This song doesn’t have an official video that I know of. But I can’t imagine a better one than this Hitchcock compilation:
On a day sure to be cram-jammed with all kinds of sappy commercialized tributes to Mom, it might be good to remember that not all of them are so sweet. Or their offspring, either. Happy Mother’s Day!
Crappy Mother’s Day weekend, everyone! Ever have one of those weeks where you devoutly wish you’d never been born, but it’s too late to crawl back into the mommy-cave? Yeah, it’s been one of those weeks for me, too. And here’s who made it so, in no particular order:
1. Rob Fucking Ford. He’s not just Toronto’s embarrassment anymore, he’s a national disgrace. And if he’s really so concerned about his family’s safety, he should stop being so fucking chintzy and just hire a security detail already. Actually, though, safety is really the least of his concerns; it’s his overfed ego, not the nosiness of “effeminate” Toronto Star reporters, that’s got his Y-fronts all in a bunch.
2. John Fucking Swinimer. Since when does one fucking religious nut get to determine an entire school curriculum? Since NEVER. And, FYI, schools DO teach “the basics”. And if your religion isn’t one of them, too fucking bad! Intolerant and religiously bigoted is no way to go through life, daddy-o. Now stop sending your son to school to preach in dumb crapaganda shirts and just let the kid LEARN, already.
3. Mitt Fucking Romney. Last week Mittens was a wanker for firing an openly gay staffer; this week he is one for sending a flack to try and spin that as proof of his championing tolerance. He has a lot of chutzpah, and absolutely no fucking guts whatsoever. PS: And speaking of gutless, how about this? Or this? Or, Bog help us all, THIS?
4. Andrew Fucking Scheer. If Parliament was not misled on the F-35, then they were all party to a lie. Isn’t that right, Mr. Speaker? Well, isn’t it???
5. Catherine Fucking Scalia. Need some mustard on your hotdog, mister? She’ll give you a hand with that. Literally. PS: Kudos to the NY Post for assigning so much importance to this literal wanker that they had not one, not two, but three reporters on the story. PPS: This woman is delusional. Psychiatric evaluation? Yeah, it would be a good idea. I’ve never seen reverse body-dysmorphic disorder so crazy.
6. Jan Fucking Brewer. Why am I not a bit surprised that the most misogynous female governor in the United States has a son who was charged with sexual assault?
7. Joe Fucking Bovino. If you need an unfunny sexist, racist “field guide” to women, ur doin it rong. And if you’re toting it around as a PUA-style conversation starter, you definitely fit one very broad category of males that can be seen the world over: Les Douchebags.
8. Jesse Lee Fucking Peterson. He laments the “mistake” of letting women vote, and thinks blacks should go back to slavery to “learn the work ethic”? I lament the mistake of letting teabaggers exist.
9. Andrew Fucking MacDougall. Why?
That’s why. BTW, we pay taxes, and our taxes pay your salary. That means you and Harpo (the asshole in question) both work for us. And you’re doing a piss-poor job of it, too. Guess that makes you our second-biggest asshole, at least this week.
10. Michele Fucking Bachmann. Watch out, Switzerland, you’re about to get two more cuckoos in your clock. Marcus Bachmann’s parents were born there, and it looks as though sonny-boy has finally taken advantage of that fact to claim Swiss citizenship. His beard — er, WIFE — also automatically qualifies. On the plus side, this dual citizenship means she is probably no longer eligible ever again to run for president of the United States. (Her eternally delusional mental state ought to be a definite disqualifier.) PS: Aw, shit. Well, that was quick.
11. Jonah Fucking Goldberg. Somebody please give this irrelevant nonentity a Bullshitzer prize, it’s the only award he’s truly entitled to.
12. Pat Fucking Robertson. I have a copy of the King James bible with the words of Jesus printed in red. And as much as I’ve scoured through it, I’ve never found one word even HINTING that LGBT people “displease” him. I suspect the displeased one here is therefore Patwa, because un-self-hating queerfolk are notoriously hard to brainwash into handing over large wads of cash in exchange for de-gayifying “prayers”.
