all should have come out firing the crazy. No one cares about earmarks and line item vetoes. And here’s a big miscalculation on Santorum’s and Newt’s part:
Neither of the Catholics has ash on their forehead.
How could they have overlooked this? Come out with ash on your forehead and you’ve effectively out-Tebowed the other crazy fuckers. It’s a no-brainer!
Update. Win from commenter Diana:
discussion over contraceptives is priceless. Ron Paul hits hits it out of the park: good analogy is guns. Guns don’t kill people, other people do using guns. Now if we didn’t have an immoral society, we wouldn’t need the pill. …
In other words, birth control pills don’t prevent conception, sluts keeping their legs shut do! If we weren’t a nation of sluts, we wouldn’t need the pill!
awesome
Raven
Remember, those mackerel snappers aren’t really christians except when it suits.
Baud
Someone’s going to be saying a few Hail Mary’s tomorrow.
Comrade Mary
I guess they can’t show up with ash on their foreheads because Biden’s already done it.
Mnemosyne
Hell, I had lunch with one of those evil Hollywood types this afternoon and he had a big schmear of ashes on his forehead. You can’t tell me that any librul commie Hollywood type is a more observant Catholic than Santorum or Gingrich!
jeff
I think it would scare a lot of fundamentalists. It scared me the first time I saw it (they didn’t use the ashes in the South when I was coming up. If they did, they didn’t leave church with it on their foreheads.)
Diana
discussion over contraceptives is priceless. Ron Paul hits hits it out of the park: good analogy is guns. Guns don’t kill people, other people do using guns. Now if we didn’t have an immoral society, we wouldn’t need the pill. …
In other words, birth control pills don’t prevent conception, sluts keeping their legs shut do! If we weren’t a nation of sluts, we wouldn’t need the pill!
awesome.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
How would TeeVee make-up affect the ashes? Melinda Henneberger had a huge, very black mark. Others I’ve seen on TV, including Biden and Mark Shields, have a faint grey smudge.
John O
Not enough Catholics to risk it.
Anne Laurie
Nah, I’m sure their handlers gamed out that they’d lose more hardcore anti-Papists than they’d gain “generally religious” votes. It’s a delicate needle to thread — Baptists and some megachurches are willing to make common cause with Catholics when it comes to beating up on women, gays & liberals, but they wouldn’t want their daughters marrying into the “cult” of the “Scarlet Woman of Rome”.
John O
Romney: Laura Ingraman.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@John O: My Tea-Bagger Catholic relatives will vote for notObama if s/he were Jewish, Mormon, Schismatic or Scientologist. I don’t know if it’s still true, but less than twenty-five years ago a college acquaintance from the wealthy suburbs of an Alabama city, I forget which, slowly and patiently explained to me that he was a Christian, as if the Catholic that I then was wouldn’t know what that was. Some of the talking heads have said that in the Deep South, Santorum’s Catholicism would be almost as big a liability as Mormonism.
PeakVT
Republicans seem bound and determined to give Democrats 60% of the female vote. I hope they succeed.
RossInDetroit
Ashes on the forehead would be a sure sign that one is not a vampire. The ashed are blessed. The undead would burst into flames at the touch.
MikeJ
@RossInDetroit: I think you’ve stumbled onto something here.
The Moar You Know
Santorum knows what that base wants. Romney is fucked.
The GOP is also fucked.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Google is lovely today in honor of Heinrich Hertz, who’d have been 155 had he lived that long. Today is also National Margarita Day (true story). After dinner (blue corn enchilada with shredded sirloin in mole sauce) the restaurant owner handed me a “coca cola to go” which was in fact the celebratory beverage in a go cup with a straw. He’s a good man and thus I’m prepared to read the live blogs of the debate.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
OK, I’m going to be 60 years old in July. I’ve read a lot of history: Medieval, Renaissance, Early Modern, Wars of Religion, all that crap. I went to school with a shitton of Catholics, some of whose parents, when the Poop said they didn’t have to eat fish on Friday any more, told them “Don’t you believe it!”
So how come this is the first I’m hearing about rubbing ashes on your forehead and wearing them around all day? What is this, India?
