Responding to this WaPo piece that Komen is funding breast cancer screening at Planned Parenthood, LifeNews has a sad and breaks out some major-league bullshit:
Komen for the Cure has officially buckled to pressure from Planned Parenthood and 17 affiliates of the national breast cancer charity will provide grants for the abortion business this calendar year.
Komen had long been a subject of national controversy in which pro-life advocates initially boycotted Komen and then celebrated earlier this year as it appeared the breast cancer charity had made the decision to revoke funding for the abortion business. After massive public pressure, media attacks and lobbying from Planned Parenthood, Komen indicates the abortion business would be eligible for funding but did to say whether funding would be continued.
Leading pro-life groups had hoped Komen would keep their de-funding decision in place via a change in grant-making criteria making it so organizations like Planned Parenthood that do not do mammograms would no longer be eligible for so-called pass-through grants in which they merely provide referrals to legitimate medical centers and physicians who do.
If they are so convinced they are right on the issue, why must they LIE about EVERYTHING? The money is not going to fund abortions. It’s almost like we need a commandment against lying for these fundamentalist evangelical lunatics. Wait, what?
General Stuck
Shorter wingnuts – all facts are hereby declared opinions
mai naem
You have to ask why? Because they can. Because Joe Klein, Elizabeth Bumiller and Neal Conan will all say “but they both do it wahhhh.”
I watched Mittster’s address to the NRA and it was utterly depressing when he went into the hand over his heart stuff. Yeppers, the Mittster and co. are going to use the Top Ten Tunes from 2008 – There’s Obama’s Coming to Git Your Guns, Obama Obama he’s a Muslim Man, Obama, He’s Not From Here and ofcourse, Obama, He’s Gonna Steal Your Heart(and Your Lungs Too.) No doubt Jeremiah Wright’s “I Hate America” and Bill Ayers “The Day I Blew America Up” will become part of the rotation too.
Anoniminous
Ya know, it will only end in stomach cramps if you keep on expecting Evangelical Christians to obey the teachings and precepts of the religion they claim to follow.
Bruce S
@Anoniminous:
It’s like lecturing al-Qaeda on the true meaning of the Koran…
Suffern ACE
@mai naem: I watched a bit of that speech. An eternity on holding hands over the heart and I just couldn’t get outraged by it. Seriously, he’s just icy even when he’s trying to be maudlin. Bush I would clobber Romney. Dukakis and Kerry had more charisma. The problem, though, with running out 2008s hits is that you get John McCains numbers with them.
Jay S
Yea verily I say unto thee, all money is fungible. What ever funds you give to any one who sins will support not just the sinner by the sin itself!
ETA Let he who is without sin among you receive the first donation.
Ralfw
@General Stuck:
And all (our) opinions will now be facts
Anoniminous
@Bruce S:
al-Qaeda has an excuse. I mean, have you ever tried to read Arabic? It’s a bunch of goddamn squiggles. AND it ain’t got no vowels. It could be the Word of God© or it could be the owner’s technical manual and specifications for camels.
ETA: And I’m at it I might as well slander Judaism too. Like those nuts in Brooklyn who dress like the year is 1732 and they are living in Poland.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anoniminous: It is floor wax and a dessert topping.
Death Panel Truck
You provided a link to the ninth commandment. I was raised a Lutheran (I’m a Pastafarian now.) Bearing false witness is the eighth commandment in Luther’s Small Catechism.
Jus’ sayin’.
Punchy
Susan G. Who?
Omnes Omnibus
@Punchy: It is Susan B. Anthony. Weirdly, I went to college with a Susan Anthony. Different person, I think.
Unabogie
@mai naem:
Great stuff!
karen marie
The commentariat reject the notion that you can’t object to boycotts when you engage in them yourself, because — shut up, that’s why.
sfinny
@Death Panel Truck: Well the Holy Trinity catholic version is very different from the New Jerusalem version too. Hence the eventual atheism. But the HT has better pictures.
Omnes Omnibus
@sfinny: Only the King James was written by the Baby Jesus.
I will confess that I prefer the the KJV for its language. But I am an elitist.
RadioOne
They lie not because they must, but because they obviously can, and because nobody in the media gives a shit. MSNBC in particular has had a field day for years covering GOP lies as legitimate news.
sfinny
@Omnes Omnibus: I only read the KJB for a brief period of church hopping in my teens. Agree on the language but I never had to study it like the others (Holy Trinity in Sunday school and New Jerusalem in a college course).
Emdee
@karen marie: I liked this part of your link:
Why is he confident? Because shut up, that’s why.
piratedan
how can a religion whose main teacher preaches to the benefits of tolerance, forgiveness and empathy be so completely ignored by those who proclaim to follow him?
Anoniminous
@Omnes Omnibus:
The language is beautiful and the impact of the KJV on English prose was and is majorly huge.