13. And in other pissing-Jesus-off news, how about our own lesser northern Patwa, Charles Fucking McVety? Everybody knows he’s just kissing Israel’s ass because he seriously believes that once the Apocalypse comes, Israel will be handed over to his corpulent ass, while the Chosen People get thrown under a metaphorical bus.
14. Rush Fucking Limbaugh. Why?
That’s why. The Pigman lives in a glass sty. And yet he still insists on throwing rocks. Funny dat! PS: There are still women who listen to him? That’s fucking pathetic. Don’t they know he hates the entire sex?
15. Tim Fucking Huelskamp. Figures this professional homophobe of a House Repug is from Kansas. And yeah, I bet he’s rubbing his hands over having done his teensy widdle bit to foil any progress His Barackness might ever actually make. But how homophobia is supposed to “defend” marriage (and from what?) is a question none of these idiots will ever be able to satisfactorily answer. And it’s only a matter of time before DOMA bites the dust. So yeah, go wave yer widdle willy, Timmy. It’s the last accomplishment you’ll ever have, so savor it for the short time it lasts.
16. George W. Fucking Bush. Yep, Dubya’s still alive, and this week he made the wankapedia. For livin’ high on the hawg at taxpayers’ expense, in direct contradiction to all that fiscal conservatism shee-yit. Don’t look to the fucking “Taxed Enough Already” teabaggers to say boo about this, though. He’s still their golden boy, and they’ll cheerfully fork over whatever he wants. Ain’t that right, assholes?
17. Vic Fucking Toews. Someone give this out-of-touch adulterous walrus a lesson in economics. Better still, basic math. Even better: Throw him in prison and force him to live the way he wants prisoners to. That oughta straighten his mathematical problems right out. PS: Ha, ha. And nyah, nyah.
18. Joe Fucking Arpaio. Meanwhile, the World’s Worst Sheriff is getting sued. And about time, too!
19. Bill Fucking Donohue. For a rabid Catholic cultist who hates sex so much, he sure is fond of using it to sell his shady anti-sex agenda. Hey Bill, keep yer rosaries off our ovaries — and yer crucifixes off our clitorises!
20. Bristol Fucking Palin. She’s a fine one to be talking about “thousands of years of thinking on marriage”, seeing as she never quite made it to the altar herself. “Thinking”, in any case, seems to come with great difficulty for her. Mostly due to massive cognitive dissonance, which is sadly common in almost-adult children of fundamentalists. (Also, Levi Fucking Johnston.) And when it comes to “leadership”, I don’t see her drawing any solid examples from her mother the Quitbull, either.
21. Chet Fucking Haze. Who? Oh, just some no-account dude who thinks he’s being “real” and “badass” by calling bullying victims who commit suicide “weak” and “pussyass”. Yeah, that’s right, he’s a nobody who bullies the easiest victims ever — the dead. Well, I hope he appreciates this former bullied kid’s blunt sincerity when I call him a total fucking douchenozzle who needs to get a life in the worst fucking way.
22. Jerad Fucking Wheeler. I find it hard to believe you couldn’t tell that the woman you kicked in the belly was nine months pregnant. With eyesight that poor, you shouldn’t be a fucking cop. PS: Oh, what am I saying? She’s black. And you’re white. And it’s Georgia. My mistake!
23. Peter Fucking MacKay. Another day, another dollar, another DND lie. But when your Libya wank costs taxpayers seven times more than the already exorbitant sum you originally gave, and even the brass isn’t backing you up anymore, shouldn’t that be yet another reason to get out of Dodge?
24. John Fucking Baird. Oh look, Squealer’s sucking up to Israel again. Yawn. Someone please tell him that the overwhelming majority of Canadian Jews are not conservative (big C or small), and therefore don’t think highly of the Chabad Lubavitchers, any more than they do of Israeli Likudniks. And they think even less highly of Tory cronyism and blatant pandering.
