The Redemption of Isiah Carey

Via Richard Connelly at the Houston Press. Just watch it.

Tosh.0
Tags: Tosh.0 Videos,Daniel Tosh,Web Redemption

Rick Perry's Ramadan *updates*

Reliant Stadium, Houston, August 6.

Gov. Rick Perry raised some eyebrows recently when he officially declared three "Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas," which has been plagued by drought.

But now Perry, these days a pundit-approved Possible Presidential Contender, is taking his advocacy for public prayer a step further -- and in a distinctly non-inclusive direction.

Perry is the man behind a new conservative Christian event called "The Response: A call to prayer for a nation in crisis." It is a day of prayer and fasting to be held at Reliant Stadium in Houston in August. Says Perry in a letter on the front page of the event's website:

"Right now, America is in crisis: we have been besieged by financial debt, terrorism, and a multitude of natural disasters. As a nation, we must come together and call upon Jesus to guide us through unprecedented struggles, and thank Him for the blessings of freedom we so richly enjoy."
(Emphasis added.)

Perry adds that "there is hope for America ... and we will find it on our knees."

Here we go ...


The Response Promo from The Response USA on Vimeo.

So who else will be at The Response?

"Governor Rick Perry has invited all US governors as well as many other national Christian and political leaders," according to the event's website. "People of all ages, races, backgrounds and Christian denominations will be in attendance to proclaim Jesus as Savior and pray for America."

The Response is being organized at Perry's request by the American Family Association, a group that regular readers will recognize from our past coverage of a top AFA official's history of openly bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric.

I'm going to have to resort to praying that God does NOT send a Category 5 hurricane to smite Rick Perry and this awakened sleeper cell of terrorists on that day.

I'm either leaving town or protesting the shit out of these people.

Update: The event doesn't seem to be going over well. Jason Embry:

(T)he Texas Tribune: “It’s billed as an ‘apolitical Christian prayer meeting,’ but on Tuesday the event drew heated rebukes from the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Sparking the controversy are the (American Family Association)’s views on Christianity, its staunchly anti-gay platform and the inflammatory statements of one its executives, Bryan Fischer. In an interview with The Texas Tribune on Tuesday, AFA president Tim Wildmon said Jews, Muslims, atheists or any other non-Christian would “go to hell” unless they accepted Jesus Christ as their savior. Wildmon’s father, Don, who famously took on iconic television programs like Three’s Company for promoting what he saw as an immoral lifestyle, is listed as one of the event’s chief organizers. ...

Go read the whole thing, including the reasons why GA Gov. Nathan Deal, FL Gov. Rick Scott, IN Gov. Mitch Daniels, and MI Gov. Rick Snyder have already RSVP'd "thanks but no thanks". And there is more about Goodhair's appearance this weekend at a Spanish-language anti-abortion event in Los Angeles (Perry will address the gathering in English). The governor, you will note, yesterday added his sanctuary cities emergency legislation to the special session call ... thus assuring himself of a strategic defeat.

Update II: Mayor Annise Parker endorses the governor's prayer meetin' ...

When asked if she considered the AFA holding an event in her city an insult, (Parker) said, “No, I’m glad to have anybody’s dollars coming to the city of Houston. They can come back on a monthly basis if they’d like as long as they spend money.”

“I don’t have any complaint with this event and certainly respect the value of prayer and believe that folks coming together for spiritual support is important under any circumstances,” Parker said ...

...but Westboro Baptist plans to picket. The Apocalypse is nigh, folks. The Dallas Voice observes...

(I)t’s pretty clear that Perry will have to do a better job of uniting homophobic bigots — and build a bigger tent of hate — if he wants to win the GOP presidential nomination.

Of Weiners (and Anthony)

I'll leave aside the condemnations of Rep. Anthony Weiner, of politicians on both sides generally, of those who would wring their hands and cluck their tongues over "the decline in moral values" -- you can read plenty of that elsewhere -- and try to focus on what's actually going on with this episode.

And I would like to start with this: everybody has their own version of whatever it is that bangs their shutters. And what does it for some does not for others, as the following article -- written before Rep. Anthony Weiner's confession yesterday -- clarifies ... for those who were still unclear.

Putting aside the issues of inappropriateness (the recipient was a college student) and accuracy (Weiner has maintained that his Twitter account was hacked in a prank), this fact remains:

Weiner, or someone pretending to be Weiner, apparently assumed that women would enjoy seeing photos of bulging briefs via Twitter.

We polled some women. Really, they would like to see . . .

“I would like a photo of a made bed,” says Kathryn Roberts, who works at a law firm in Washington. “I would take rose petals, but I want them on top of a made bed.” And not that fake kind of made, either, where the comforter is smooth but the sheets are a jumbled mess.