However, as a translation it is fer shit. Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have the definite article “the.” Which puts a bit of a crimper on:
Jamie
@Anoniminous:
To be fair, I’ve lived in Brooklyn and, well, not Poland, but Northern Germany, and those beaver hats looked tempting, if only I wouldn’t have gotten beaten to death for wearing one. Oh, and they cost four months rent, depending.
Happy to be back in San Fransisco, where you always need a sweater, but not a heavy one. And yes, we are first up against the wall when the water comes rushing in. Put on my
watery, post-AWG grave, at least he didn’t have to put up with Medicare subsidized Free Zimmerman motorized cart shoppers.
Not that we don’t have drama queens here. It comes down to aesthetic choice, like most of politics.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anoniminous: I am not religious and I like it as work of literature in and of itself.
Jay S
@Death Panel Truck: I didn’t know Luther was on the Catholic side of the great commandment numbering schism. Assuming we can trust the link, that is.
ETA I mean there wouldn’t be any bias there would there?
Anoniminous
@Jamie:
As a former loyal subject of His Imperial Majesty Norton I, Emperor of these United States and Protector of Mexico, I am well aware of wot goeth on in Don’t-Call-It-Frisco. And still miss it.
I don’t, however, miss the sand fleas.
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ack.
Didn’t mean to imply anything else.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anoniminous: You did not imply anything else. I just wanted to make sure.
TenguPhule
Everyone knows the J-man was just a figurehead used to squiggle bright red man juice on the lips of the obese Porky Popes as they drank and whored their merry way through the Dark Ages.
Burn the churches with the followers locked inside and start over.
Calouste
@TenguPhule:
They already tried that during the 16th and 17th centuries. Didn’t work.
Omnes Omnibus
@Calouste: My family came here in the 17th century to avoid that and then to do it to others. It doesn’t really work.
TenguPhule
Obviously they didn’t burn enough.
Omnes Omnibus
@TenguPhule: Possibly they burned the wrong ones.
Jay S
@Omnes Omnibus: It seems obvious that anyone failing the “burn not lest ye be burned” rule of thumb is on the wrong side of the burner.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jay S: So you are saying that burning the decent people was bad? I’ve a few dead “witches” in my ancestry who would not argue with you.
SarahT
Many apologies for being 100 % OT, but I am drunk enough to not care & to think this should be posted : TARP may end up MAKING us money (of course I deserve to be mocked for posting OT, & especially if this has already been posted, etc., & for being so drunk.
bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/13/11186623-taxpayers-to-make-money-on-tarp-treasury-says?lit…
Hill Dweller
So Romney pulled his wife on stage before his NRA speech to ramble about stay at home moms. I’m not sure I’ve seen two more transparently fake people. But the media is working their asses off to pretend otherwise. Hell, Politico apparently said Romney is Don Draper.
Thankfully, the republicans are incompetent, and are sure to over-play their hand.
Omnes Omnibus
@Hill Dweller:
1. Draper is faking everything.
2. Romney does not have his skill and nerve. Which is kind of one of the points of the show. Fucking morans.
Jay S
@Omnes Omnibus: I’d like to think the rule isn’t limited to decent people. I’m sure I wouldn’t pass the test for some definitions of decent.
Chuck Butcher
@Hill Dweller:
You know, if I didn’t have a sense of humor I might feel sympathy for GOPer voters. Maybe it ain’t much of a sense of humor but it does keep me from feeling bad for them, the rest of us…
Omnes Omnibus
@Jay S: Of course not. Here is another view.
Narcissus
My favorite part about the dogma they want us all to live by is that we can’t hold them to their own beliefs because after all we’re all just sinners
satanicpanic
@SarahT: Good for you for being so drunk!
+1
Joey Maloney
@Anoniminous:
Mister Pedant says, sorry, no, exactly wrong. The definite article in Biblical Hebrew is the same as in the modern language, it’s “–ה”, pronounced “ha”. It’s a particle, though, and gets attached to the noun it modifies, thus, ha-aretz “the earth” and “ha-shamayin”, the heavens.
What Hebrew lacks is an indefinite article like the English “a” and “an”. It’s implied in every unmodified noun.
In modern Hebrew when there’s a preposition (which is also attached to the noun), the consonant of the definite article drops but the vowel sound is retained. Biblical Hebrew was not so fussy about retaining the vowel (or maybe it was – the vowel points are a late addition to the original text which lacked not only vowels but even spaces between words), relying much more on context and tradition. So “In [the] beginning” is a reasonable translation. It’s actually the verb in that sentence that’s problematic. A more literal rendering to English is something like “At the time God was beginning the creation of the earth and the heavens…”
Mister Pedant has spoken.
(this post void where prohibited, such as at The Agitator)
Jay S
@Omnes Omnibus: Ah, now if it’s my sense of decency then that’s another matter. Bring on the tumbrels. Sharpen the blade. If it’s not fire it’s fine, right? These scoundrels may not be for burning but there are other ways. /self-indulgent-sarcasm
Actually a healthy fear of a populist revolt might constrain our current over class. I don’t see that happening (either the fear or the revolt) without terrible collateral damage, as it always has. If only there were something like a rule of law, with checks and balances … one can dream.
