CNN: "Can Democrats sway young evangelicals?"

From the article:

"With younger millennials, we're seeing more commitment to the environment, climate change, LGBT equality, poverty and a range of social justice issues," said Sally Steenland, director of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank allied with Democrats. "One thing is that when you take the Bible seriously, you take justice issues seriously. Because they reflect your belief in your faith."

The fuck? "Why, yes, we think Evangelical Christians are complete and utter scum who should be put in concentration camps and 're-educated' until they're deader than the fucking Kulaks (death to the Christianist Imperialists!), but we think we can win their vote!"

Okay, that's possibly not fair. The Democrats would probably be just as happy forcing Christians to have the faces pealed off the faces of all their fetuses, and extinguish them that way. Hey, there's profit to be had in them thar body parts!

Oh, did I mention abortion as a justice issue that Evangelicals just might care about? That's more than CNN did. Informing the public indeed.

A couple of observations about the Planned Parenthood videos

First, the callousness of some of the PP workers shouldn't come as a surprise. People that do horrible things for a living tend to become inured to their work - it losses its horrors over time. (Talk to anyone that works in an ER if you don't believe me.)

Also, working as an abortionist is a natural profession for a sociopath or sadist. Surgeon is one of the top five professions for sociopaths, at least according to some sources. And abortion is essentially a type of surgery. Look to that Philadelphia abortionist from a couple of years back for a trenchant example of what I'm talking about.

Second, I have a question. For people that are pro-abortion rights, why do you think selling an aborted fetus is a bad thing? After all, having decided to terminate the pregnancy, what difference does it make if the fetus is sold for a profit? There's much offense being taken at accusations that PP has done exactly this, but why? You already think the fetus doesn't have any rights as a human being, so what difference does it make if one sells them for whatever reason afterwards?

I can understand why some women having abortions might not want to do that (cases of abortion to protect the health of the mother & cases of extreme congenital defects spring to mind immediately), but why is it considered a bad thing otherwise? The positions seem completely at odds to me.

At least he's being honest.

A pro-abortion writer at the Daily Beast admits that the videos that have been released about Planned Parenthood have made him re-think his position a bit. (A bit of nagging by his wife also seems to be at play.

But that isn't what caught my attention. It was this bit about deciding to be pro-abortion back in 1985.

After all this, I still consider myself pro-choice, as I have for the last 30 years. I staked out this position during my freshmen year in college. Even then, I understood the abortion debate was a tug-of-war between competing rights—those of the mother versus those of an unborn baby. I sided with the mother. And I tried not to think about the baby.

All this was happening in the 1980s, which was a particularly tense time in the abortion debate. Americans were at each other’s throats. Protesters picketed the offices of abortion providers. Clinics were bombed or set on fire. Doctors who performed abortions were being threatened. The Moral Majority, Operation Rescue, and the Republican Party seemed an intolerant lot. I couldn’t imagine siding with them, so I lined up on the pro-choice side. [emphasis added]

Yep, his stance on the abortion issue was dictated by tribal affiliation as much as any moral considerations.

This is actually pretty common. It's little different from how people decide on which football teams to root for, really. Think of this next time you wonder why the sides completely refuse to listen to each other - it's Alabama vs. Auburn, but with actual consequences to real people.

David Gergen - Shill for the Olgarchy

There's so much dishonesty and crappy reasoning in this piece from David Gergen that it's hard to know where to begin. But I think I'll start with this:

It is not clear whether coming events will play into the hands of Bernie Sanders -- they should on inequality -- but they should certainly give Joe Biden more of an opening. A man who was at Obama's side in coming out of the recession, friend of working people, a good Catholic -- those could be high cards for him. 

I can see at least three blatant lies in this paragraph.

First, we never really came out the recession. As Bernie Sanders likes to point out (and Trump too, though not with numbers), if the Labor Force Participation Rate were the same today as it were in 2007, the U-3 unemployment rate (which is the one they always discuss in the news) would still be over 10%. Ten fucking percent unemployment for 6+ years! We only came out of the recession in anything other than a technical sense because we're lying about the numbers. And by 'we' I mean the people in charge, not any of us.