“Or laundry,” adds her friend Andrea Neurohr.

“Folded laundry,” elaborates Roberts. “Maybe in a wicker basket.”

Over the years, a handful of famous men — and a boatload full of unfamous, Craigslisty men — have landed in the news for sending women photos of their artfully framed packages. Brett Favre allegedly had a special delivery for Jenn Sterger, a sideline reporter for the New York Jets. Kanye West allegedly provided some of his female MySpace friends with some extra-friendly pictures. There are entire Web sites, aimed at men, teaching them the etiquette for public displays of private parts.

Men! Broaden your seduction techniques!

How about you move away from the below-the-waist close-up? How about you try going naked from the waist up? How about a picture of you, sweaty, cleaning out the storm drain? How about a photograph of you gently caressing the yogurt, as you rotate the soon-to-expire food to the front of the refrigerator? So sexy!

“The refrigerator,” says Gretchen LeMaistre. “That’s a big scenario.” LeMaistre is a San Francisco-based photographer who has worked on the “Porn for Women” (very SFW) series, tongue-in-cheek books purporting to tap into women’s most intimate pleasure zones. In the yet-unpublished “Porn for Working Women,” an attractive man cleans out the office fridge and asks, “Am I the only one who cares if we have a clean breakroom?”

Not all women like this, of course. This is the part where we call up an expert, who affirms that there is a great diversity in what women find arousing.

“There is a great diversity in what women find arousing,” says Marta Meana, a renowned psychologist who studies women’s sexual function at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. She would never want to make blanket statements about what does or does not put wind in one’s sails.

But.

“But,” she says, if you look at the empirical literature, it does indicate that the majority of women are not as aroused by pictures of” naked man-parts.

Cindy Meston directs the Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a past president of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health. If there is something you want to know about what turns women on, she is the person you call.

“We spent six years of research on why women have sex,” Meston says. They compiled 237 reasons. Duty sex. Revenge sex. Pity sex. Bored sex, engaged in because women simply had nothing better to do. “Of the 237 reasons why women have sex,” Meston says, “not one was looking at a man’s genitals.”

Women, research increasingly shows, are nuanced sexual beings whose arousal depends on context, mood and a whole bunch of things they aren’t even aware of. Men are different. Men do tend to find the equivalent naked pictures of women titillating. When they send women photos of their genitalia, they are engaging in a sort of sexting golden rule: I think it’s hot, so you should, too. (If women also employed this rule, they would text pictures of themselves taking out the recycling.)

“I can picture liking a photo that’s a little private and romantic,” says Amy MacHarg of Arlington County. She could envision a photo of some massage oils, or perhaps a man sitting at a candle-lit table. He would be holding a pan. Because he had just cooked the meal.

Her friend Sara Monsef has a different dream. “I would like to see a photo of a man who has organized his books alphabetically and by genre,” she says.

OK, we get it; it's a Mars/Venus thing. I posted on FB last week -- also before Weiner, ah, exposed himself as a non-truth-teller -- that I missed the good old days, when you could take a picture of your dick and nobody would see it except your girlfriend and maybe one or two other people. Only women initially responded to the post, and the reactions ranged from "And the developer at the drugstore and everybody he showed it to", to "Why do you want a picture of your dick anyway? Don't you know what it looks like?"

To that last I would (but did not) respond: "Why do you take a picture of your children? Don't you know what they look like?"

There's a lot going on here and it's all worth mentioning: yes, there is that "decline of moral values" crap and also the usual testosterone poisoning and insensitivity all men are afflicted by, combined with the evolving definitions of "social media", the licentiousness of some people colliding with the prudishness of others, as well as the fact that it's not constricted so much any longer by age or even technological proficiency but goes along with the increasing obsessive/compulsive nature of the virtual world versus the real one.

Men of my generation grew up reading Playboy, and then Hustler. When we got older and had a little more money we went to the Playboy Club ... or the titty bar. If we earned a lot more money then we paid for a hooker. The women involved were not unwilling accomplices, either. They realized a lucrative opportunity when they saw one: they could get paid by the men to accommodate their predilections, to whatever degree they by mutual consent extended. The first time I ever showed my wife a video of a facial shot (it wasn't my first time) the very first thing she said was: "How much did she get paid for that?" A question I had never considered but instantly knew the answer to: "As much as was necessary to get her to say 'OK'."

And of course that's just the growing-up-straight-in-a-small-town version. YMMV.

And long before there was ever any money involved, people took naughty pictures of each other and of themselves, beginning a short time after the first cameras were invented. It's just that now those pictures can be uploaded to the WORLD WIDE Web and shared with everyone on the planet, whether one meant to do so or not. Do you remember -- two or three years ago -- when Facebook was initially a place where all the kids were hooking up? And then their mothers and fathers found out and started joining in order to monitor them, and then they found their high school friends (or others) they had long fallen out of touch with ... and now nobody ever has to attend a high school reunion any more. And now there are social media seminars cautioning kids not to post pictures on FB of that rock concert where they pulled up their shirt or pulled down their pants because it might affect their future employment prospects, and companies are suing their employees who are on workman's comp because they found those online photos of them wind-surfing in Cancun.

