Notes on Katherine Kersten’s Stool Samples

Please tell me, why are Republicans condemn all of society to live in perpetual and eternal fear? If you drink, you’re going to Hell (unless you’re a Baptist minister and love gospel music). If you fornicate, you’re going to Hell (unless you’re a Republican and your wife looks stunning in a leopard print dress). If you’re gay, you’re definitely going to Hell (because God really hates the Queers for some reason…I don’t know). No matter what your crime against “The Holiest of Holy” might be, shouldn’t “fear mongering” be up there on that list too? At least as a minor crime like “white lies” and “cheating on your diet”?

In today’s Strib, Katherine Kersten writes a piece entitled: “California ruling hijacks middle ground on marriage” by which she laments all of the fear and loathing one could muster on the recent news out of the California State Supreme Court on same-sex marriage. (Be careful with that last link there; it’s a PDF and it’s a whopper of a file! It’s jammed packed with extra-fear, too! So be careful!)

Ms. Kersten opens her first paragraph with:

The debate over same-sex marriage has roiled for over a decade. On one side are people who believe that marriage is properly limited to one man and one woman. On the other are those who argue that lack of access to marriage is unfair to gay couples, because it deprives them of benefits that flow from the marriage certificate, such as survivor rights, hospital visitation and insurance coverage.

Did you see how she’s set the tone for her entire piece? If there’s anything Kersten loves more than Jesus and her Bible; it’s “Spin”, “Jargon” and “Fear”. You think it’s a coincidence that Noah had three sons? Strange, you might think, that King Nebuchadnezzar threw only “Three Young Men” into the Fiery Furnace? Odd that it’s “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Scary One”? Everything Ms. Kiersten writes falls under her own favorite categories she calls “Her Holy Trinity” of “Spin”, “Jargon”and “Fear”.

Everything!

“Properly” is hetero, while the “homo” side of her argument a tone of disparaging, whining and complaining. It’s all code! But we’ll get to that a little later.

I’ve often wondered how the Star Tribune came to ask Ms. Kersten write for them? I would suspect, the Strib’s Editorial staff asked her to submit samples of her writing while considering her. And so I’ve concluded that, Ms. Kersten must have submitted a stool sample like this piece here for consideration. Since the Strib didn’t have anybody else on staff that used their own stool samples to communicate their views on the world, they decided to run with it and asked her “properly” for her two forms of ID as her proof of US Citizenship and her Social Security number. …And then probably gave her a small advance on her next check. But that’s only a guess.

A good friend of mine says that my blogging is sometimes “Obtuse“. Since I have no idea what that word means, I decided it probably had something to do with one of the missing colors in my box of Crayons. I suppose I should be happy that he didn’t say my writing was “ochre”, “puce” or “burnt sienna”. So if I’m being a little too “obtuse” with that stool sample analogy, I apologize in advance. Just be grateful I don’t get really upset with Ms. Kersten’s writing and go a little “goldenrod”.  Which I’ve been known to do from time and again…

Ms. Kersten continues, painfully I might add:

But last week, this middle ground disappeared — courtesy of the California Supreme Court. In ruling California’s marriage laws unconstitutional, the court made clear that, far from preserving traditional marriage, domestic partnerships are actually likely to hasten its demise.

She claims that her fellow conservative (Republicans) in California attempted to come “half-way” with their gay and lesbian residents by approving a one-man/one-woman definition of marriage in 2000 by an election of 61.5% of the vote. (Nice to see they’ve over-exerted themselves in having to go vote on such a decision in the first place, let alone dragging themselves to make such a huge “compromise” with their fellow citizenry.) Working up a strain producing this recent stool sample of hers, Ms. Kersten aptly points out that in 1999 California passed their own Domestic Partnership Act. Something she her self would pull her hair out and scream the horrors if such an act or any resemblance of such an act were to passed here in Minnesota. So don’t look for any “compromising positions” from Katherin Kersten any time soon.

Kersten claims that California reached that “middle ground” by giving gay and lesbian couples “some rights”, and they should have been happy with that.
Ms. Kersten immediately changes her tone by patronizing the state’s Supreme Court:

The court put no stock in the state’s argument that same-sex and opposite-sex couples already have equivalent rights under California law. In fact, the majority found that the Legislature’s decision to treat gay relationships as worthy of marriage-like benefits actually bolstered plaintiffs’ argument that domestic partnerships are discriminatory. Since the Legislature has treated same-sex and opposite-sex couples equally, said the court, withholding the marriage label from gays is a “mark of second-class citizenship.”