25. Scott Fucking Walker. Shark: Jumped. When even Forbes, the plutocrat magazine par excellence, turns against you, it’s time to pack it in and go home.
26. Geraldo Fucking Rivera. Don’t wear a hoodie to the airport, or the TSA agent will be honor-bound to manhandle your, uh, man handle.
27. Jane Fucking Skrovota. Please, don’t anyone tell her that a straight man’s P-E-N-I-S can just as easily penetrate a straight woman’s anus. She might just beshit herself harder than she already has. PS: That guy right behind her in the video is a fucking KING. PPS: She has a Facebook page and blogspot devoted to her insane ramblings. Popcorn, anyone? Tumblr?
28. Patricia Fucking Weaver. Oh look, the teabagger brownshirts are projecting again. I wish these idiots would make up their minds whether they really think His Barackness is a commie or a Nazi, because it’s so tiresome to watch them seesawing back and forth like this.
29. Allen Fucking West. See above, and add extra WTF for not being able to recognize a capitalist puppet when he sees one in Hamid Karzai. And he can’t seem to remember that it was his boy Dubya that installed said puppet, either.
30. Dennis Fucking Prager. Same-sex marriage is a “radical social experiment”? Um, no. It’s simply a small step to equality in a world where many other social experiments much more radical have gone unremarked by rightard idiots who just haven’t the ‘nads to admit that they just really fucking hate the queers for no good reason at all.
And finally, to the fucking homophobes of North Fucking Carolina. You people are a national embarrassment and disgrace. And Gene Wilder has just the words for YOU:
Good night, and get fucked!
Heh…maybe a better question to ask is Why wouldn’t he be? After all, with approval ratings like these…
The approval ratings for the governance and credibility of the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, surpassed 80 percent in Quito and Guayaquil. Five years into his rule, the consulting firm Perfiles de Opinión, indicates that the leader has historic levels of acceptance.
The study, cited by state news agency Andes and taken on April 29 in Quito and Guayaquil, shows 83 and 82 approval ratings for Correa, respectively. The president took power on January 15, 2007.
In an interview with Ecuadorinmediato Radio, Perfiles director Paulina Recalde also revealed that the question “Do you find Correa credible?” received a “yes” response of 68 percent in Guayquil and 67 percent in Quito.
The third question of the survey asked respondents for their impression of the leader. 76 percent replied “good”, 21 percent “bad” and 3 percent did not respond.
Recalde considers these figures to be exceptionally high. “I don’t believe we could register a leader with such positive numbers in the entire democratic history of the country,” she says, adding that since December of last year these numbers have remained very stable.
The analyst added that Correa “benefited” from the latest mobilizations of opposition organizations.
Translation mine.
And the real kicker? Guayaquil is supposedly an anti-Correa stronghold, full of oligarchs and angry, angry haters. Yet he gets 82% approval there, and even slightly higher credibility ratings than in the “pro-Correa” capital city of Quito. Go figure!
For all the lamestream media up here trying to make out like he’s been bad for the country and should be ousted and look at the “police rebellion”! and blah blah blabbity blah blah, Rafael Correa sure has ratings to kill for. (Trust me, Stevie the Spiteful and His Barackness would, and so far neither has gotten anything close to them.)
Ecuador is politically stable for the first time in living memory, it’s improving economically a lot as well, and it loves its rebellious, super-smart president. He’s been good for the country overall, even the so-called opposition strongholds. And everything they’ve tried to do to hurt him has ended up backfiring in their faces.
And now you know why he’s smiling.
A Moroccan poster denounces the forced marriage of child brides. A problem which, sadly, remains a fact of life in Morocco, even in cases of rape:
The family of a 14-year-old girl in Tangier, Morocco, denounced the case of their daughter, who was forced by the judiciary to marry the man who raped her and left her pregnant, and now prisoner of a profound depression.
The family of the victim, supported by the association “Don’t Touch My Child”, said that their daughter, named Safae, was pressured by a judge to agree to marry her rapist, during a meeting in which the parents and attorney of the assailant were present, but not those of the victim.