Second, Biden is no friend of the working people, having sponsored a bankruptcy reform bill in 2005 that re-wrote bankruptcy laws in a way favorable to the banksters, and in a way guaranteed to make wage slaves out of the vast majority of future college students.

Third, while I am not a Catholic myself, I do think it is probably hard to call yourself a good Catholic when you are in favor of millions and millions of abortions each year, and in fact want more and more all the time.

Maybe I'll address the more subtle lies later, but probably not. Not even a giant dung beetle from a Japanese Godzilla-type film* could digest a shit sandwich of this size.

* That would be a 'kaiju' film, to all the nerds out there.

VOX: The dumbest "educated" people on the internet?

There's a lot of competition for the title.

Vox headline:

Pregnancy is painful, difficult, and dangerous. No one should be forced into it.

The article is not about forcing women to be pregnant. It is about abortion. Here's a sample for the article:

Banning abortion isn't "preventing killing," it's forcing pregnancy.

Apparently they think that merely failing to have an abortion means a woman is pregnant. And here I always thought the fundamentalist pro-abortionists were simply too fucking stupid to figure out how to use a condom, or similarly complex methods of birth control. No, they're about 40 IQ points below what I had imagined.

And this isn't the only such example from this week of incredible stupidity from the fundamentalist pro-abortion crowd. Jodi Jacobson, Editor in Chief, RH Reality Check, (which organization seems to think the only good pregnancies are the ones that are ended), had an editorial this week in which they called an anti-abortionist a Hitler-loving slut because the woman in question had registered on an online dating site. (This is NOT an Ashley Madison story! Although I'll happily take the traffic.) Apprently being anti-abortion means that one both loves Hitler (figure out the logic of that if you can) and hates sex. Therefore, this anti-abortionist (I'm not using her name out of common decency) needed to be slut-shamed and called a Nazi. I'm sure Jodi Jacobson will be quite happy if her trolls flood the other woman's dating profile with all kinds of vile commentary. (Actually, I'm sure Jacobson would be happy if her trollish supporters found the other woman and beat her with truncheons before setting her on fire. Never too late for a post-natal abortion, right Ms. Jacobson?)

Clearly, Jodi Jacobson hasn't actually ever spoken with or read the views of any anti-abortionist. Not only are most of them not anti-sex, a great many of them, especially the evangelicals & Catholics, are very much pro-sex, and pro-sex for pleasure. It is considered part of the sacrament of marriage for many of them, and something that they should in fact do when they can, even if birth control is used. (This last part varies a lot, but it's out there.) It is a way to increase the intimacy between partners and celebrate the joy of being alive. (In part, I believe, so that the parents can present a unified front against their children, but that is merely inference on my part.) I know this and I don't even go out of my way to learn about these things because it's not part of my job.

But discovering the actual views of anti-abortionists isn't part of Jacobson's job either. Her job is to demonize everyone that doesn't believe that abortion is a right more fundamental than any other. In other words, Jacobson's job is to destroy the lives of everyone that doesn't keep the faith. Jacobson is an inquisitor - she only lacks the legal authority to go full Torquemada on everyone's ass.

The reason I've noticed this is because Jacobson has been forced to come out and apologize - for slut-shaming. She still thinks the other woman is a slut (any woman that likes sex must be a cumdumpster of a slut, by Ms. Jacobson's own reasoning), and a Hitler-lover, but slut-shaming is bad, because it offends real sluts and cumdumpsters.

I would link to some of this, but on the off chance anyone reads this and wants to give the vile folks of the RH Reality Check any traffic, you can look for them yourselves.

Christ Almighty, how did the most stupid people on the entire fucking planet end up being credible voices about anything?

BONUS SECTION: Here's a tip to any clueless fundamentalist pro-abortionists out there: The vast majority of the anti-abortion crowd isn't anti-sex, or anti-sex for pleasure. But they do believe that people need to live with the consequences of their actions if those consequences endanger the life of another person. And yes, they do think a fetus is a person. See how simple that is? Oh yeah, and next time you have sex, use a condom. It really isn't that hard.