God's Own Party: Screw the poor

During the early voting period just completed, the city of Houston offered free flu shots to people at selected locations. This was challenged by the Harris County Republican Party, which claimed through their chairman Jared Woodfill that it was a "scheme" to get Democrats to the polls. Mayor Bill White promptly ceased the program.

One of our vile local conservative blogs -- this is the only hint I'm giving -- quoted Jesus out of context from Matthew 26:11: "the poor be with ye always".

This rankles me on several levels:

1. I could simply note that the Harris County branch of US Hezbollah, also known as the Republican Party, is as sorry as Satan regarding this matter and leave it at that, but I won't.

2. Bill White is a bigger coward than John Kerry for rolling over on this. I hereby declare my support for whomever happens to be White's Democratic primary opponent when he runs for higher office.

3. The biblical quotation is not only out of context but incomplete as well. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the Holy Scriptures -- that barely describes me, incidentally -- can easily figure out that Jesus wasn't contradicting his many statements about the poor being blessed, the meek inheriting the Earth, that people should not covet earthly possessions and in fact should sell them, that the moneychangers were sinful, that the wealthy have almost no chance of entering heaven, and so on. Michael Dawson does a much better job of dissembling this atrocious rationale.

As previously noted many times in this space: I don't go to church, I hardly even believe in a higher authority, but I sure know an Elmer Gantry when I hear him.

What the Harris County Republican Party managed to pull off this week is absolutely NOT what Jesus would have done. But that won't stop them from wallowing happily in the stench of their hypocrisy like pigs in shit.

Support the Troops: Vote Democratic

-- "Donald Rumsfeld must go". That's the subject of an editorial which will appear in Monday's Army Times, Air Force Times, Marine Corps Times, and Navy Times, the military service's newspapers of record.

I'm careful wishing for this: he will likely be replaced by Joe Lieberman, who will resign the Senate seat he is probably going to be re-elected to, which means that the Republican governor of Connecticut will appoint a Republican to replace him. Then again, what really is the difference between Lieberman and any another shit-eating conservative?

-- November is off to a bloody start in Iraq. And I do mean bloody.

Republicans are chanting "taxes, taxes, John Kerry, taxes, what's their plan, taxes, taxes, taxes", but the truth about what issue Tuesday's vote turns on is flowing down that Baghdad street.

-- Tammy Duckworth, the Democratic candidate for Illinois' 6th congressional district who lost both legs in Iraq when her helicopter was shot down, was passed over for endorsement by the VFW. They instead picked the Republican who has had no military service. Why? Because a member of the national board lives in the district. He's a right-wing freak, of course.

The VFW overlooked sending a questionnaire to Duckworth -- as they typically do all candidates considered for endorsement -- and relied solely on the word of Ray Soden, said freak.

This is, as you might be guessing, backfiring on both the VFW and the Republican.

-- In this Vanity Fair interview with Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum and others, author David Rose reveals that even the hearts of neoconservative darkness have turned against the Bushies for their failures in Iraq.

Who's had enough?

Even more GOP scandals erupt

How could Karl Rove let all this happen so close to Election Day?

-- the Bush administration posted online the guidelines for constructing a nuclear weapon, and left it up for several months. In Arabic. When the New York Times asked them about it, they took it down.

Do you feel safer?

-- someone from the campaign of state representative John "Dufus" Davis flushed grease from a fish fry down a commode in the community center where the event was held. It clogged a lift station, which is how it got traced back to Davis. (Two questions I don't really want answered: what is a lift station, and how does one 'trace grease'.)

You simply cannot make this shit up. Go see Bay Area Houston and Musings (for the Fox26 video).

-- Pastor Ted Haggard, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals -- a group that claims thirty million members -- resigned yesterday after a male prostitute alleged that the minister had paid him for sex for three years and used drugs with him.

-- Don Sherwood, R-Allentown Pa., paid an ex-mistress nearly $500,000 to keep the affair quiet until after Election Day. Oops.

And this man wants to invest your Social Security money. Pshaw.

-- the mad-dog Republicans in Fort Bend County, led by Commissioner Andy Meyers, are terrorizing their neighbors with signs and direct mail. Since scaring them regarding terrorist attacks isn't working, they have resorted to scaring them about brown people in general. I wonder if the conservatives in Fort Bend are stupid enough to fall for this ...

-- Greg Abbott got chastised by the Austin American-Statesman editorial board, and made fun of by John Kelso for his videotaping crimes, but that's all. Damned liberal media.

I'm sure I missed some of yesterday's news, since I have been busy working get-out-the-vote efforts in my precinct. Would you please add the ones I've overlooked in the comments? The myriad electronic voting-machine irregularities, for example...