Those dumb judges! If this were true, then why on earth and all things un-Holy, would the California Supreme Court even bother with this case?

Let’s watch Kersten’s stool sample turn into fear. Be on the lookout for her “Holy Three” - I’ll try to help you as you go along:

Minnesotans can draw two lessons from the California decision. First, it vindicates the approach taken by the proposed Minnesota marriage amendment, which the Minnesota House of Representatives passed in 2006 but the DFL-controlled Senate killed by keeping it bottled up in committee. The amendment would have prohibited both same-sex marriage and civil unions. Opponents sometimes slammed this dual prohibition as mean-spirited, but the California decision now reveals it to be far-sighted.

Second, the California decision vindicates Minnesotans who argue that a constitutional amendment is the only way to safeguard traditional marriage. During the 2006 debate, then-Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson and OutFront Minnesota both maintained that the amendment was unnecessary, because our state already has a “defense of marriage” act and because the Minnesota Supreme Court rejected same-sex marriage in a 1971 case.

Her next paragraph is her “bombshell”. Her piece de resistance…

But when it tossed out California’s one-man/one-woman voter initiative — which the state’s Legislature cannot overturn on its own — the California majority showed how far arrogant, activist courts will go in disregarding the will of the people.

“Activist Courts”?! “Activist Courts?!” Why…Why…If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was more “code”!!! Ohh… I’m starting to get a little goldenrod right now!!

Let’s do a quick head count of those damned judges that are sitting on that “Activist Court”, shall we?  …Lessee…

Ronald M. George - appointed in 1991 by Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican

Marvin R. Baxter - appointed by Governor George Deukmejian, a Republican

Ming W. Chin - appointed by Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican
Carol A. Corrigan - appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican

Joyce L. Kennard - appointed by Governor George Deukmejian, a Republican

Carlos R. Moreno - appointed by Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat

and finally…
Kathryn Mickle Werdegar- who was appointed by Governor Pete Wilson, whom we already know… was a Republican.

Where, pray tell… does Katherin Kersten get off calling the California Supreme Court a bunch of activists?! The entire bench is filled with Republicans!!!

Katherine finishes her stool sample with this tidbit:

Anyone who has followed the abortion debate knows what happens when a court cuts out the middle ground, as the U.S. Supreme Court did on abortion 35 years ago in Roe vs. Wade. Toxic social division is inevitable when courts usurp the people’s rights.

Shall I help you out with her Holy Trinity in that paragraph, or are you good to go now? Hint, it’s the first three words in her last sentence. But I’m guessing you already knew that.

Photos from the political campaigns

Good evening, and thank you for watching Fruit Fly News. My name is Frizzie McBee.

In tonight’s Special Edition, we’ve decided to look at some of the amazing photography being collected during this year’s election campaign.

As you know, we’ve seen thousands of photographs of our candidates, both Democrat and Republican, male and female and black and white. First up, let’s look at a photo from Bozeman, MT where Senator Barack Obama was just a few days ago!

Wow! With a population of 27,000 people living in Bozeman, can we assume at least 75% of them were out that night listening to the Senator?! And the Senator was also in Billings over the weekend, can we look at a picture from that rally?

Holy crow! What an impressive crowd out there in Billings, Montana! A city of 100,000 souls, and a good majority of them all came out to hear the Illinois Senator speak! Well, good for all of them! A good looking crowd out there in Montana.

The senator has just published his fund-raising for the month of April and it seems that the Senator has raised a little over $31.3 million in April. An impressive amount of money indeed.

What happened last weekend in Oregon? Let’s take a look at how many people rallied on a sunny Sunday afternoon to hear Senator Barack Obama speak out there in Oregon….

Oh my lord..!! That’s staggering! Look at that crowd! Some have said that more than 70,000 folks showed up to hear the Senator speak. A staggering sized crowd!!

And from the Hillary Campaign, here’s an interesting photo…

…Getting kissed by some gay guy…

And we found this picture….

Woah! We didn’t see to see the Senator trying to hump that guy… The look on his face alone is worth 1,000 cattle-prods..