Lev
I gotta say, Rick ‘n Newt are doing the best tonight. Mitt hardly looks presidential and Ron Paul’s immigration answer was practically the definition of “senior moment.”
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Heinrich Hertz also died of infected teeth—like that guy whose death the rethugs were cheering because he didn’t skip buying food for his family that week and got the Tylenol instead of the high-priced antibiotics they prescribed his uninsured undeserving ass.
Raven
Yea, I was a truck driver in Vietnam and I COULD have gotten killed just as easy as a grunt but my odds were one hell of a lot better. Fucking fat newt is an expert on all these military matters because his step-father was in the Mekong Delta.
freelancer (iPhone)
Mitt just seconded Santorum’s notion that Hezzbollah is in Latin America. One of my best friends is from Gualdelajara, and I have others from South America. Where The Fuck is this claim coming from?! I need a citation.
garbo
@freelancer (iPhone): Citation? They don’t need no steeenkin’ citation. They say it out loud, that’s what makes it true.
Mnemosyne
@The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge:
Maybe your friends would take the day off school on Ash Wednesday so you didn’t see it? It’s always been A Thing for Catholics. I used to do it back when I was still a practicing Catholic, and I’m 42.
Satanicpanic
Santorum is getting upset about a theocratic regime. Uh huh.
pseudonymous in nc
Did Santorum get upset about what happened to Christians in Iraq?
jl
As I said in previous thread, Santorum does not seem to be aware that the major Iranian opposition groups assert the right of Iran to have a nuclear program.
The foreign policy section is really fantasy hour.
I think WoW computer jocks would give better foreign policy advice.
Edit: OK, I’ve had enough. I give up. Turning off the debate, Too much stupid and evil and silly fantasies and incoherence for me to absorb.
Svensker
@pseudonymous in nc:
No.
WereBear
I never thought I’d say this, but it’s truly worse than I thought.
Every Man’s Battle
What is it, you ask? Why, sexual temptation! I’m not talking about the wrong kind, either; there is no good kind!
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@pseudonymous in nc: Of course not. They were brown Christians, who don’t count.
Donut
@The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge:
Forreal? I am 40, was raised Catholic, but after Confirmation told my parents, “now that I’m an adult in the Church, I make the adult decision to not go to Mass.”
In my 17 years practicing Catholicism, I can’t recall an Ash Wednesday where people didn’t have ashes smeared on their heads. I know the ins and outs of the ritual and symbolism (I was also an altar boy until I was 15). Just sayin.
jl
Final comment: If they are going to go after birth control so ferociously, they should ban auto mobiles too. You know, a woman can drive off in one of those auto mobiles and find herself ruined. Horrors. Cars are Satan’s tools in the struggle for America, and we need to make sure not one dime of federal money goes to cars. Not one dime.
Only interesting idea tonight was when Newt said that if there was a religious mad man who might get control of nuclear weapons, NO preventative measure should be ruled out.
So, if Rih gets the GOP nomination, will Newt plan a coup?
noodler
Santorum had ashes on this morning at an event. I think there would be too much make up and bright lights on stage to maintain them for the debate tonight.
Diana
thanks for the update — I’m very flattered!
We had people come to work, here in godless Manhattan, with ash marks on their forehead.
Of course, this is godless Manhattan, so what they talked of was Cardinal Dolan and how he might be the next Pope.
An American cardinal as Pope and Rick Santorum as President? Truly that would be the American Theocracy incarnate.
may it never come to pass…
DanielX
@Diana:
Well, of course! And don’t forget, the reason we have a greater percentage of our population in jail than any other country isn’t because the laws are insane, it’s because we’re a nation of sinners and lawbreakers! Er….wait a minute.
Not me, you understand. Or you. It’s the sluts and brown people and deadbeats and bikers.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
Obviously I’m completely ignorant. I blame growing up in one of the bluest of blue cities, back before the recrudescence of religious nutbaggery. OTOH, our school district (Shoreline) apparently had NO black students, at least when I was in grade school and junior high. In high school we had two “exchange students” from Garfield (Seattle S. D.). (And one from South Africa, but she was a Boer.)
