This Week In Crazy: Christo-Republicans Are Not So Anonymous

This week I am up to my ears in facebook links that leave me flabbergasted (love that word!) at how stupid, crazy and mean-spirited some Christians and Republicans can be...

Let's give you a quick run-down:

CRAZY: Shirley Phelps-Roper, who will likely be the new Pastor of Westboro Baptist Church (the "God Hates Fags/Soldiers" people) when her father finally kicks the bucket, has got herself into an online spat with the amorphous collection of hackers known as "Anonymous". The details are really quite boring, but the video posted at Joe.My.God can be amusing if you're not already familiar with the downward spiral that both groups are apparently riding together. The whole incident quickly devolved into a situation where it became obvious that both parties are helping each other to achieve fame/notoriety.

From my understanding, "Anonymous" first made themselves known as protesters of clandestine religious groups by wearing Guy Fawkes masks ala "V for Vendetta" and ranting about supposed murders committed by Scientologists without much evidence at hand... If I'm wrong about that, please don't hack me - just give me your side of the story in the comments section... Thanks.
(Also, it would be REALLY cute if you use the "anonymous" function in the comment box, hint, hint.)

Moving right along...

STUPID and CRAZY: Oh my goodness... Where to start with Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin? Of course, you've probably heard about the prank call in which he revealed that he had given some thought to sending covert provocateurs into the MASSIVE pro-union protests in order to incite riots...
Then you probably also heard in the same recorded conversation that he was going to trick the Democrats into showing up for a quorum so he could strip away worker's rights with a simple majority.
But then... the STUPID jerk went in front of a TV camera to verify that the union-busting thugs idea was REALLY his idea first. Boy, you can't sneak anything past this bright guy! Don't even think about taking credit for his evil master plans. He will send his Storm (ooops, I meant "state") Troopers after you!

Suck it up, Democrats... There's no crying in baseball or fascism... it's just the American Way!

The upshot here, is that a little tavern called "The Merchant" is serving up slices of STFU with every "Governor's Special". When Gov. Walker came into their private establishment, his very presence was causing a disturbance amongst their hard-working clientelle... So they did what any small business owners in Rand Paul's Civil-Rights Repealed America would do... They kicked his ass out.


STUPID and CRAZY and MEAN-SPIRITED: A legislator in Georgia has brought forward an anti-miscarriage bill similar to the fiasco in Utah... This stupid, crazy and mean-spirited bill would have women defending themselves in court after a miscarriage in an effort to prove that the miscarriage was not actually a makeshift abortion. The stupid part of it, of course, is that by giving civil rights to fetuses, you create little versions of the children of Salem... They can't speak for themselves, so you're free to place whatever wants and desires may lurk in the back of your own mind up as their "defense" in court... So, say you secretly want to throw your wife in jail so you can bang that hot chick down the street... Pray for a miscarriage and the world is yours, my friend.
The crazy part of it is the fact that some ass-wipe named Bobby Franklin actually brought the legislation forward...
The Mean-Spirited part of it... C'mon, do you really need me to tell you? These women have just lost the opportunity to love their newborn child and now you want to drag them into court and persecute them... Nice, real nice.

Special shout-out to Salon.com and Clarence Thomas who first started the "This Week In Crazy" meme... Thanks for that!

South Florida Plagued By Child Abuse

Carmen Barahona uses a sheet of paper to shield herself as she enters the court room. Her husband, Jorge Barahona, and one foster child were found covered in chemicals inside a truck alongside I-95 in Palm Beach County. (Photo: C.W. Griffin, Miami Herald)

First Read This:
http://browardsblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-slay-cucuy.html
Excerpt: "As a confidential informant for the FBI, I penetrated these men’s operation and secured over 30 digital videos of child abuse that was so horrific that I haven’t really slept at night ever since viewing it. From start to finish, I handed the FBI a perfect case with proof beyond all doubt of these men’s guilt."

Then Read This:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-02-19/jorge-barahona-accused-of-horrific-child-abuse-in-florida/
Excerpt: "Behind closed doors, authorities say the twins were systematically abused: tied with duct tape, locked for hours at a time in the bathroom, made to stand in garbage cans, starved, roughed up, and neglected."

Then Support Debbie Wasserman Schultz in this:


And then Join This Group:
http://bhtc.us/news.html
Excerpt: "According to authorities, in April 2009, Cox found a 17-year-old Broward County girl to work for him as a prostitute. Cox would pick up the minor near her home and would take her to a hotel, authorities said. Myers helped Cox by posting advertisements on the Internet, according to prosecutors."

Florida Rises Up Like Egypt

Floridians: Give Us Democracy Or Give Us Death!

“The Floridian culture is very threatened by Rick Scott’s dictatorial lockdown on the press,” says renegade blogger Jarrett Terrill who barely escaped the death panel imposed by the ruling party last year. “The people want to see what a real democracy looks like. Florida has not had a real election since the early 90’s and they blame the ruling party for this,” says Terrill.