Let’s move on to Senator McCain’s campaign. As you all know, he’s had some difficulty raising campaign cash. The latest is that he’s raised only $18 million, a little more than half than this political rival Obama and less than second place running, Senator Hillary Clinton. Certainly, the Republican party could show more excitement and thrilling rallies than the Democrats can do.. Can we look at a McCain photo…?

Ohhh… tough break for the “Old and Mouldy” crowd!! Maybe if Senator McCain would wake them up, he might get them to dig out an extra dollar out of their pocketbooks!

Maybe he’s hypnotized all of them. …He pulled out a pocket watch and gave them a black and white spiral to stare at…

What an embarrassing crowd of Republicans. Looks like the Senator has his work cut out for him…

This is Frizzie McBee and I thank you for joining us tonight. Good night!!

Now I’m lost…

About a month and a half ago, the WordPress folks decided to completely re-write the engine that the FruitFly blog homesteads. The enormity of errors was horrific.

Opening up the blog to begin a new entry took over thirty minutes and a couple dozen web browser messages popping up like:

See what I mean? I would get a dozen of them! The “Dashboard” side of the blog was completely re-engineered as well (with some very ugly colors, I might add).

When those of us complained, we were ignored.  What they did do was continue to slog on and fixed a ton of this stuff.  Which is great, if they would have done beta versions of it instead of throwing it at us expecting us to love ‘em for it.   But I had moved on..  I started a Blogger…err.. blog called “The EnK Stain” and I’ve been posting there since.

Now it appears that the WordPress people have fixed enough errors that I can actually manage.  So, do I write on both?   Or do I create dual personalities and write on either?!

I dunno!!

FF

Bachmann Solves Energy Crises While Watching Beverly Hillbillies

This piece made me fall off my chair while sitting at Keys Cafe in downtown Minneapolis yesterday morning. It bears nothing for an introduction, with the exception of one warning: Don’t read it while drinking anything you don’t want coming up and through your nose, hot coffee and Coca-Cola drinkers beware.

From the City Pages: Virginia is the new Saudi Arabia

Matt Snyders

Let’s face it: Harping on Rep. Michele Bachmann just ain’t what it used to be. At this point, taking swipes at her fairy-tale worldview is like shooting fish in a barrel. No, wait. It’s more like shooting the barrel itself, provided it’s filled to the brim with steaming bullshit.

So it is with fatigued reserve that we pass along a laughable speech that the Sixth District representative delivered to the Anoka County Business Leadership Forum last week: “If we extract 20 percent [of the oil] we know is off the coast of Virginia, we can replace what we import from Saudi Arabia,” she said. “We have got almost unlimited availability of energy in the United States but we have restricted our ability to use it.“

Sigh. It’s impossible to know the exact figures, but according to the Interior Department, about 56 million barrels of oil are waiting to be tapped off Virginia’s coast. Twenty percent of 56 million—let’s see, carry the one—is just over 11 million barrels. Total. By contrast, we import roughly 500 million barrels of oil a year from the Saudis, according to those hippies at the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. government’s own site that keeps track of such matters.

Note to Bachmann: 500 million > 11 million.

The Kiss

She is pregnant; he had just saved her from a fire in her house, rescuing her by carrying her out of the house into her front yard, while he continued to fight the fire. When he finally got done putting the fire out, he sat down to catch his breath and rest.

A photographer from the Charlotte , North Carolina newspaper, noticed her in the distance looking at the fireman.

He saw her walking straight toward the fireman and wondered what she was going to do.

As he raised his camera, she came up to the tired man who had saved her life and the lives of her babies and kissed him just as the photographer snapped this photograph…

Secret Young Republicans training compound located!!

First photos are emerging from behind the enemy lines, where their nefarious indoctrination techniques corrupt the innocent minds of America’s youth and prepare them for a life committed to espousing Republican ideology that runs counter to their own self interests!

We all owe a debt of gratitude to the Democratic operatives that have risked their lives to bring us this first haunting photo:

Here we can obviously see a seemingly innocent piece of playground equipment that has been twisted by the right-wing propaganda masters into some sort of sick political metaphor…

Undercover operatives for the Democratic Party have told us that Republican parents force their unwilling children up the molded plastic stairs into the GOP’s “Indoctrination Machine.” These children remain inside for up to 48 hours until they are fully processed. The children, once they are completely transformed into a smelly mass of waste material, will eventually tumble down the chute behind the Indoctrination Machine fully prepared to carry-on the Neocon Agenda.