Anne Laurie
@The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge:
“Remember, man, thou art but dust: and unto dust you shall return”.
Getting that smudge on one’s forehead is a long-standing tradition (the ashes, in case anyone cares, are made by burning the leftover leaves from last year’s Palm Sunday); how long one wears the smudge is… open to interpretation. I grew up in a very Catholic neighborhood, in the 1950s/60s, where only a small minority didn’t have a dirty forehead by the end of Ash Wednesday. While you weren’t supposed to wash it off right after leaving the altar, the nuns at our parochial school told us it could be a venial sin to take too much pride in “flaunting” the public symbol of our private obedience. Adults who worked “in the city” (Manhattan) and/or “for the city” usually rubbed the mark into a faint dusting across their foreheads, for discretion. Especially the Irish Catholics, who were (not unreasonably) paranoid about being “outed” — those ‘no Irish need apply’ jobs were still a fresh memory extending into the 1940s in some pockets.
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
Didn’t know this. But then I was raised Southern Baptist, and we would have bruises on our forehead from getting dunked in too many shallow creeks. One day I said no mo of this shit, and was never dunked again. Praise be Earthmother!
Valdivia
@freelancer (iPhone):
it’s been going around for a while. It is true that in the Triborder area in South Am you had a strong presence that dates back to the bombing of the AMIA in Argentina the idea that they are taking over the whole continent to bomb us is ludicrous. There is an old New Yorker article about this, dating back to 2002.
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
@Valdivia:
I used to keep read about that area. supposed to be full of terrorists and spys, or something.
Gian
after reading the intro here. this is a GOP debate for the GOP faithful. the talk radio listening 27%
THEY care about earmarks because they’ve been told to care about earmarks. even if the earmark is something like the GOP local one at loma linda univeristy medical center for proton cancer treatment
some focus group poll must’ve told the leadership to harp on it in 2010…
Valdivia
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero):
it is in general a very unlawful area, like where people who are into illegal stuff gather so it is not surprising that you would end up with any kind of criminal element. And it is true that the Iranians were behind that bombing. But to jump form there to what these people are saying? God.
eemom
ashes to ashes, funk to funky, you know Major Tom’s a junky….
I confess, this is one I am proud of getting.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@eemom:
I do like Bowie.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis:
Maybe these candidates are just The Spiders from Mars and a brokered convention will nominate Ziggy Stardust.
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
@Valdivia:
LOL, they have to keep the rubes skeert of terrorists under their beds and behind every tree. I don’t think there has been a single case of any terrorist suspect being caught crossing our SW border. But there has to the north and Canada.
Valdivia
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero):
next it will be the Iran Hezbollah Chavez axis of evil. Kind of hard though since Chavez seems to not be long for this world.
SiubhanDuinne
@noodler:
The fuh? There’s no such thing as ashy makeup?
Citizen_X
I guaran-fucking-tee you that Colbert will have ashes on his forehead tonight.
28 Percent
@The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge: If you’ve ever been to a very Catholic friend’s house and seen strips of dried palm leaf, sometimes it’s braided palm leaf, stuck into picture frames or behind crucifixes & such, that’s for Ash Wednesday. The Sunday before Easter is Palm Sunday, on which these palm leaves are blessed and sent home with parishoners. Then everybody brings them in just before Lent the next year, the palm leaves are burned, and the ashes are smeared on everybody’s foreheads. Then everybody gives up chocolate – everybody always gives up chocolate – until Easter.
dollared
@The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge You must be kidding. I mean, it happens every year, to every practicing Catholic, on Ash Wednesday (Clue! Clue!), right after Fat Tuesday.
OK, how about this: did you notice all the signs up and down Aurora in Korean? There are Korean people living near you. Did you notice them?
dr. luba
@Citizen_X: He did.
dollared
@Valdivia: In the Triborder region? They call it Mesopotamia because it’s between two rivers, not because the Iraqis have taken over.
Really? There’s a big Muslim population in Northeastern Argentina?
Yutsano
@dollared:
THEY ARE?? I thought that was Klingon! :)