The mother of the victim, identified only as Zakia, told EFE today that the trouble began in January 2011, when the attacker kidnapped Safae in front of an institute where she was studying Spanish and computer studies, raped her, and then left her abandoned near her home.
The family denounced the assault at the time it occurred, but the mother says she was pressured by the prosecutor’s office and a family-court judge to have her daughter accept marriage to her rapist as a way to “salvage her honor”.
Safae later gave birth to a daughter, but never lived with her assailant, who did not stop harassing her even up to the point of several suicide attempts, according to her mother.
In Morocco, a disputed penal-code law allows a rapist to marry his victim and thus escape a prison sentence. This law came to light with the case of Amina Filali, a 16-year-old who killed herself on March 10 in the Larache region after being raped, forced to marry her attacker, and mistreated by him after their marriage.
Translation mine.
It’s pretty obvious that the Moroccan justice system is far from impartial in cases like these. When the perpetrator can get an audience with a judge but his victim cannot, it’s clear that there’s a patriarchal skew at work to force an unwanted marriage down the throat of a victim, who in turn is treated as though SHE were the culpable party. (Ah yes, the old “sin of Eve” canard. It can’t die soon enough!)
The one good thing in this story is that there are now victim-advocates groups fighting back. Here’s hoping that they change that law and bring Morocco’s judiciary into the 21st century, where it belongs.
Where is the IAP(O)A on this one, I wonder?
When President Obama addressed the American Society of News Editors convention last month, the real news was what didn’t happen. The watchdogs didn’t bark. No discouraging word from the gathering of 1,000 of the country’s top news people, facing a president whose administration has led a vigorous attack on journalism’s most indispensable asset — its sources.
Obama took office pledging tolerance and even support for whistleblowers, but instead is prosecuting them with a zeal that’s historically unprecedented. His Justice Department has conducted six prosecutions over leaks of classified information to reporters. Five involve the Espionage Act, a powerful law that had previously been used only four times since it was enacted in 1917 to prosecute spies.
Whoa, that’s harsh. But wait! They go into actual cases too:
Some spies. We’re no longer in the era of Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen or Kim Philby, infamous Cold War turncoats.
Instead, there’s Thomas Drake, a career official of the National Security Agency, who faced 35 years in prison for telling a Baltimore Sun reporter about what The New York Times called “a potential billion-dollar computer boondoggle.” At stake was bureaucratic embarrassment, not national security. (The case against Drake collapsed last summer.)
Then there’s Shamai Leibowitz, a translator for the FBI, who believed he had intercepted evidence of illegal influence-peddling by the Israeli embassy. When his boss wouldn’t act, he leaked transcripts to a blogger. He got 20 months.
Ex-CIA agent John Kiriakou was indicted in January for allegedly identifying a Guantánamo interrogator (who was not working undercover;) Stephen Kim, a State Department analyst, allegedly told a reporter for Fox News — wait for it — that the U.S. was worried North Korea might respond to new U.N. sanctions by testing another A-bomb; and Jeffrey Sterling, who allegedly disclosed a botched CIA operation in Iran that was described in a 2006 book by a Times reporter.
And there’s the biggest case, the court martial of Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of engineering the mammoth dumps of U.S. military and diplomatic data that Wikileaks, the online whistleblower network, turned over to leading newspapers in 2010 and 2011.
The administration seems undeterred by the scanty evidence that any of these defendants was out to hurt the country, a mainstay ingredient of espionage, and the Manning judge has even warned prosecutors they must show he believed he was “aiding the enemy” or she would toss the most serious charge against him.
The public is generally unaware of how essential nominally classified information is to coverage of diplomatic and strategic news. As Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ government secrecy project, put it: “The administration’s aggressive pursuit of leaks represents a challenge to the practice of national security reporting, which depends on the availability of unauthorized sources if it is to produce something more than ‘authorized’ news.”
“Authorized” news? That sounds like CRAPAGANDA to me.