Said one Republican mother after her child was expelled from the Indoctrination Machine: “Oh, he’s still the little stinker he always was….” where she snickered and waddled away.

UNICEF, Save the Children and Sally Struthers have begun nationwide media campaigns to save these poor little children before they’ve become indoctrinated into the little GOP shit’s that’s expected of each and every one of them. So please: If you can give anything, please give to Sally Struther’s Christian Children’s Fund. Because Jesus, and only Jesus could love these little Turds.

I found it on Bartcop Nation… So it must be true!

Sewage Plant in San Fran: Named after King George

From the Internets..!

Looking to honor the forty-third President of the United States of America, George W. Bush, the recently formed Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is looking to change the name of the Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Facility. It seems the group would like to rename the SF Zoo adjacent facility to the “George W Bush Sewage Plant.”

Genius.

The local grassroots movement, helmed by “Wayne Pickering,” is proposing an ordinance initiative for the November 2008 San Francisco ballot in order to get the poop/pee/vomit plant’s title changed. Why? To honor our current leader of the free world with an “appropriate and enduring legacy, for no other president in modern American history has accomplished so much in such a short time.

We think this is an excellent idea.

Would you like to help out with this effort? Help collect signatures? Host meetings or social gatherings? Then, join the effort by visiting Presidentialmemorial.org. So far, there are only six members, which we find inexcusable. Together we can make a difference and setup a constant reminder of what was, arguably, the worst administration in the history of our glorious country. God bless America and God bless the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco.

Airports, parkways, boulevards even high schools; there’s nothing better than the community toilet being named after a Bush is simply priceless.

Who wants to take bets that the sewage treatment plant becomes a haven for bathroom sex for prominent Republican Senators and ultra-conservative Evangelical pastors?

Peeking in on Roger Ailes’ Blog…

I love snooping in on Right Wing crazies to find out what’s inside their brains. Most of the time, I come up empty, but I try not to seem to stunned by the fact.

Fox News CEO, Roger Ailes, has a personal blog and I found his entry on Easter Sunday rather amusing:

Happy Easter

Or, as John McCain calls it, the Jewish Custer’s Last Stand.

The Senator has no campaign events scheduled for today, as he will spend the entire holiday hunting, unsuccessfully, for the Easter eggs he hid last night.

Now there’s a miserable Republican voter!

The Clintons Are BFF With Rev Jeremiah Wright Too?

So while all of those “Hillary Lovers” out there are yucking it up over Obama having to defend his personal and religious beliefs, here comes the Photo Op of the week on the NYT - courtesy of the Obama campaign staff.

Among those in attendance, was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., who is seen shaking hands with Mr. Clinton in a photograph provided today by the Obama campaign. Mr. Wright’s relationship with Senator Barack Obama, as his longtime pastor, has been the subject of considerable controversy in recent days because of incendiary excerpts of sermons Mr. Wright gave at their church, Trinity United Church of Christ, in Chicago.

In providing the photograph to The New York Times, the Obama campaign appeared to be trying to divert some attention to the Clintons after a week in which Mr. Obama’s relationship with Mr. Wright has left him facing one of the biggest challenges of his campaign. There is nothing in the picture or the note that addresses whether Mr. Clinton had met Mr. Wright prior to the White House meeting or whether he or Mrs. Clinton knew anything about Mr. Wright’s views.

Anybody out there holding their breath that Hillary will give a stump speech defending her religion? Email me and I’ll make sure you get a nurse and an oxygen tank ASAP.

Larry Craig: Caught in the Bathroom again! (Well, sort of…)

This deserves no explanation - the joke writes itself. From The Hill:

While reporters were hovering outside a Capitol Hill conclave of the Michigan and Florida delegations last Wednesday night, Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) just happened to come by to use the restroom, which he did.

But when he emerged, flashing lights surprised him as several cameramen pointed their lenses at Abercrombie. They had been given instructions to shoot any live bodies they could see.

Being from Hawaii, Abercrombie doesn’t have a dog in the Michigan-Florida delegation fight, but there he was, caught in the glare of the cameras like the proverbial deer in the headlights.

Momentarily stunned by the three cameras staring him in the face, Abercrombie decided to have a little Aloha State fun when he looked back toward the restroom and shouted:

“Come on, Larry, it’s all over!”

To be clear, there was no one else in the restroom at the time, including Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) — the obvious Larry in question.