You used to have to pay a private detective to dig up that kind of dirt. Another industry destroyed by the Internet. Anyway ...

At this point I have but one request for the women reading this: please don't ever again ask your man, if there is one, why he was thinking with his little head. That's all we have ever thought with, for goodness sake.

Yes, all men are horny pigs. Snorting, grunting, groveling-in-the-mud swine. I'm sorry about that. Some of us get trained -- by our mothers -- to act better in public. Some of us don't. Like the dogs we also are, sometimes we forget what we've been trained to do in public.

I hope Anthony Weiner does not resign in the next couple of weeks because I think he's an outstanding legislator, but that's the over/under and I'm betting the under.

The One Hundred Degree Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance congratulates all new high school and college graduates as it brings you this week's roundup.

Dr. PDiddie is now in session at Brains and Eggs, and state senator Steve Ogden is on the couch. (He ought to be in the public stocks.)

The Seliger-Solomons Congressional redistricting plan is finally out, and though it's been modified from its original form, Off the Kuff still thinks it's a joke.

Last week extremist GOP state Sen. Dan Patrick referred to public education as an entitlement. WCNews at Eye On Williamson points out it is actually part of the Texas Constitution: Education is a right in Texas, preserving the liberties of the people.

At TexasKaos, libby shaw tells us Show Horse Rick Perry fast-tracks Texas to third world squalor. The sad part is that she is NOT exaggerating!

Neil at Texas Liberal wrote about the recent death of Houston police officer Kevin Will. Officer Will was killed when struck by a car that was driven by a man who was allegedly drinking and, also, not legally in the United States. Neil wrote that incidents like this one leave people with a choice to respond with hate, or with a resolve to move forward with solutions to immigration concerns.

McBlogger observes that Ambassador Jon Huntsman has apparently decided to remake Being There in real life.

Sunday Funnies

The sociopathy of Steve Ogden

Teachers, parents and school administrators urged Texas lawmakers Thursday
to reject a school finance plan that would allow the state to cut
$4 billion from public schools over the next two years.

But one key senator cut off their pleas to tap into the state's $10 billion reserve fund, sending a clear message such an option won't be considered.

"It's not going to happen," said Sen. Steve Ogden R-Bryan, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Ogden nearly didn't run for re-election in 2010, you may recall, but he thought he was the only person smart enough to solve the budget crisis he knew was coming. He sat in that hearing yesterday and said to those teachers and parents testifying: "It doesn't make any difference what you say. Nothing is going to change." In other words, fuck all y'all for wasting my time.

"You have a choice to use your savings but you are choosing not to," Sue Diegaard, who has two children in Houston public schools, told the House Appropriations Committee. "You cut $4 billion from public education, and you expect us to think it's a gift."

Carol Fletcher, a Pflugerville schools trustee, said her district, which has more than 50 percent of its students on reduced-cost lunch plans, is already one of the lowest-funded in Central Texas and more cuts will hurt.

Comparing her district to a car, "Right now, we're driving a '72 Ford Pinto, not a Cadillac," Fletcher said.

After hearing several witnesses urge lawmakers to use the reserve Ogden pointed his finger and told them to forget it.

"Hope is not a plan," Ogden said shortly before the bill passed the committee.

[...]

Ogden also said he doesn't believe what he called threats of "draconian" cuts to local schools.

"We're not cutting school budgets," Ogden said. "We're just not giving them as much money as they think they are entitled to."

Now that's a demonstration of sneering contempt that borders on -- no, actually goes ahead and crosses over to -- sociopathy. Anybody who knows Ogden is well aware of his opinion of everyone who hasn't reached a station in life similar to his own. And keep in mind that this is what passes for Republican moderation in Texas (Ogden was the only Republican senator opposing the carry-guns-on-campus bill). If he had not run again, there would likely be someone much, much worse in that seat.

Honestly, 'sociopath' is an understatement, since so many people are actually going to suffer and die as a consequence of his actions. The proper label for Ogden is 'psychopath'.

Psychopaths, on the other hand, often have charming personalities. They are manipulative and easily gain people’s trust. They have learned to mimic emotion and so appear “normal” to other people. Psychopaths are often educated and hold steady jobs. Some are so good at manipulation and mimicry that they can have families and other long-term relationships without those around them ever suspecting their true nature.

And another brutal truth is that Steve Ogden is far from the only -- or even the worst -- psychopath in the Texas Legislature.