Scott, like Mubarak, maintains a tight control over all communication online. If a worker’s internet access has been denied by Comcast’s clandestine operation called the Internet Owners for Freedom Regime (CIOFR), they cannot get necessary help or information. However, they may still receive Scott’s daily inspirational tweets on the preferred media outlet of the ruling party.

“The native people of Florida are feeling inspired by the Egyptians and Tunisians,” says Rebellion Leader Alan Grayson. “They are intent on upon achieving a real Democracy. It’s going to be a tough battle to the finish, but we’ve seen worse. So far, our plan is to not get sick and if we do, die quickly.”

But the rebel faction has received little help in the region from the United States. Although President Obama said “This is a way of endangering our troops, our sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives who are sacrificing for us to keep us safe, and you don’t play games with that,” about the radical regime in Florida, there is still a pervasive sense that those in the beltway see Florida as a Sovereign Nation.

Real journalists were denied access to the ruling party even before the so-called election. “It wasn’t an election, it was a dog and pony show just like always,” says Terrill. The small minority of Floridian people who did confirm that they voted for the dictator said they did so out of fear and desperation. They voted for Scott primarily so that his brutal Tea Party regime would stop harassing them. “I can take care of myself," said Evelyn Logas, a retired medical worker from Mount Dora. "I just want the government out of my life."


Logas, like other Floridians who were pressured into voting for Scott were also afraid that they would be denied medical care. The Dr. Mengele of the ruling Tea Party regime is named Dr. Jack Cassell. Outside of his office, he has signs posted that read “If you voted for Obama, seek medical care elsewhere.”

“I’m glad he’s shutting down transportation and denying medical care,” Liz Staub screams to a mob of protesters in Tampa. A Tea Party insurgent herself, she shakes her fist authoritarian style one more time at the crowd and retorts, “I hope he cuts it down to the bone!”

Staub is obviously under the advisement of Rick Scott’s minister of Propaganda, Sean Hannity. Activists stormed Disney World (which has since become the only refuge from snipers and car bombings) when they found evidence that no women were actually forced to give birth in the middle of the street under other leaders throughout the southern region of the United States and that their only government-approved media source had lied to them.

“The real issue here,” says Terrill, “Is that people finally realized the ruling Tea Party had been nothing but a front for Rick Scott’s regime all along. They were caused to realize this when Governor Scott vetoed their demand for a free democratic election. He did this by removing the people’s mandate to redraw the voting districts more fairly. The Scott regime employs a kind of propaganda about the situation in which they managed to convince their insurgents that Gerrymandering is ordained by God.”

Terrill says he also believes in God, but he is not a Talibangelical like the hostile majority in the Tea Party Regime. “My God would never allow for such deplorable behavior in his name,” says Terrill, who is now in hiding since insurgents took over his refugee camp. “These people are very dangerous because they believe in radical tax fundamentals like the idea that you can take more away from zero. So who can say what their concept of or respect for human life is like.”

“I only pray that the CREW is successful at infiltrating this dangerous regime at their highest levels. If I would have known things would get this bad, I would have voted for Alex Sink instead of the real Democrat I voted for... I was just thinking that at worst he'd be another Charlie Crist.”

Notice: Although this "news story" is obviously a parody, the photograph above is taken from inside the United States by PBS during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina... Some of the quotations above are real and some have been slightly embellished but the links lead you to the very real reasons that you should be concerned about our Democracy in Florida.

Gay Newspaper Rolls with Stone

No Apologies from Republican for Hijacked Blog


When a strange silence suddenly falls upon a gay pride parade, you can bet that the Sunshine Republicans are nearby; a group of LGBT Republicans who split off from the Log Cabin Republicans over concerns about political tone and conservative values. The Sunshine Republicans were closely associated with (although not formally in sponsorship of) Florida’s first Transgender Republican candidate for the House of Representatives, Donna Milo, who incidentally did not believe in Gay Marriage… but she intended to go up against Florida's Pro-gay Democratic Rockstar Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Nick Stone is their Vice President. He operates his own website at http://drawnlines.com/ .

Recently he wrote a blog piece called “Do Words Matter to Debbie Wasserman Schultz”. In this piece, he attempted to counter-attack Mrs. Schultz’s opinion that we all need to cool our heads and tone down the political rhetoric because “words matter”. In the news broadcast that Stone refers to in his rant, Congresswoman Schultz (D-FL) tells CNN’s TJ Holmes that we all need to be conscious of what we say in light of the recent assassination attempt on her good friend Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ).

Never once in the referenced news broadcast did Schultz ever say that the man who shot Giffords was a Republican. Nor did she make any other kind of partisan divide in that speech. Nonetheless, Stone wrote his counter-attack by questioning Schultz’s integrity, her honesty, and her motives. From there he connected all of America’s most beloved Democrats to the worst violence in US History.

"I want to clarify that just about everything you've heard from me or that I've written is just my opinion,” said Stone in an interview on Friday, “and should not reflect on The Sunshine Republicans or be seen as an official statement on any matter."