So why is this happening? Well,
What’s behind the administration’s fervor isn’t clear, but the news media have largely rolled over and yawned. A big reason is that prosecutors aren’t hassling reporters as they once did. Thanks to the post-9/11 explosion in government intercepts, electronic surveillance, and data capture of all imaginable kinds — the NSA is estimated to have intercepted 15-20 trillion communications in the past decade — the secrecy police have vast new ways to identify leakers.
So they no longer have to force journalists to expose confidential sources. As a national security representative told Lucy Dalglish, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, “We’re not going to subpoena reporters in the future. We don’t need to. We know who you’re talking to.”
It doesn’t appear that the current prosecutions required the help of journalists, which helps explain the ASNE’s equanimity when President Obama met the press last month.
Press barons complacent when sources get pinched? Sounds like the sort of thing that could only happen under totalitarianism. So much for the idea that socialists and communists are the authoritarians. Capitalists, those guardians of free speech, have them beat nine ways till Friday for state censorship. And nowhere more so than the “freedom-loving” US of A!
But hey. It’s kind of nice to see my pet hate, the Miami Herald, reporting (a) REAL news, and (b) actual free-speech violations that occur continually on US soil. They should do that more often!
If only they were not also complicit in the “authorized news” game, that is.
Privacy? What the hell is that, anyway? It’s old hat, is what THAT is! And since your access provider is probably selling all your data to cops and spooks, sure, advertise your sexual predilections to your heart’s content. I’m sure it will NEVER come back to bite you!
A terrific Lady Gaga parody celebrating the women’s suffrage victory of 1920 in the US. Canadian women had limited suffrage already, as of the federal election of 1917 (when female relatives of military men could vote “on behalf of their male relatives”!), but it was not until 1929 that they had full suffrage, along with legal personhood.
Tabernac de merde! The IMF just got two more black eyes today. First, in France:
Socialist Francois Hollande swept to victory in France’s presidential election on Sunday in a swing to the left at the heart of Europe that could start a pushback against German-led austerity.
Hollande was set to beat conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy by a decisive 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent margin, the TNS-Sofres polling agency said in a projection based on a partial vote count.
The president conceded defeat within 20 minutes of the last polls closing at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT), telling supporters he had telephoned Hollande to wish him good luck.
“I bear the full responsibility for this defeat,” he said.
Sarkozy, punished for his failure to rein in record 10 percent unemployment and for his brash personal style, is the 11th successive leader in the euro zone to be swept from power since the currency bloc’s debt crisis began in 2009.
A cacophony of new voices will have their say in Parliament after a majority of Greeks rejected the two pro-bailout political parties that have dominated the country’s government since the fall of the dictatorship almost 40 years ago, according to an exit poll released after voting stations closed. A weak coalition government between the remnants of those major parties may be the result, analysts say, but its flexibility — and legitimacy — to push further painful austerity measures on the Greek people is likely to be tightly constrained.
The vote was the first chance for the land that invented democracy to exercise it since Greece was enveloped by an economic crisis in late 2009, and voters used the opportunity to topple old pillars of stability. The future of the $171 billion bailout, approved in February, is now further in doubt. If the Greek government fails to live up to promised plans to collect more taxes, drastically cut the size of the public sector and institute further cuts to services, the European Union and International Monetary Fund could pull the plug altogether.
That would likely cast Greece into bankruptcy and would put other European governments on the hook for the billions each has loaned the troubled country through the bailouts. No country has ever received such a large bailout — and no country has been asked to cut so much in return.
Surprise! People don’t take cuts in good grace when the cuts start costing jobs, livelihoods…and increasingly, in Greece, LIVES.
Also, democracy works, but not the way elites like the IMF would have it work. Which is to say, in favor of bailing out the rich while leaving the poor forever on the hook, suckered into paying off odious debts that the elites have no intention of forgiving. At least, not until somebody puts a boot to their collective throat…
It’s now time for the so-called socialist parties of both these countries to remember what their names actually mean, and start working for the people again.
After all, it wasn’t the corporations that elected them, and it isn’t the elites that they should serve.