ETA WP ate my fake tags so I added them without brackets
Mnemosyne
@Hill Dweller:
Romney stole the identity of one of his fellow missionaries when the real Mitt died in France just like Don Draper did?
Also, too, Don Draper is the Devil in disguise.
(Weirdly, I had a dream about Jon Hamm last night. He was giving me work advice. I think it’s the most boring dream that any straight woman has ever had about Jon Hamm.)
SarahT
@ satanicpanic : I’d like to thank the members of the academy, my agent, my bartender, the MTA…
Yutsano
@Joey Maloney:
LULZ.
satanicpanic
You earned it!
Raincitygirl
I’m pretty sure the real Don Draper died in Korea, not France, prior to Dick Whitman assuming his identity.
/pedant alert
TenguPhule
So he’s actually a Dick Draper then?
elmo
So every morning, seems like, I get up and check out the overnight comments. There’s usually like three or four posts, lengthy comment threads involving much drinking and hilarity, and I’m always mildly disappointed that it all happened overnight while I was asleep. Like watching a tape of a fun party that I just missed attending.
This morning, I’m on Pacific time for a change, it’s three am and I can’t sleep. So what happens? We have one open thread with like eight posts, and in this post we’re talking about – wait for it – Mitt Romney. Literally the most boring human being on earth. A black hole of human interest. He sucks interest out of the room – if he and The Most Interesting Man In the World were together, they would both be drinking Coors.
The one time I’m up, this is the best you all can do?
sal
Sheesh, Cole, it’s not lying when Christian soldiers do it. Have you learned nothing the last decade?
Also, too, Republicans, Fox News, Joe Klein and the rest of the jetsam on that flotsam raft.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus:
This is the bunch of morans who think that Ann Rmoney is a “rock star”.
Weird Al Janknovic is an ACTUAL “rock star” compared to Ann Rmoney.
RossInDetroit
@Omnes Omnibus:
Concur. I’m an Atheist and I still dip into the KJV Bible for the prose. Some of the most beautiful and effective lines ever written in English.
Too bad it’s so full of contradictions that the Holy Book can be used to support anything from slavery to vigilantism and the parts about mercy, charity and stewardship get overlooked.
Amir Khalid
@Anoniminous:
Does too.
Sloegin
You’ve discovered the flaw inherent in the system. Religion doesn’t function properly without the lies.
liberal
@RossInDetroit:
Me heart Ecclesiastes.
jimmiraybob
Indeed.
Interrobang
@Anoniminous: To further clarify what Joey Maloney, Master Pedant said, the particle ‘ha’ (ה) can also be subsumed under other prefix particles, which changes their pronunciation. So the particle for “in,” ‘b” (ב) changes to be pronounced ‘ba’ when merged with ‘ha’. This happens with all the Hebrew particles. So it’s perfectly reasonable to read the first word of “Genesis,” ברשת (b-rsht) as ‘bareshet’.
Hebrew, on the other hand, doesn’t really have a present tense for the verb “to be,” unless you count the weird non-verb thing ‘yesh’ and its conjugates to be the most irregular verb form ever. It also kind of sort of does have vowels, they’re just used differently from vowels in Romance and Germanic languages, and their pronunciations are kind of fungible.
Now you know far more Hebrew grammar than I’m sure you ever wanted to. (Also, too, Arabic does have vowels. If you want to laugh your face off, find the YouTube video with a guy named Yusuf Estes explaining how to pronouce the letter ‘ayn’.)
nice strategy
So, when the US Chamber of Commerce gets income from international sources that fund overhead and select programs but not contributions in US politics, money is fungible, and the accounting boundaries artificial, and the Chamber is corrupt, but when Planned Parenthood gets income from Komen dedicated to one part of their operations, money is no longer fungible and internal accounting create meaningful boundaries? Hmm.
With an ever-increasing % of capital flowing through large, often international institutions, individuals can not expect to have as much agency in their spending choices, be they consumption or contributions. Boycotting Whole Foods because the CEO is a Republican and shopping at an alternative hippiemart lands your money at Wells Fargo either way. Or maybe it is Citigroup.
Some institutions have more meaningful boundaries than others. Some companies actually regarded the pension fund as untouchable, not as just another asset on the balance sheet. But we can’t have satisfying debate about the second order effect of money flows because it is so much partisan baloney.
Liberals are right to be skeptical about the actual degree of separation between a politician and his SuperPAC. Conservatives are perfectly right to be skeptical about the degrees of separation within Planned Parenthood. It pains me to admit this since I fully support the mission of PP, including providing safe, subsideized, compassionate abortion services.
Sorry John but its unlikely that we aren’t all hypocrites about the politics of accounting somehow or another.