When he wrote the item for his blog, it was geared mostly toward his fans, friends and fellow Republicans. It was meant to be sort of a morale booster for the sort of Republicans who like to turn up the volume on rhetoric and defy what they refer to as our “PC Culture”.

But when Stone wrote the piece, he didn’t intend for the Florida Agenda to swipe it from his blog and publish it in the context of an editorial in their newspaper…

“I could be wrong but I believe that the author would have addressed things somewhat differently,” said Andy Eddy, a Log Cabin Republican, “if he were under the impression this was an op-ed piece for media consumption and not just blogging among friends and cohorts.” Eddy has met Debbie Wasserman Schultz once before, unlike Stone, and remembers that even though he was introduced to her as “one of those Republicans”, she said something reasonable like “it is most important that we, as Americans, are politically involved regardless of our differences.”


Stone says he never gave permission to the Florida Agenda to re-print his blog post at all and that he thinks the media sometimes uses Republicans to label as crazy and weird for a sort of boost in readership. He says journalists will often pick “the weirdest statement” to highlight. “I didn’t pursue the Agenda about it and they didn’t pursue me about it.”
Now, aside from the already scandalous way that The Florida Agenda (a gay newspaper) selected this particular gay-friendly Democratic Congresswoman to attack in their newspaper, there is the matter of all the other Democrats who were dragged through the mud in Stone’s original blog entry.

For instance, Stone stated boldly that President Carter and his wife Rosalynn had been “close friends” with John Wayne Gacy - a serial killer who preyed on teenage boys. He evidenced this accusation by showing a photo of Rosalynn with Gacy which was taken at a large Democratic event in the Chicago area. Gacy was just one of many people who were photographed with the President’s wife that day.

“Whether or not Gacy and the Carters were ‘besties’ is not the point,” said Stone when pressed for clarification on the matter, “the fact that Democrats and violence have a long and sordid history together was my big point.” But for every statement in the entire piece there should be a separate retraction and apology if it were to appear in a real newspaper.

As another example of his propagandizing spin, Stone cites the Discovery Channel Hostage situation in which James Jay Lee, who stone describes as an “enviro-terrorist” [sic] and a “left-wing nutjob”, held hostages at the popular science show headquarters. It’s important that we realize this, according to Stone, because “everyone in the media” had supposedly jumped to the false conclusion that “since he had a gun” he must have been a conservative or Tea Party member.
When pressed to come up with a source of who Stone believes originally blamed James Jay Lee of being a “Tea Party Extremist” in the media, he admitted that it was “just a sort of rumor that got started”.

But Stone has dug his own hole even deeper by choosing this particular event to highlight because environmental terrorists are not what Stone thinks they are (check the definition) and Lee was actually what’s properly called an eco-terrorist. On his own website, Lee ranted about “immigration pollution” and “anchor baby filth”. When asked about this particular section of the piece, Stone said plaintively, “I feel that being an enviro-terrorist [sic] is generally a left-wing ideal and everything else is tangential to me.”

As predictable as his spin can become after a glance or two, the dapper young Republican is not without his surprises… He speaks more favorably of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow than he does of Fox News’s Glenn Beck and he’s not so quick to toss Hillary Clinton into the fray either.

At the end of the day, a lot of Stone’s criticism of Democrats seems reactionary to an either real or perceived hatred that he feels is directed toward him by the majority of left-leaning gays and lesbians who can tolerate just about everything EXCEPT Republicans in their midst. He perceives danger and hostility at what most of us consider as being rather benign events like Gay Pride Parades. For this reason, much of what he says becomes self-fulfilling prophesy for him. Because he thinks negatively about Democrats, some Democrats behave negatively toward him. He really doesn’t seem to think of his writing or opinions as hostile or unwelcoming either - but if you use a term like “teabagger” in his presence, you’ll likely not be forgiven.

It must be this sensitive side of himself that is bothered by Congresswoman Schultz. Some Republicans have referred to as "the DNC's Head Cheerleader" or "The Mean Girls version of Nancy Pelosi" because of her biting wit and clever use of props on the house floor... But even her Republican counterparts in the House are generally humored by her antics. She doesn't use "violent rhetoric" or "tell bald-faced lies" as Stone states in his blog... She's just very partisan... because that's her job.

In the end, Nick Stone is also just a puppy. That is to say he is a young guy with a pleasant demeanor whose bark is worse than his bite. “Debbie Wasserman Schultz is right,” he says, “in the sense that if her party does their part as well, we can make things better […] but it has to be fair and even handed. No, I won’t apologize for what I’ve written.”

An apology for threatening the congresswoman with damnation to “the darkest pits of hell” if she dared to use any rhetoric herself, was in the end, too much for him to manage. But in his defense, he went on to list even more supposed connections between Democrats and violence. I’ll leave it to his fellow Republicans to correct him on those matters if they would be so kind.