But what do I know? I'm just a shade-tree psychologist.

Update: The Rise of the Second-String Psychopaths.

Sarah doesn't want to be queen, she wants to be kingmaker

Sarah Palin's bus tour took her to Philadelphia's Liberty Bell and a pizza dinner with Donald Trump in New York on Tuesday, moves that may not have telegraphed serious presidential intentions but at least gave her another day of something immeasurable: attention.

Republican candidates who are intensely wooing early-state voters found themselves eclipsed for another day by the former Alaska governor, who repeated Tuesday that she was pondering whether to run. Unlike them, Palin found herself surrounded by reporters and voters, her bus tour bringing her back to the forefront of GOP politics regardless of her ultimate decision.

"Whether she runs or not, Palin needs to stay relevant in order to leverage her celebrity, influence and earning capacity," said Mark McKinnon, a Republican consultant who helped coach Palin when she was preparing for her vice presidential debate with Joe Biden in 2008. "She just proved that she still can generate crowds anytime she wants. Her machine just got oiled and taken out for a test drive."

Yes, she's playing the LSM like a Stradivarius:

There is nothing that the U.S. media wants more than something it thinks it can't have. Hence the power of news leaks that manipulate the thrust of their initial presentation. Hard-to-get is a rigid rule of human behavior. Ask any teenage boy or girl.

And there are few things more sweet to Palin and her fervent supporters cheering their TV sets this week than the image of a hungry know-it-all "lamestream media" caravan of 15 or more vehicles traipsing along behind her red-white-and-blue bus enroute to they-know-not-where to do they-know-not-what.

To make it worse, each one of the frustrated, confused chasers knows that Fox News' Greta Van Susteren is riding along with the not-yet-and-possibly-never Republican presidential candidate, filing exclusive conversations for her audience to gobble up that only enhance Palin's already million-dollar value to FNC.

Can you hear the teeth grinding?

The day's best line came from a CBS News producer who tried to claim that the lack of information from Palin's lumbering bus was endangering the dozen competing media vehicles trailing behind, uninvited.

As Michelle Malkin puts it so succinctly here, "The boys behind the bus."

Speaking of CBS, Katie Couric's unemployed now. And forget that front porch in Alaska. Sarah Palin can see revenge from her rear window.

This confirms what I have suspected all along: Sarah Palin isn't running for president. Loathe to quit a job that actually pays her a comfortable living, happily bereft of any actual work, Palin is quite busy assuming her position in conservative pop culture. She is transforming herself into a Tea Party version of a Kardashian; famous for essentially nothing and getting a lot of attention -- and making a lot of money -- doing it.

Besides, it's so much more powerful to be able to dictate terms to the eventual nominee. Sarah may be dumb, but she's not stupid.

The biggest excitement in recent days has surrounded Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential nominee. Her bus tour, which stopped Tuesday at the Gettysburg battlefield, the Liberty Bell and New York City, is equal parts carnival, photo op and breezy history lesson.

Her meeting and dinner with real estate mogul and almost-candidate Donald Trump did nothing to tamp down the frenzy and frothiness.

Palin refuses to give reporters her schedule, and then gently upbraids them for their pell-mell efforts to locate, photograph and interview her. It's not clear that she will run for president, and some suspect her "One Nation" tour is designed mainly to support her lucrative book sales and TV appearances. If Palin does run for president, many Republican strategists feel she will do poorly, as her combative nature has driven down her approval ratings among GOP voters and others.

Yet by some counts, more than 100 journalists trooped alongside Palin in Philadelphia, an entourage that Pawlenty and others can only dream of. "It's quite chaotic anywhere we get off on the bus," Palin acknowledged.

Rich Nutinsky of Chadds Ford, Pa., returned to downtown Philadelphia on Tuesday after failing to find Palin there Monday. "I wished her luck and told her I supported her," Nutinsky said. "To me, she's a breath of fresh air."

Palin said she has not decided whether to run, even as she fueled speculation by saying her bus tour eventually will reach New Hampshire and Iowa.

Palin is effectively constructing a powerful brand. She will use its populist power to control who gets the Republican nomination for president, who gets picked for vice-president, and what their campaign's message should be. If there is ever going to be a Tea Party unbeholden to the Republican Party, it will only happen when Sarah decides to get a divorce from the GOP. That split could come in the 2012 presidential cycle.

But she can't really afford to have Karl Rove, Roger Ailes, et.al. call her bluff, and they are too afraid to do so anyway. Half-successful third-party movements are so 1992.

The odds are much more favorable that Palin will continue snapping her fingers and making the Republicans heel. The dogs are just too cowed by the Mama Grizzly to do anything else. And if her "Lamestream Media" keeps running along behind her like a pack of males after a bitch in heat ... well, all the better for her.